One recurring set of questions that business executives ask is: “Do we have the accurate, timely and unique insights we need to make decisions that differentiate us from our competitors? And how can we better understand customer behaviors and quickly apply what we learn to everything we do?”
The data to help answer these questions is there. But organizations have bumped up against computing and time constraints in working with the data. Using conventional techniques, it can take days – even weeks – to prepare data for analysis. It takes further time to build and test models, identify unknown risks, reveal unseen patterns or predict future consumer behavior.
That isn’t helpful to businesses with increasingly shrinking decision windows. Organizations need to be able to make decisions daily, even hourly.
This is where high-performance analytics comes in. It can become a backbone of your ongoing business analytics endeavors. No matter how big your data, or how complex your analysis needs become, high-performance analytics (HPA) helps companies use data to make decisions faster. Here’s what you need to know about HPA:
1. It can transform customer relationships
Marketing organizations need to understand more than just who bought what. They need to understand what behaviors drive customers to purchase products and from what channels.
A sporting goods retailer used an HPA solution to increase its directing marketing response rates by 60 percent by studying the geographies of customers most likely to generate the greatest possible incremental sales. The retailer now also has a more complete understanding of the value of promotional marketing, and how much – and where – to spend those promotional dollars.
2. It leads to meaningful, real-time interactions with customers
How do you engage the customer in real time? Tracking individual customer needs, updating their preferences and analyzing their likely behavior as it is happening is tailor made for high-performance analytics.
The sporting goods retailer discussed above built models that continually rates customers as to their lifetime value. When a customer service rep interacts with a customer they can better personalize the interactions, giving just that extra bit of service to keep those high-value customers. Before using HPA, this wasn’t possible as analysts spent 75 percent of their time preparing data.
3. It makes location-based marketing achievable
The proliferation of navigation and tracking devices, smartphones, location-based networks and social media has resulted in explosion in information available to create innovative offerings and new business models. Location-based analytic applications have cross-industry appeal to predict unknown outcomes.
What will you do with all the time you save?
You’ve heard the term speed to market? HPA is about speed to decision. When you know something faster than your competitor, you can act on it in ways that ultimately impact the bottom line. But it isn’t just about saving time processing large volumes of data; it’s what your company does with that time-savings. The sports retailer that reduced the time it took to manage the data by 75 percent could have laid-off those analysts. Instead, they put them to work finding myriad ways to make the company more successful. Therein lies the true value of HPA.
For more uses of high-performance analytics, check out the white paper Analytics on a grand scale
