Whether they’re buying products, using an app, visiting a website or calling customer service, your customers generate a flood of data. Every action creates a data point that can be used by your organization for better operations, improved customer service and new revenue streams. Similarly, your employees, supply chains, marketing efforts and finance teams produce an abundance of data each day.
Big data is the ability to harness this information and transform it into meaningful, actionable insights that can drive more informed business decisions. It’s a set of technologies that can manage voluminous data sets that are too large to store in standard databases or spreadsheets. These massive sets of information often contain a variety of different types and formats that require advanced processing technology to manage.
Data analytics tools like natural language processing and other visualizations can make it easier for people of all skill levels to explore and understand complex data sets. These techniques can elucidate relationships that are obscured or lost in the shuffle of information. For example, a simple stack chart illustrates the part-to-whole relationships among several categories in a dataset.
Another key facet of big data is that it can be analyzed in real time. This capability is transforming industries by making it possible for companies to respond to customer needs and demands faster than ever before. This is especially true for businesses that rely on their products, services or systems to generate and analyze real-time data from their customers.