Real-time data analytics enabled smart business decisions and boosts efficiency - Anjna Bhati, director - Data Analytics & AI, BluePi Consulting

We witness every day how data is playing the role of digital currency that is running modern business operations.  Unlike in the past when business decisions were a guessing game, today such an approach is risky for businesses and will certainly lead to inaccurate and costly decisions.  In the modern business world, time is money, and obtaining accurate insights on the market or customer quickly is crucial.

Gartner says “Real-time analytics is the discipline that applies logic and mathematics to data to provide insights for making better decisions quickly.  For some use cases, real-time simply means the analytics is completed within a few seconds or minutes after the arrival of new data.”

All organizations, be it large enterprises or small and medium businesses should have data analytics capabilities to improve operations and identify market and industry trends amidst business complexities before taking an informed business decision.   With the growing need to capture data in real time, organizations across industry verticals are investing significantly in real-time analytics.  With this tool, data is available for analysis, interpretation, and visualization as and when it is created in the source systems.  Marketing teams can maximize the returns on their campaigns while customer service teams can manage massive volumes of customer queries with the tool.  All these efforts lead to improved customer experience, higher revenues, and profitability for the organization.  A McKinsey Survey confirms that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.

 1.   Creation of the next-best service or product offering

The value of the data decreases with time and stale data has diminishing use for business operations. It is near real-time processing that enables gathering the most valuable business intelligence.  Retailers, financial services companies, or any other business, know that well and strive to match the fast pace of data generation.  Real-time analytics will combine the transactional history of customers with their web-browsing history and transactional activities to determine what offer will appeal to them in the future.  Trends in purchasing behavior can be identified across multiple promotional platforms and sales channels.  Financial services firms can also analyze fraudulent online activity and ensure security measures are put in place with this solution.  With an understanding of the pulse of customers, the creation of effective marketing strategies, the adoption of dynamic pricing, and increased accessibility, businesses can cater to the future needs of customers effortlessly with real-time analytics.

 2.   Power of live data visualization is enormous

Every click by an online user made for purchasing a new product, watching a movie, playing a game, or booking vacations gives rise to tons of valuable data for sellers to create exceptional customer experiences.  Now, this data is stored in data centers across the globe and the key lies in quick analysis of it to understand the message before making informed decisions.  Promoters of products or services and other stakeholders will find it convenient if the message from the data is in form of graphic representation for easier understanding rather than numbers or text format.  The visuals grab eyeballs and keep them focused on the insights while identifying patterns or trends. Yes, human eyes can process visuals better and faster and store the information longer when compared to written text or statistics.

Real-time data visualizations help with the real-time updating of graphs or charts and business decisions can be made on real data rather than guessing or intuition.   The target audience can be both educated and empowered. Transparency of data with visualization helps marketers to quickly comprehend and make the right decisions that have a significant impact on the business.  For example, the data can help the sales team to see which product in which region is selling faster driving next-level planning.

3.    Speedy response to red flags

After only one bad experience, many customers can shift from the brand.  Dashboards that give a clear indication of customer engagement with the product or website reflect the success of the brand.  Businesses should leverage real-time KPI analytics dashboards to keep track of red flags and quickly work towards resolving issues.  Monitoring customer retention and churn rates in real-time and establishing quickly why they are abandoning the website or brand can help fix the issue fast before further damage occurs.  Real-time analytics can help address problematic areas with more agility.  Real-time product adoption dashboards track the changing product interactions, whether customers are engaging for a long time or logging off quickly as they do not see much value in the product.  Organizations can resolve the problem before customer churn further aggravates.

It becomes crucial to evaluate customer journeys, and spot cart abandonments in real-time so that the product teams identify the challenges in the features and rectify them immediately and get customers back on board.

4. Achieve operational excellence and drive productivity

Product and automation experts are continuously exploring ways to increase efficiency in business operations, improve quality and throughput, and reduce costs to stay ahead of the curve and increase market share.  However, the challenges to reaching this goal are many, such as interoperability issues, siloed data, lack of visibility, production inefficiencies, and cybersecurity concerns among others.

Real-time analytics can play a key role in better understanding of the working structure and using data to address complex challenges while improving the performance of the assets.  Maintenance can be planned, and unscheduled downtime and costs can be reduced while driving higher efficiency leading to an improvement in the operational processes.  Improvements in workforce productivity, faster operating speeds, and better customer experience are made possible with the implementation of real-time analytics. Operational excellence results in gaining a competitive advantage, for certain.

Many more benefits are delivered with real-time analytics, a potent tool for businesses to improve operations and make smarter decisions.  Furthermore, real-time analytics will take the organization’s business growth to newer heights making it an excellent tool to invest in.