What is Big Data and Why Big Data Matters to Your Business?

Big Data

In general, high volume of complex data is referred to as Big Data. Though the term Big Data is a buzz now-a-days, it’s been here around for a relatively long time. Data that helps us in finding information is like the most important thing in today’s world.

It’s important to have access to data, not only for businesses but also for an individual. When a set of data is too big and complex to be processed with traditional data processing technologies, then that set of data can be referred to as Big Data.

Each set of data (or record as we know it) in Big Data may differ from another set of data of the same group in terms of attributes. Records for similar objects may vary in number of data provided, thus this type of data requires different approach for storing, accessing and processing or querying to generate information which is valuable and expected.

Big data was originally associated with the three key concepts: volume, variety, and velocity. Other concepts later attributed with big data are veracity and value. Currently big data is used to perform highly complex analyses such predictive analysis, user behavior analysis, goal conversion, market trend change analysis etc.  

Why Big Data matters to your business?

1. Knowing and Understanding Customers

No matter what type of product or service you sell or provide, you have a targeted customer group which can be one or multiple. And for your business and for any business it is one of the most important thing to know the targeted customer groups, their attributes and their choices. Big data helps you in this. You can obtain such valuable information by analyzing the data that receive from your sales, not only your sales but also sales of other similar businesses. However in the latter case, you have buy privileges to access other company’s data. But that’s not the concern here.
Knowing and understanding the customers who are receiving or purchasing your services or products or similar services or products of other businesses can be a vital information for you to analyze and predict who those people are, how their tastes change and what they might be wanting from the market, more specifically from the services or products which we discuss in the next reason.

2. Keep up with the change in trends

As we were discussing that Big Data can help you to better understand your customers, it also helps in understanding the change in trends. More specifically, that change your customers are looking forward to for the services or products you are offering. In this way, you can understand the changes that you need to bring to your services or products. This is the most important or the biggest help you can obtain by using Big Data in your business.
The more know about the changes the more you know about the changes you need to implement. In case of business, in case of services or products, the one who bring the changes first what people need will be at the top. But the changes or upgrades should not stop. In today’s world, people’s choices and tastes and needs changes too fast. To sustain in such market you have to keep bringing upgrades to your products and services along with bringing new products and services as they are needed. Big data helps you in knowing your customers, understanding them and knowing their choices and tastes and knowing the change in their tastes and choices, with these information you can more confidently and accurately decide the upgrades to your products and services along with introducing brand new service or product.

3. Faster and Accurate conversion from Decision to Action

So as we were about taking decision based on the data you obtain from analyzing Big Data about your customer and their choices, big data can help you in finalizing your decision to trigger action with more confident and better accuracy. Business is about decisions and actions along with risks. Though a lot of other steps or factors involves in the process of successfully implementing and executing a decision which is backed-up by strong statistical data, Big Data helps you in the very first to overcome the primary barrier, decision to action. Analyzed data about the changes in trends which are real data and not average data helps you to confidently trigger an action based on the decision you took. This process becomes faster and accurate, it’s because the data you have in hand are from reals customers. It is not like surveys that you run on a thousands of people while your customer group is around a million.

4. Build and Serve better product or service

As you know what your customers are actually interested in or what other products making them interested, you can decide and build better product or service by implementing what your customers are wanting. This might be change in design because your customers like the function of your product but they like the design of a similar product of another business. So you know how you can build a better product, you know what needs to be upgraded. This one single example is like a diamond that is you know where problem is, though you and your whole business have no problem there, but your customer has. As you and your business people are not the targeted customer, so it doesn’t matter if you or your business people like it or not, to reach the customer you have to bring changes as per their need. However, that’s not the case always, sometimes you might need to bring creative changes also to bring something new and which your customers fall in for. Both approaches are required to sustain. Sometimes you have the luxury to build something totally new and try it on the market, if it fails then you move on to something newer or roll back to traditional and if it works, great.

5. Analyze Data to make your business future-proof

Businesses are supposed to be sustaining and growing. Thus a business should have plans for the future and the plan should be future-proof. Predictions are important. Predictions include risks. But when prediction is made from analyzing huge set of data, it becomes more accurate. Though there are no 100% guarantee, but still the more data you go through the more accurate average you obtain. Then you can make decisions and perform actions based on that. This will result in more fruitful plans for the future. Customer data, Environment data, Trends data can help in finding the next big change in market and using that you can plan for your business in an accurate future-proof way.