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Making Sense of Big Data

KT Prasad - Country Sales Director, Zendesk
Thursday, January 19, 2017
KT Prasad - Country Sales Director, Zendesk
Headquartered in California, Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships by creating products that are easy to use & implement. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement & better understand.

Each year, fresh information is collected by companies in various sectors and this ends up in repositories. A lot of this data is left untouched for years. So how do companies process the wealth of information accumulated over time? Data analysis is a business intelligence tool that involves inspecting, cleaning, transforming and modelling data, and converting this into need-based usable information. While most companies claim to have data mining and analysis on their agenda, very few are actively involved in implementing such processes within their structures. The volume of data can be overwhelming at times, but it is possible for companies to deal with the information pile-up using big data analysis.

Gathering information from different sources and storing it on a single platform helps data analysis. Deconstructing data can actually be used to the company's advantage. Data extraction can be related to simple information or more complex and multidimensional analysis. Not just companies, different sectors like energy, healthcare and politics have used big data analysis to assess feasibility plans and possible outcomes based on past projects and figures. A survey conducted by Reutlingen University in Germany found that big data is a relatively new subject for German companies. The survey found that about 50 percent of the companies had spent less than three years deconstructing big data and about 25 percent claimed they were 'afraid' to deal with it. The study also showed that the marketing department profited the most from data breakdown, especially since it is important to systematically evaluate and know one's customers in marketing. Due to these reasons, the customer service teams are the biggest profiteers of big data analysis. But these days, not just marketing, most departments can profit from the process.

Role of Data Analysis in Real-Time Information

Collated metadata or the raw data is first deposited into data repositories or warehouses. Such enormous data collected over years has the potential to aid companies implement strategic decisions. For example, the customer service department can use collated customer information to respond to client queries on call or on social media.


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