Top 10 Examples of Business Analytics
Introduction
Digital data is the perfect way to paint a panoramic picture of many vital areas of business performances which opens a whole window of insight. Using these insights businesses can create enhanced business strategies that can guarantee ongoing commercial success to them. In the past decade data has exploded and become big with access to the cloud and business analytics has stepped into this landscape by giving a comprehensive perspective of data. We will look into examples of business analytics in this article but first, let us understand what is business analytics and the role of business analytics in today’s business scenario.
1. Business Analytics
Business analytics is the process by which we apply maths and statistics to data which helps in deriving meaning out of it. This means data can then help to make business decisions and drive more profit to the companies. The benefits of business analytics are manifold; it helps in interpreting data and also predicting and forecasting. Here is a brief list of the major gains business analytics brings to the table:
- Companies no longer have to rely on guesswork or intuitions. They have facts and figures now in the form of structured data that helps them in business decisions.
- The host of tools that are used with business analytics can collect a humungous amount of data which is not possible humanly. These tools allow decision-makers to exploit data in novel ways.
- Apart from processing data, business analytics also gives a deeper vision and meaning of the data and how best it can be used.
- Business analytics can help various processes within a business like sales, finances, internal processes, etc.
- By 2025 it is expected that the BA market will become worth 147.19 billion USD which is a compound annual growth of 26.98% from 2016.
Now we will look at the top 10 examples of business analytics. These business analytics examples have been taken across industries and many are real-life examples of business analytics.
2. BA examples
- Microsoft – Improvement in productivity and collaboration – One of the best business analytics application examples has been seen with the business giant MS when in 2015 its engineering groups’ offices moved. The company figured out that they needed to have more face-to-face interaction with their staff for improving performance by increasing collaboration. The MS Workplace Analytics team came out with the hypothesis that if a group of 1200 people moved from 5 offices down to 4, it could provide better collaboration between employees since it would reduce the distance that staff needed to travel for meetings. This move saved 100 hours of work per week and they gained a net saving of 520,000 USD per year in terms of employee time.
- Koodos unified their data to know how their experiment was performing. Koodos is a startup from Harvard’s Business School’s entrepreneurship and is aimed at understanding the relationship between disparate sets of data. They first experimented with matching music and emojis. By texting an emoji to their number you could obtain recommendations of songs. They initially did not have a tool to understand how their product was performing but with BA they set up a central repository to log all product data.
- Growth in sales of an online retailer – A company found inconsistent sales and implemented a sales dashboard. That dashboard revealed to them that data was not driving sales which prompted the retailer to revamp its sales strategy by shifting the target setting system to respond to data. They were able to grow sales by 24% with this implementation.
- Uber enhanced its customer support with BA – Uber developed COTA (customer obsession ticket assistant) in 2018 which was based on machine learning and natural language processing. It helped agents improve their accuracy and speed with which they responded to support tickets. The first iteration gave them a 10% decrease in ticket resolution time. Uber then came up with COTA v2 which focussed on deep learning architecture and did A/B testing before rolling it out.
- Another business analytics case studies examples are Starbucks which can predict the purchases and offers a customer is likely to be interested in. This big coffee company used its loyalty card program to gather individualized purchase data of millions of its customers. With this information and BA tools, it was able to achieve its goal of identifying the pattern in a customer’s purchase and then suggest to him/her offers through mobile devices which the company believed the particular customer may take up.
- One of the good examples of business analytics is a gym that wanted to decrease customer attrition. They installed a predictive analytics model that could identify those customers who were likely to cancel their subscriptions. The model used historical data to predict what incentives could be offered to such customers to retain them. Whenever a customer, who the system identified as at-risk of cancellation, arrived at the gym, the system would alert the staff about it. The staff would then discuss offers and incentives and could successfully stave off cancellations.
- The finance industry has gained heavily with business analytics and AMEX is one such analytics example. American Express has used BA to develop new payment service products for customers as well as new market offers. In the Australian market, the BA technology helped AMEX to identify up to 24% of Australian customers who are likely to close their accounts within 4 months of service. This way AMEX has been able to retain those customers who they could have lost otherwise.
- A clothing retailer saw success with customer purchases initially but it tapered off later. He then installed a retail dashboard that showed demographic information about current and target customers. This information gave insights into where the sales were strongest and what areas needed improvements. He then segmented buyers by different factors and customized his marketing strategy to suit each group of customers. This led to growth in the customer base for the retailer.
- HelloFresh is a meal kit company that provides fresh food and recipes to ten international markets. Their problem area was digital marketing reporting which was time-intensive, manual, and inefficient. By implementing a centralized BA solution, the team of HelloFresh was able to save 10 to 20 hours of work per day.
- Online retail giant Amazon has used BA successfully to personalize product recommendations and also for logistical business decisions. Their massive supply chain runs smoothly mainly due to in-depth data analysis.
Conclusion
If you have a business that involves a huge amount of customer data and you feel you are unable to use this to increase profitability then business analytics is going to give you immense gains. BA can help you unite all your data and help you understand what should be your next steps to increase sales and grow your customer base.
It is also important to find the right place to learn and become proficient in all these skills and languages. Jigsaw Academy, recognized as one of the Top 10 Data Science Institutes in India, is the right place for you. Jigsaw Academy offers an Integrated Program In Business Analytics for enthusiasts in this field. The course runs for 10 months and is conducted live online. Learners are offered a joint certificate by the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and Jigsaw Academy.
