DETROIT – Over the past few years, big data has caught the attention of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in a big way.
Why? Because SMBs have learned that, like their larger counterparts, they, too, can use big data to cost effectively mine all the information collected about their customers, businesses or competitors.
Now SMBs of all sorts?from small, local shops to regional restaurants to online retailers?are benefitting from the ability to more accurately?and cost effectively?pull and analyze information that will help them make smarter business decisions.
A number of shops, for example, are increasing their product and reward offerings as a result of mining information to learn the secrets hidden in their customer loyalty programs. Restaurants are providing customers with tablets on which they can share their email addresses and information about their favorite menu items. Then, restaurants use this information to offer customers special incentives to return for another meal. Online retailers are gathering trending information by using big data to analyze their customers? spending and buying habits, and discovering opportunities to reach out to selected customers with low-cost offerings.
What has made big data finally accessible to SMBs is the low-cost availability of both high-speed bandwidth and the easily accessible cloud. It is this access to the cloud that gives them the ability to store all the data they want or need without the huge capital expenditures they would otherwise have to lay out to build and maintain their own storage centers. And it is today?s high-speed bandwidth that gives them the capability to extract intelligence and insight from all the terabytes of data they knew were out there but could not afford to collect.
In effect, big data gives SMBs all the facts, figures and details they have needed, but could never access?due in large part to it being cost prohibitive?to make better business decisions. But, it?s not just about having access to the large amounts of information. Rather, it also matters what a company does with it after gathering and storing it. Savvy SMBs also share big data with everyone in their business and supply chains who have a need for it, and they give them the permission and capability to pull the intelligence and insight that will help them better run their operations.
Leveraging big data is not only a strong alternative to relying on that gut feeling about marketing trends and customer spending habits, but it also is more time efficient than diving into old spreadsheets to try to understand the costs of operations, labor or material. More importantly, big data now gives SMBs a cost-effective way to gather, store, share, and mine every bit of available information about their customers, businesses and competitors, which ultimately leads to increased profits and improved business practices.
