Getting the Most From Your Big Data Stores: 10 Best Practices

by Chris Preimesberger

These are gold mines of information of which many companies don’t take advantage.

Embrace your customers for what they do, rather than what you think they’re doing. Stay objective and allow the data to provide the insight.

Blind spots can lead to missing critical information and a skewed overall picture of a customer’s experience. Make sure you truly capture everything that can influence the customer’s experience and behavior.

After capturing everything, focus on feeding your analytics solution with the data that matters the most.

Customer needs and priorities are always changing. Technology must be agile and able to adjust as well. To ensure that your analytics don’t lag behind, you must be able to adjust them on the fly to meet continuously changing requirements.

The ability to gain insights into your customers’ experience and behavior in real time allows you to understand what’s happening as it’s happening and take appropriate action steps as needed to ensure optimal user experience and business results.

Nor should analytics have a negative impact on your customer’s experience. Capturing everything and avoiding blind spots should have no impact on your site performance.

Aggregated data can hide critical insights. It is the granular information about your customers’ behavior and experience that will render the most valuable insights required to continuously improve your customers’ experience and business results.

Leverage the data that resides in different data stores to make sure you are able to “connect the dots.” Correlate that data as early as possible in your analysis to gain complete, accurate and timely insights.

IT should never limit your application implementation decisions and should capture customers’ experience and behavior information from any type of device (laptop, desktop, smartphones, tablets, etc.).