IN a digital world, the winning organisations will be the ones that successfully find new customers, discover new markets, and pursue new revenue streams using digital channels.
New, digital competitors are surfacing in every industry to challenge incumbents. The only way to compete is to evolve, transform, and fully embrace digital technologies.
One of the most powerful ways to transform is to use what you already know – the unstructured data encircling your business every day.
Knowing you have this information is one thing, but using it to gain insight into your current and future business drivers is something else entirely. To make that leap, a business needs ‘analytics everywhere.’
Today, the analysis of structured data – data that sits neatly in a database – is a well-used business tool. New, rich graphical interfaces enable organisations to use this data to easily identify trends.
Unstructured data, however, cannot be sorted into a table as easily – so it tends to be overlooked.
Yet unstructured data – including emails, voicemails, written documents, PowerPoint presentations, social media feeds, surveys, legal depositions, webpages, videos and more – offer a rich mine of information to inform business insights.
Advances in analytics and content management software are already giving companies more power to cross-examine unstructured content, rather than relying on intuition and gut instinct. Now, analytics can quickly identify patterns and offer a new level of insight into business operations.
In addition, predictive and prescriptive analytics also offer unprecedented benefits in the digital world.
Consider, for instance, the data collected from a bank’s web chat service. Customer service managers cannot read through millions of lines of ‘free-text.’
Yet ignoring this wealth of information is not an option. Utilising sophisticated data analytics allows the bank to spot and understand trends, such as common product complaints or frequently asked questions, and identify new product categories or business opportunities.
