In The New Use Cases of Big Data series, we are reviewing some of the use cases enabled by new technology for big data.

Every year, a month or so before the anniversary date of my cellphone contract, I get a call from my operator, with a “fantastic” offering: usually a rebate on my monthly contract, or a free add-on feature. The catch?  Oh, I “just” need to commit to another 12 month of contract. Or even better, 24 months. “This way you won’t have to worry about price changes for up to 2 years,” would say the helpful sales person. And they wouldn’t have to worry about me jumping ship to another operator.

That’s probably one of the most basic forms of customer retention: offer indiscriminately a discount/freebie to all your clients. Continue reading ‘The New Use Cases of Big Data: Customer Retention’

In The New Use Cases of Big Data series, we are reviewing some of the use cases enabled by new technology for big data.

Leveraging of big data for marketing can be real-time, on the fly behavioral analysis for cross promotions, or batch analysis and segmentation for targeting and nurturing.

In the first case – real-time – the goal is to influence consumer behavior at the point of sale or on the site. The most common example is the recommendation engine, but check out couponing also belongs to this category. For years, large organizations such as Amazon or eBay have used recommendation engines to match and recommend products, people and advertisements to users based on analysis of user profile and behavioral data. Continue reading ‘The New Use Cases of Big Data: Marketing’