Big Data Means Meeting Big Targets — How Information Defines Content And Customer Interaction

Big Data is never about the numbers. It’s about how the numbers are crunched, broken down, analyzed and then used by businesses to generate messages and services that customers want to receive.
Here are three examples of how companies are using Big Data now to produce effective content and improved customer interaction.

     1.Oscar Uses Data To Let Health Insurance Clients Personalize Their Service

Oscar is a health insurance start-up in New York built to take advantage of the market created by the Affordable Care Act. Its executives and backers come from the world of hi tech and they’ve brought their understanding of mobile functionality and digital marketing to their customer interaction. The company’s marketing videos are attractive and fun, and smartly aimed at the sort of young urbanites who are least likely to make big claims.

But Oscar also makes innovative use of big data. Like other healthcare providers, Oscar collects information about physicians that it can use for performance reviews but it also shares that data with customers. Patients can see which doctors treat patients that match their age group and which languages they speak. By giving customers the chance to drill into the data, Oscar gives those customers the ability to do their persona marketing for them.

     2. The Commonwealth Bank Of Australia Turns Data Into Engagement… And Revenue

Like many banks, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia first turned to big data as a defensive mechanism: it wanted to protect its retail banking market share against competition from large technology companies. It’s since expanded that use of data, both the collection and the dissemination. The company’s Albert device competes with traditional card payment systems but sends the data to the bank, giving the company vital information about sales records.

The bank also sells access to Daily IQ, a big data analytics tool. Available to business customers as an iPad app, the tool provides cash-flow reports and business insights based on data accumulated from similar industries in similar locations. By giving their customers content so valuable that they’re even prepared to pay for it, the bank is able to earn extra revenue and keep them engaged and connected.

      3. Walgreens Uses Big Data To Turn Pharmacies Into Fast Clinics

In 2013, Walgreens began to roll out ePass, a Web-based system that offers in-store pharmacies both medical data and the means to analyze it. The data comes from health insurance companies and provides access to information based an incredible 7.5 billion medical events that involved more than 100 million people.  

It’s a huge amount of information and the figures can be broken down by demographics, diagnoses, procedures, pharmacy information and laboratory results. In practical terms, it means that when a patient of any of the health insurers contributing to the system walks into a Walgreens with a prescription, the pharmacist can access aggregated data that tells them if they’ve missed a screening or failed to take their medicine. The result is a service so personalized it knows the patient better than he knows himself.

Big Data is the collection of vast piles of numbers but its real test is how companies use it. Companies are finding increasingly creative ways of both collecting the data and disseminating it to build a better relationship with customers.

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