Improving your business through data – Identifying Opportunities
It is a situation that we are all no doubt familiar with. “You might also be interested in…”, “What to watch next” and “Customers also bought…” are all relatively innocuous terms that we all frequently encounter. For organisations, however, they are the aspect of something much more complex. In this blog, we’ll discuss the way by which data can help an organisation to identify opportunities that might have been otherwise missed.
From the customer’s perspective, recommendation engines are little more than a series of prompts and suggestions encouraging them to add one more item to their basket. For organisations, they are an opportunity to maximise the potential revenue from a sale.
Behind the scenes, a wealth of data helps curate a series of suggestions that are relevant and timely to the consumer. In the case of Netflix, a combination of machine learning and probability analysis is used to not only suggest films and TV shows but to also determine the type of preview image that an individual is most likely to respond to.
In a white paper, published in 2015, Carlos Gomez-Uribe, Vice President of Product Innovation at Netflix stated that “If we create a more compelling service by offering better-personalized recommendations, we induce members who were on the fence to stay longer, and improve retention.”
An article from McKinsey outlines that as much as 35% of what consumers purchase on Amazon, and as much as 75% of what consumers choose to watch on Netflix come from product recommendations based on their recommendation engines.
At their core, recommendation engines are the application of data to help identify additional opportunities. Organisations are not limited to recommendation engines either. Data has the potential to identify opportunities in a variety of ways, not least of all by providing insight into unknown and unfamiliar markets.
Consider, for example, the solution we developed for Coriolis Technologies. Our solution collates vast amounts of financial and commodity trade data within a single platform, allowing users to quickly visualise complex trade relationships from around the world. The simplicity of the visualisation allows users to quickly and easily identify trade opportunities that might have been otherwise missed.
For organisations, data can be used to not only identify new markets but also in the optimisation of existing markets. Data can help organisations to identify and address missed opportunities in the delivery of a product or service.
Our COBALT Rates Revenue Tool used a range of disparate data sets to help Belfast City Council identify £500k in additional revenue from unpaid non-domestic rates, not including backdated rates.
Bottomline
Data has the potential to identify new opportunities for organisations. It can provide insight into complex markets that might have been otherwise missed and can help organisations to better optimise existing markets. To find out more about how we provide data solutions that enable our clients to identify new opportunities, contact us using the form below.
