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It wasn’t long ago that just being online, or in the cloud, was a competitive advantage for a company. That’s not true anymore—those things are just status quo. So what is your competitive edge as a company today?
Many companies underestimate the value of their most important asset: their data. They have accumulated data but have no idea what to do with it. But that data has enormous value, as long as it is used to your advantage—and with data services, it can even be transformative for your organization.
What if we could anticipate when and where staff will be most needed? Or when a key piece of machinery will need preventative maintenance and the most efficient time to do it? Or if we could predict whether a student will graduate or drop out of a given college course? Most businesses know how they got their best customers, but what if they could influence potential customers to become better customers as well?
The key to unlocking your company’s potential is data science and machine learning. But many companies don’t know how powerful their data can be. Here are five examples of major competitive advantages organizations have found by harnessing their data.
Helping Customers Pay their Bills
Non-payment of health care costs is a significant line item in most health care services, whether because of the client’s inability to pay, or because of fraudulent use of insurance. When a major health services company wanted to better predict its patients’ bill payments, they knew that the answer lay in their data—somewhere. So they asked Quisitive to help.
Quisitive was able to use the company’s data to detect patterns in their client data that would help to determine a client’s ability to pay their bill, and whether a client would be willing to pay. These patterns included socio-economic factors and spending habits. With these metrics, clients who were willing to pay their bills but were less able to were identified; by analyzing the data, Quisitive and their partner found ways to adjust how these patients were billed to help motivate them to make payments. By adjusting these metrics, the company was able to influence their clients to pay their bills, thereby minimizing bad debts without resorting to harassing clients. The result was more satisfied customers—and a better bottom line for the company.
Getting Staff on—and off—the Floor
A much-beloved national restaurant chain realized that they could improve their operations significantly by staffing their individual restaurant locations more effectively. Over-staffing led to out-of-control costs, and under-staffing led to fewer satisfied customers. The company came to Quisitive for help.
Quisitive was able to aggregate the company data from multiple sources nationwide quickly to make accurate staffing predictions. Quisitive pulled real-time data for revenue generation, as well as from sources such as their ERP and inventory systems across multiple locations. This enabled a view of over-performing and under-performing stores, based on revenue versus staff on the floor at peak times and lulls. This knowledge enabled each store to schedule staff more effectively. Quisitive’s strength was in the power of their data services—the ability to aggregate data from multiple sources quickly and constructively. This use of Data Services could be applied in almost any retail or storefront setting.
Making Preventive into Predictive Maintenance
A major manufacturing company knew that downtime in their equipment was a major source of loss. They knew that by minimizing maintenance of their machinery they could realize millions of dollars in savings every year. But with hundreds of items spread across multiple facilities, how could they improve their maintenance scheduling?
Quisitive was able to help this company by aggregating the data from the IOT devices in the equipment. Data analysis enabled Quisitive to strip out the noise and find the similarities across the wide range of data. Using Machine Learning processes, patterns emerged and provided insights into failures from the equipment’s point of view. Quisitive implemented Azure Data Services to quickly aggregate, normalize, and process huge data sets. This enabled the company to identify the characteristics that indicated when maintenance was required. Based on this data, the company was able to develop a spot maintenance program that helped them prevent failures and minimize downtime.
Ensuring Success for Learners
Education is not only a huge industry, with the industry’s value expected to surpass $2 trillion in the USA by 2025, but is also a major factor in the country’s economic and social wellbeing. It’s extremely important that learners enter and successfully graduate from college programs vs. leaving before finishing a course of study whether transferring to another college or prematurely ending their academic career. Predicting factors that influence the success or failure of students can have a significant effect on a university’s operations—and their bottom line.
Postsecondary institutions especially have a wealth of student data that can be leveraged to obtain a richer understanding of student demographics. Finding characteristics across such a wide number of dimensions as demographics, program of study, STEM/non-STEM programs, citizenship (domestic or international), age, and even student behaviors like absenteeism can reveal patterns and correlations that can directly influence institutions’ policies and decisions. Quisitive has designed data services for a postsecondary institution to enable its data team to help stop students from falling out of the program and put them back on track for academic success.
Building Better Customers
Most online retailers know what their best customers look like. But the real value isn’t just in identifying customers but creating them. Converting a potential customer to a loyal, repeat customer is truly the holy grail of online retailing. And with the right data analysis, creating those customers can be a reality.
An online retailer wanted to improve their customers’ sales journey to influence them to purchase the products they want most. Quisitive’s Azure Data Services aggregated data from user searches on their online storefront and applied Machine Learning to correlate terms and analyze patterns to figure out what customers were actually searching for. Using the results of this analysis, the retailer was able to adjust their website dynamically to predict a user’s demographics and desired products, and present to them the items they were most interested in—whether the customer knew it or not. The result was a significantly enhanced customer experience and increased customer retention, which will only improve as the customer dataset continues to grow.
Can Data Services Transform Your Business?
The fact is, most companies already have a transformative tool in their hands: the information they’ve collected over years of business transactions. The challenge is making that information work for them to give them a competitive edge.
Until recently, the power to analyze and utilize the vast sets of data that many companies have collected was beyond the scope of all but the most technologically capable organizations. But Quisitive has partnered with multiple organizations to help them implement Azure Data Services to enable remarkable transformations using their information.
Quisitive’s On-Ramp to Azure Data program is designed to help businesses through every stage of their data projects, from planning and discovery, through deployment, to platform adoption, and finally use case execution. The power of Azure Data Services and Quisitive’s experience-driven approach can put your data to work and transform your business in as little as 30 days.
As you prepare to embark on your new data journey, Quisitive is here to help.
