Читать книгу Tech Trends in Practice - Бернард Марр, Bernard Marr - Страница 52

The better you understand your customers, the better you can serve them. Sales and marketing activity is often based on past sales history – effectively, which customers previously bought which products or services. But, thanks to big data and augmented analytics, this activity is increasingly becoming more predictive. In other words, companies are now confidently and accurately anticipating what customers will want in the future. Netflix predicting what you might want to watch next is one simple example of this.

In another example, German retail company Otto discovered that customers are less likely to return items when they arrive within two days, and when they receive all their items at once, rather than in multiple shipments. Hardly earth shattering – keeping goods in stock and shipping efficiently makes good sense. However, Otto is like Amazon in that it sells products from many, many brands, which means stocking and shipping products all at once is a major challenge. So Otto analyzed the data from 3 billion past transactions, plus factors like weather data, to build a model that could predict what customers would want to buy in the next 30 days. Not only could the system do this, it could do so with 90% accuracy.⁶ Now, the company can order the right products ahead of time and, as a result, product returns have been reduced by over 2 million items a year.