Predictive Analytics for Small Business organizations?

Big data has rapidly become a game changer for small to mid-sized organizations. Chances are, you’re already analyzing data to gauge where your organization stands opposed to the competition. That means you might already be using some big data analytics tools to make insights and find trends. As a fact, Nielsen surveyed 2,000 U.S. small trades and found that 60% of business using big data to recognize opportunities for update service and product.

If you start predicting customer behavior and business trends rather than just action to them? That’s where predictive analytics comes in.

Benefits for Small Business

There are many benefits of predictive analytics for a small growing companies and business. The top two are customer retention and demand forecasting.

Customer retention

Customer retention defines as the actions and activities businesses and organizations take to make smaller the number of customer defections. The aim of customer retention process is to help organization and businesses retain as numerous customers as feasible. With predictive analytics, you can analyze and track customer Dealing to predict what and when a customer may purchase, and identify the customers at risk for leaving. An important advantage for new businesses is to identify which prospect groups are most likely to adopt their services and products. This allows businesses to identify opportunities for enhancement, as well as effectively use their marketing budget on promising targets.

Demand forecasting

Although predictive analytics help small to mid range businesses take their respective touch to the next upper level, it also allows big organizations to provide personalized customer service as well. For small companies, enhancing the top line has always been a first priority, but now that their customer service is being matched or surpassed by larger businesses, it has become essential to survive. Inventory tracking and effectively forecast which products are most in demand at a certain time of the week, month, or even year can improve the top line of a business significantly.

How to Get Started

When it comes to big data and predictive analytics, cost isn’t as much of a problem now that there are more low-budget and open-source solutions to choose from. The biggest problem lies with businesses not knowing how to get better insights from the big data which they extract. In fact, in the case study, less than 15% of the small companies surveyed knew how to do this well manner.

How can a small business make sure an initiative will yield actionable insights? Start with a distinct aim in mind or a problem that requirement for fixing.

Beginning with a specific objective, such as high product sell, will start you off with a small amount of data range and scope rather than starts at thousands of data points and hoping something will jump out. With better aim and discover the relevant useful data, you can recognize how to measure the key performance indicators, and begin with tool that suits businesses requirements.

Stream Analytics’ senior data scientist came up with few key points to take complete benefits of predictive analytics:

1. Clear plans & strategy for how to use data and analytics.
2. Ability to recognize, manage and combine different data sources.
3. Be able to build machine learning models for predicting outcomes.
4. Have management transform the organization from process-based to data-based decision making to have better results.

One thing to keep remember is even though all companies can leverage the power of predictive analytics, it doesn’t mean that it’s the correct outcomes or solution for all business. Make sure to discover your business needs predictive capabilities before jumping in head first.