PREDICTIVE SERVICES — crystal ball or path to success?
Data-driven business solutions for an Ultimate Customer Experience
Ever opened a fortune cookie? And did the short sentence written on that crumpled little white paper predict something that turned out to be true?
And have you ever experienced a product or service offering you a solution before you even knew you needed it? If so, weren’t you, like with the fortune cookie, truly fascinated by such a foresight? ;)
1 — Predictive services enable new business opportunities
Of course, with predictive services there is not as much magic as one might think. It has nothing to do with fortune telling at all. If you drink a cup of coffee every morning, it is obviously clear that after a specific amount of time your coffee will be empty and needs to be refilled.
Don’t make the user think.
The interesting thing about this for a company like — let’s call them Coffee Inc. — is to know exactly how many cups of coffee you drink. Why, and how could they know that? They could sell coffee machines, connected to the Cloud and an app. So Coffee Inc. knows what coffee you are making at what time and how often. They can predict exactly when you need to buy more coffee and offer you a service that automatically asks you via app to re-order, so new coffee arrives at your home just at the right time. It can also give you recommendations for new coffee flavors based on your preferred taste. For the company, it’s a perfect new business case — to produce those smart coffee machines and win lots of new customers just because of the simple and unique coffee experience.
That is an ideal example of a predictive service. And it works for almost any basic commodity, from toilet paper to detergent.
2 — Predictive services help reduce operational costs
Imagine a factory operating a huge manufacturing line. Their machines have many spare parts that get worn out from time to time and need to be exchanged. The repair can take up a few hours if it occurs suddenly in the middle of the production process. All that downtime, in which the machine is not able to proceed with work, costs the company quite a bit of money.
If the same company starts using predictive services to identify when spare parts come close to their life’s end — depending on workload, working hours and also other influencing factors, for example e.g. humidity or dust — the mechanics can easily replace all critical spare parts with their regular maintenance. An uninterrupted production line is almost guaranteed.
A very similar case might be elevators. The elevator company could wait until an elevator gets stuck and then send a technician for repair. But this only leads to frustrated passengers, and it could also easily result in a pointless service call, if the problem cannot easily be fixed by the technician, due to whatever reason.
Instead, collecting information on the frequency of usage of the elevators, maintaining them on a regular basis, and detecting and exchanging outworn spare parts early enough, prevents elevators from getting stuck at all. This not only saves time and money for the elevator company, it also increases trust and strengthens the overall brand image.
3 — Predictive services are not artificially intelligent
Fortune tellers may claim to know what the future will bring to your emotional relationships or whether your unborn child will be a boy or a girl — predictive services DON’T know things like that. BUT, as Target proved aptly in the past, by analyzing the shopping and search habits of their users, and looking at patterns and abnormalities, they could predict if a woman was pregnant almost before anybody else knew.
In this way, predictive services can also take into account a wide range of additional circumstances like weather conditions, seasonal events and holidays as well as current news. So, communication can be adjusted based on individual preferences, ads can be delivered at the perfect moment, and e-commerce stocks can be automatically ramped up based on expected demand
Instead of voodoo, just clearly analyzing the behavioral data of users and customers can lead to an astonishing amount of new possibilities and opportunities for businesses. It’s not only about inventing new products or reducing operational costs, it’s also about being the first to know.
Want to learn more about data and how to create Ultimate Customer Experiences with it?
You may want to have a look at our previous articles on Behavioral Analytics,
Customer Centricity Transformation and Flywheel Business Growth Model or just stay tuned to coming up articles on Situative Relevance Index (SRI), Automated Machine Learning etc… ;)
Get in contact:
Eve Cecon | Business Innovation Strategist @ Sensory-Minds
e.cecon@sensory-minds.com
