Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

UNLOCKING STAGE

The unlocking stage is the point at which data are cultivated to provide information on what has happened, who was involved, how often it happened, and where it happened. This discovery phase helps identify complex patterns and trends from structured and unstructured data. It helps discover and quantify important relationships that you may have been unaware of, thus providing insight to better define customer segments to target for an acquisition or an up-sell campaign; to detect fraudulent insurance claims; to assess product affinity and analyze online shopping carts; and to identify high-value customers to keep and protect. Uncovering patterns and trends enables benefits that include

• Effective segment targeting
• Marketing CRM campaign optimization
• Merchandise strategies optimization
• Fraud reduction and cost reduction
• Risk reduction
• Increases in customer profitability
• Keeping and protecting your high-value customer segments

These patterns and trends are usually discovered via statistical analyses, complexes queries, and descriptive analytics that include the following four points:

1. Data mining. Data mining refers to a collection of techniques that aims to uncover complex patterns in data (big or little) to support the decision-making process.

2. Segmentation. Segmentation is an associative technique by which similar customers/companies are put together in groups called segments. It is based on the premise that similar behavior or characteristics are derive ...