Did you know that 53% of companies are adopting big data analytics?

That means that about half of all companies haven’t yet adopted the tools to assess big data, which means that you still have the space to perform better than half of your competitors.

You see, big data isn’t just numbers – it’s a way to know your customers better than ever. Here are a few key ways that your business can use big data to its advantage.

Predict What Customers Want

A big challenge to businesses today is to provide the kind of personalized service that parents and grandparents reminisce about. When you would walk into a shop and the shopkeeper would have your order in hand and ready for you without even needing to ask.

Companies today have more information on their clients than ever before. Not just their purchase history  – where they live, what they like, what they click on, where they’ve interacted with customer service, whether or not they interact with your brand on social media platforms.

All of this information comes together to paint a complete picture of your customer – if you know how to compile the data.

This is where big data analytics can make all the difference. You can go one step further than just knowing your customer – you can predict what they like and give them exactly the services they’re after before they’ve even asked.

Identify and Solve Customer Pain Points

Let’s be honest: most companies already know a few of their customers’ main pain points. After all, they’re providing a service that helps solve them.

However, companies who really dive into the data to take a closer look at their customers and solve their deeper pain points are the ones that rise above the crowd. Big data can help you get there.

Let’s say, for example, that a customer is already using your product or service. But they have another pain point along the way. By looking into your data, you can spot these pain points and address them, creating an even better customer experience than before.

Answer More Questions, Completely

At its root, data is all about information. And as a business owner, you know two things: running a business is primarily about answering questions, and answering those questions requires you to have the right information.

For example, what do you customers want? What do they need? What products or services are they missing that you can provide better than your closest competitor? Who are your strongest customers? And what are you not providing to those customers that you should be?

Before big data and analytics, answering these critical questions about your customers could take weeks to establish. And even then, you might not have a complete picture of the situation.

Big data offers you two things: a way to see the whole picture, and a way to make sense of the picture in front of you. In other words, it provides you a means to answer your most pressing questions – and answer them more completely than you could before.

Using Big Data as a Resource

Above all, your company needs to treat big data as a resource. After all, big data is information about your customers. It’s the key to understanding how they think and what motivates them to buy so that you can provide better products and services to meet those needs.