The Big (Data) Game Changer in CRM

In the nineties I took part in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by providing my idle computational resources from my home PC to look for patterns in the noise coming from outer space. The amount of radio noise coming from outer space is overwhelming but SETI@home, University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and millions of participants tried to find the patterns that would suggest extraterrestrial intelligent activity.   This activity is quite similar to what is going on with big data in today's business world.

The size of this project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence might seem daunting, but projects based on massive data sets are actually happening all around us today. On a daily basis, organizations are on a quest to find patterns in the "noisy" data that is coming from our digital world. Data is flowing at a tremendous rate from connected sensors, devices, images, videos, customer interactions, clickstreams, etc. As a follow up on two earlier articles on insights driven engagement and drilling for data to know your customer via a customer engagement platform with Microsoft technology, the subject for this article is: Big Data.

The Three V's of Big Data

Though it might seem that Big Data is all about the volume, it is just one of several key aspects. Big Data can be described by 3 V's- volume, velocity, and variety. As we will see, these factors will radically change the way customer centricity is to be managed.

Figure 1: Big Data: volume, velocity ...