Customer Data Mining

802 Words2 Pages

A 2011 study conducted by the Digital Universe Corporation, showed that in 2011 alone, 1.8 zettabytes of data were produced by all businesses. That is the equivalent of 1.8 trillion gigabytes, the same as every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for the next 26,976 years. The study also predicts that the overall amount of data produced annually, will grow by an extreme 5000% by the year 2020. However, what is the point of this mass collection of data if we aren’t even able to make useful inferences from it? Thanks to customer data mining, that has all changed. To better understand this developing industry, we will explore what exactly customer data mining is and how it works, ending with the utilization of this technology by businesses.
According to Queens University of Belfast, customer data mining is the practice of searching through mass amounts of customer data to find patterns that can better increase revenue and cut company costs. Customer data mining allows businesses to better organize and access data from customer interactions to find information on customer usage patterns.
Customer data mining has a vast potential, but the inner workings of this business practice are quite complex. According to Jason Frand, a Managerial Computing and Information Systems Professor at UCLA, customer data mining is a very complicated process that requires experts with a high level of understanding. Several types of analytical softwares are available for customer data mining, with the two main softwares being statistical software and machine learning software, which enables the computer to ‘learn’ from data. These softwares seek four main relationships.The first relationship sought are classes which are information stored in predeter...

... middle of paper ...

...o its newly launched website by blasting them with sporadic emails, that received about a 20% email opening rate. Upon using customer data mining softwares, Sway's email marketing campaign increased online revenue by 300%, 40% of recipients began opening the emails and the number of click-throughs tripled. Customer data mining as a whole is making a variety of businesses efficient by allowing them to gain insight on customer tendencies.
We have now explored what customer data mining is, how it works, and how businesses are able to utilize this technology. Customer data mining has become a keystone practice for businesses, large and small. This dynamic tool has the power to affect us everyday, simplifying the consumer experience and helping businesses better gauge what customers want. All in all, customer data mining is the key to understanding our data filled world.

Open Document