Streaming analytics is a powerful tool that is being increasingly utilized by businesses to improve productivity and make timely decisions. Sometimes, you have only a few seconds or even milliseconds to make a business decision. This can be done only if you have the right data analytics, and then combining them with pre-set conditions.
Streaming analytics essentially lets you capture data and data-driven insights in real-time. This is probably why it is also referred to as real-time analytics. It has the potential to offer various benefits for your business, no matter the vertical or niche it belongs to.
Following are some of the key benefits of using streaming analytics for your business.
Minimize Downtime for Production Line
Problems or bottlenecks in a production line can slow down the output. Often, the actual problem is tiny but the time taken to diagnose it can multiply its costs in terms of time and money lost. This is where streaming analytics can be immensely helpful.
Using well-coordinated streams of data directly from the production line and then analyzing them in real-time, you can identify the exact nature and location of the problem.
Whether it’s related to human resource, the equipment, the raw materials or any other conditions, real-time insights let you react quickly and ensure minimum downtime for the production line. It also ultimately allows you to utilize your business resources more effectively and efficiently.
Curate Better Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing today is all about relevance and timeliness. If your business can market the right product at the right time to the right customer, it can sell more and garner better customer satisfaction. In order to do so, sometimes you have to take data input from a customer’s real-time behaviors.
For instance, if a customer is looking for perfumes at your online store, you can use streaming analytics to update recommendations instantly. In this case, including beauty and care products in the recommendations section may be more relevant to the customer’s state of mind at the time.
The timeliness of such recommendations is crucial for their success and streaming analytics can play a major role in ensuring that. It helps you craft digital marketing strategies that are relevant and timely.
Monitor Cyber Threats More Effectively
Business data is vulnerable to a variety of cybersecurity threats today. You can use different tools to scan and monitor such threats. However, relying on third-party vendors to handle cyber emergencies can lead to delays and losses.
Streaming analytics helps you create a more holistic and tailored strategy to handle cyber attacks. You can use an open-source solution such as Imply Streaming Analytics to create a powerful security operations center (SOC) and handle cyber threats on a timely basis.
By keeping an eye on the real-time logs of various services and programs, your streaming analytics can identify the threats quickly and counter them before they can cause any damage.
Get Maintenance Right
The systems and equipment your business utilizes typically need routine maintenance. It is hard to exactly specify when is the right time to perform maintenance, although standard schedules are applied in general.
The problem is that depending on the use of a piece of machinery or equipment, it may require maintenance sooner or later than the standard stipulated schedule. This is where streaming analytics offers better recommendations.
Streaming analytics takes data points from different aspects of a system or equipment machine’s functionality. Using data, past and present, from these data streams, the analytics can tell you exactly when the maintenance is needed. Such predictive maintenance can help you allocate resources more efficiently and on time.
Offer Timely Medical Care
Smart patient care is a concept that is increasingly popular among healthcare facilities. While technologies like Internet-of-Things (IoT) are primarily driving this trend, streaming analytics are also contributing to it.
In fact, streaming analytics are a crucial behind-the-scenes tool to allow smart patient care.
As a healthcare facility, you can use as many data touch-points as you want to gain real-time insights about the condition of a patient. By defining pre-set conditions, you can trigger different alerts when real-time data from the touch-points meets these conditions. A drop in blood sugar level on a connected device, for instance, can be coupled with an instant alert to the nurse or doctor.
Track Real-Time Sentiment
Social media today is considered the pulse of real-time sentiment. No matter what kind of business you run, social media feedback typically reflects the general sentiment among your target customers.
That being said, customer sentiment offers both opportunities and risks. When customers are happy about a product you have launched and talking about it, for instance, it is the perfect time to introduce them to other products or services you offer.
Similarly, handling negative response quickly and appropriately can mitigate the damage to your reputation.
Streaming analytics makes this possible by letting you track customer sentiment in real-time. You can use an analytics tools to trigger alerts for both warnings and risks. When positive or negative mentions exceed a certain number, it may be time for a timely strategy.
Know Your Customer Better
As a general rule, the better you know your customer, the more effective are your marketing efforts. Virtually endless streams of customer data exist today, from on-site behavior to real-time sentiment and more. Many business use batch analytics to assess these streams but that can lead to considerable delays in decision making.
The great thing about streaming analytics is that it lets you receive customer data from as many streams as you want without sacrificing in terms of time. The available data is analyzed in seconds or even milliseconds to reach quick decisions. Catering to real-time customer behaviors also helps you make more relevant and effective business choices.
Streaming analytics has virtually endless applications across business and industries. SMBs and larger corporations can benefit from it alike, incorporating it into their marketing efforts, artificial intelligence tools and IoT ecosystem. The key is to look at streaming analytics as a real-time tool that can help you make decisions that are better, timely, and more suitable.
Businesses are increasingly incorporating streaming analytics as a part of their overall analytics solutions. It may be time for you to join the bandwagon as well.
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