Intelligent use of big data fuels CRM opportunities

This is part one of a podcast about big data and CRM. For part two on how data integration and data quality affect big data initiatives, click here.

Companies don't lack data on their customers. Instead, they are straining to make sense of the massive amounts of information they obtain every day.

With data coming from many different channels, organizations -- as well as the tools they use -- must get smarter and more efficient with data management. Organizations' customer data management efforts today involve harnessing big data to understand customer preferences and to augment product and service offerings.

Peter O'Kelly

Big data doesn't refer just to the massive volume of data but also to the variety of sources and formats it comes from -- such as social media, video and audio -- and the speed with which companies collect it.

In this podcast, independent consultant Peter O'Kelly defines big data and explains its broad applicability to CRM. The lower price of technology and the entrenchment of cloud, open source and other machine learning platforms have made it possible to work with data in ways that would've been too expensive or impossible 10 years ago, he said.

"All businesses can benefit from having a 360-degree view of customers," O'Kelly said. "This has been a long-standing goal for industries, but big data technologies are helping to bring that to fruition by making it more cost-effective and easier to integrate disparate types of data across different system silos."

O'Kelly also talks about proximity-based technologies, such as beacons, that boost customer service in real time and about how using big data can help in areas such as fraud protection.