Big Transactional Data

BIG DATA!

Big data is a wide term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and information privacy. The term often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics or other certain advanced methods to extract value from raw data, and seldom to a particular size of data set. Accuracy in big data may lead to more confident decision making. And better decisions can mean greater operational efficiency, cost reduction and reduced risk.

Analysis of data sets can find new correlations, to "spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.  Scientists, business executives, practitioners of media and advertising and governments alike regularly meet difficulties with large data sets in areas including Internet search, finance and business informatics. Scientists encounter limitations in e-Science work, including meteorology, genomics,  connectomics, complex physics simulations, and biological and environmental research.

The challenge for large enterprises is determining who should own big data initiatives that straddle the entire organization.

Working with big data is necessarily uncommon; most analysis is of "PC size" data, on a desktop PC or notebook that can handle the available data set.

Relational database management systems and desktop statistics and visualization packages often have difficulty handling big data. The work instead requires "massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers".  What is considered "big data" varies depending on the capabilities of the users and their tools, and expanding capabilities make Big Data a moving target. Thus, what is considered "big" one year becomes ordinary later. "For some organizations, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider data management options. For others, it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes before data size becomes a significant consideration.

Datasprint wanted to simplify and breakdown the barrier of entering the BIG data analysis market.  How?  Simply by offering a platform that can easily connect to your data securely either via a direct API connection or by a manual upload process all in under 3 weeks. In the simplest terms we take your transnational data, crunch it through the super cloud platform and display actionable trends that your teams at all levels can understand via a visualisation dashboard and really intuitive menu and story board system.  

Our platform works on a two folded approach, firstly your teams can review data in proven visualisation displays and secondly your team can make critical business decisions based upon the trends discovered and take critical action.  Upon the FREE trial Datasprint offers its customers, users on the platform are able to engage and interrogate the last three years of data up to the current LIVE working week to identify critical actionable trends. 

So what is Datasprint?

DataSprint is a software as a service tool specialising in retention across ecommerce and the online gambling and gaming verticals. Our gaming operator clients regularly approach us to help them with their most important customers, their VIP’s.

Their ‘issues’ around their management of VIP’s range from the promotional: ‘are my VIP promotions driving real value?’ through to the strategic: ‘How do I define a VIP?’ to the tactical:’ am I spotting VIP’s when they visit my site?’  

If you want to learn more on how Datasprint can help redefine retention for your customers please get in contact. 

Simon Elias is a director of DataSprint a Software as a Service (SAAS) tool focused on improving Profits, Customer Conversion and Customer Retention for their clients.

www.datasprint.uk

info@datasprint.uk

Using Data to align your business’ customer acquisition and retention teams

Using Data to align your business’ customer acquisition and retention teams:

With our traditional marketing based on SEO, PPC and occasional forays into online media, digital industries focus has been on traffic sources. Who can blame the acquisition manager when all they see of the hard earned customers they acquire is their backs as they fly past and into the hands of a customer support or CRM team, earning us another conversion click? From there on the acquisition managers wait with bated breath for that click to turn into an action or deposit or wagering depending on the metric their efforts are measured by.

The acquisition team’ focus is spent on evaluating effective earnings per click, analysing traffic sources, the conversion numbers they generate, and the prominence we give to each operator on our sites. Sometimes they go so far as to look at the design and branding on our site and the overall customer experience but most times it’s the numbers that keep them busy and focused.

This is sound business practice, but is this enough for an industry that’s now been doing the same thing for over a decade? In that decade, social media and smart-phones have threatened the dominance of www. Our target audiences however are still searching and looking for our competitor’s products across all the devices they use. Meanwhile, we continue to battle it out amongst ourselves to grab a share of search and capture the click. In our industry the focus is all about the metrics and the results they produce.

A decade later we find ourselves still unable to predict beyond six months of certainty. We confidently assert that this uncertainty is the nature of the Internet. After all, who knows what tomorrow brings in a Web 2.0 world? Our obsession with the platform of delivery, the metrics we use to measure our activity on the platform and our business model keeps us blind to the key ingredient in the mix: the customer.

It’s partly a fault of our business model. We assume we have nothing of value to trade with the customer. We view the customer as a click; a number, a percentage that affects the metric that obsesses us. We lose sight of the motivation that drives the customer to search for and then click on our link or Call to Action. We view the ad text and organic ranking position as the prime customer motivators and our battles centre around the race to the top. Unfortunately for us it’s not a free race. Time and money are the key elements required to fuel the engines in the race. Working in small teams or even as individuals these commodities are in scarce supply so we focus all our time and or money on this small area to stay in the race.

So how do we evolve our business and have a plan for the future?

The first step is an old marketing maxim:

• Know thy customer

You have a very limited window to start trading with your customer once they hit your site. The fear of disrupting the customer journey to the key objective: clicking to an operator, obsesses us. have you considered the following basics:

How do you track their behaviour online?

What metrics do you use to determine their online behaviour?

How does their transactional behaviour affect you?

How an you sift through the realms of transactional data you have and make it usable such that you can help influence what the customer does on your site?

Our recommendation would be to look at a way to identify the key drivers in your business and note these drivers are not often what you think they are. Next you have to understand how you will monitor these key influencers and set targets. What do you want your business to achieve. Then comes the hard bit. Finding an effective way to monitor what is going on in your business in an effective not tactical manner. Then finding a way to take the reams of transactional data in your business and come up with short action based lists of customers whom you can promote to in order to help you uplift your business results.

Doing it yourself if you do not have the tooling background or skill set may result in a fruitless exercise and distract you from your prime expertise in traffic management. Datasprint is a Business Intelligence Software tool that has decades of experience invested in it. It shows you actionable trends within the business sand the driver behind those trends so you can go straight to the root and work a customer level to improve your business results.

Small teams of people who have too few hours in the day can’t this overnight. Neither can a business work effectively if it has silo-ed Acquisition and Retention teams with no common shared vision or tooling. At Datasprint we recognise this and are cost effectively helping businesses to adopt a joined up approach to acquiring and retaining customers. We also help senior level executives be aligned and on the same page as junior level coal face executors by providing shared common tooling in the form of Datasprints’ software. Using Datasprint has helped our clients stay focused on their game and up their game several notches. The success of our software drives our clients and us as we put meaningful distance between them and their competition.

Michael Braga is a Director of DATASPRINT a Software As A Service Business Intelligence tool offering transactional businesses the opportunity of turning their volumes of transactional data into actionable data which can be used to drive their profit growth and can be contacted at Michael@datasprint.uk.

Getting off the ‘no growth’ plateau

Getting off the ‘no growth’ plateau

What will a 5-10% increase in conversion mean for your business? If you can improve your average revenue per customer by 10% or have your customers visit, deposit or purchase more often what will that look like for your profit line?

These are all tangible opportunities that in this recession wrought economy and over competitive e-commerce space we hanker after but find difficult to deliver. How do we create this kind of change in our business?

Strategy and Data are words that gets most small or medium sized online business owners yawning, looking at their watches or opening up the next daily report on their blackberries. In our tactically driven entrepreneurial environment somewhere along the line we decided that strategy was irrelevant and data equalled analysis paralysis. So it became more important to do rather than think. No bad thing either. Let’s take the online gambling vertical as a prime example of tactics over strategy. The gods of right place, right time, a fair wind and blood sweat and tears have all helped the burgeoning e gaming sector capitalise on the zeitgeist that was online gaming. Then came the headwinds of legislation, regulation, taxation an oversupply of competing brands and a promiscuous customer.

So in the UK we have ended up with an online gaming market that is cluttered, and targeting a customer that is over served and demanding much more for less or nothing.

The recession or competition is often blamed when we find our business growth has plateaued. How do we now take that big leap forward which will give our business clear space from the competition and quantum growth?

As in all things in life there are no silver bullets but rather a combination of factors. At the heart of all these factors is a mantra, we at Datasprint regularly apply which is “think more, do less”.

It’s also important to choose the focus and structure of your thinking as random thinking is as harmful as tactical doing.

So, here are some top tips from our team at Datasprint that can help shift your business up a gear:

Your boss-your target customer

A few simple questions about your boss:

• Who is your target customer?

• What is the journey your customers undertake to find you?

• What is the transactional behaviour of your target customer?

• How do you get your target customer to want to spend more time and or money with you?

Your own business:

• What makes your business the money?
• What do you spend your time doing?
• How can you make more from your existing traffic?
• Who are the right types of customers for your business and are you managing how you reward them effectively?

Since early 2009, our consultants have been working with e-commerce, e-gaming and home shopping clients and online affiliates, helping them to realise that the solution to their growth issues were by and large externally defined but internally solvable. The approach we take is always strategic in nature, data driven and most importantly focused on Return on Investment or meeting a goal or target defined by our clients. Using predefined fields applied to our client’s customer level data our software solution presents trends and actions for you to implement to affect those trends. This allows our clients and you to optimise business performance by using customer level transactional data in a manner that can be easily executed and acted on by your existing resources and infrastructure. This methodology and tooling has seen us deliver double-digit improvements on key profit influencing metrics for our clients.

For your business to succeed clear space, fresh perspective and emotional distance is vital when you are thinking about the future. This is hard to do for a business employee or owner as there are a lot of personal dimensions in the relationship you have with your business. Working with a proven piece of independent and proven software gives you the clarity of vision you need for a fresh and qualified perspective on your business.

Michael Braga is a Director of DATASPRINT a Software As A Service Business Intelligence tool offering transactional businesses the opportunity of turning their volumes of transactional data into actionable data which can be used to drive their profit growth and can be contacted at Michael@datasprint.uk

Retention software for the online gambling world

Finding and managing your next VIP:

DataSprint is a software as a service tool specialising in retention. Our operator clients regularly approach us to help them with their most important customers their VIP’s.

Their ‘issues’ around their management of VIP’s range from the promotional: ‘are my VIP promotions driving real value?’ through to the strategic: ‘How do I define a VIP?’ to the tactical:’ am I spotting VIP’s when they visit my site?’

Each operator has different needs but VIP identification and management lie at the heart of their needs.

We have created a process that has resulted in strong success for our operator clients. This process has enabled us develop an innovative and effective way to identify VIP’s and to facilitate the ongoing management of VIP’s.

With every new operator, we begin by distilling the initial issue down to the essence of his or her concern. We look to understand their perception of what constitutes a VIP for their business and why. We start with questions focused on how they currently measure their business, their measures for success and the daily, weekly and monthly metrics that drive their activities.

In our experience, most operators focus their metrics on the outcome (gross win, net win, net, cash, deposits) without analysing and leveraging the drivers that generate the outcome the operator is focused on. This means that marketing teams use blunt rather than sharp promotional tactics to deliver a result. Blunt because the promotional activity either ends up bringing spend forward, rewarding players unnecessarily or worse still grooming players to expect regular promotional incentives. This is particularly true when it comes to the operator’s most important players: their VIP’s.

Once we have asked the above questions our discussion moves on to more qualitative aspects. We ask the operator to clarify how they classify VIP’s and why they chose that method of classification. We use a few closed questions to determine what makes a player important to the operator’s business. This helps us analyse the operator’s mindset and bring to the fore any opportunities that may exist which the operator is not exploiting fully.

Our questions then move to the practical operational level and we use DataSprint to assess how the operator’s database is managed in terms of player segmentation and how that drives their marketing activity and business reporting. Again, this often brings to the front opportunities for maximisation. These early opportunities identified by DataSprint tools allow the operator to engage in quick win tactical activity, which can take place. This information is provided in a visual manner not dissimilar to Google Analytics. The idea behind DataSprint tool is to provide the operator with actionable data. This actionable data takes the form of lists of customers for the business to focus their efforts and attention on. The software presents lists customers that need promotional activity and so on and so forth. Essentially the tool is a very concise view of your business and your VIP’s so that your business can move from the doing and stop the wondering stage to the doing phase.

Next we begin the process of player segmentation. We use DataSprint’s software customer transactions to group their customers into behavioral segments. This is important as it helps define how and why VIPs play at the operator’s site. Once this is done we use these ‘behavioral’ segments to create new metrics. New metrics are key, we need them to be able to identify and influence behavior. DataSprint also create a tracking and monitoring system that helps monitor player behavior to prevent VIP attrition or lapsing. Once this has been completed, we work with the operator to train the team and set up the new processes. This is essential as it helps to build a mindset within the business, which is focused on using quantitative data to understand and influence player behavior.

The marketing resources in our operator client’s teams have seized the opportunity as it provides them with more creative space to initiate and deliver campaigns, which are more interesting to the player and reduces the hum drum nature of their existing campaign activity. In all of this DataSprint uses templated solutions to allow the team to operate and manage this with limited resources.

And that in a nutshell is how we think online casinos should identify potential VIP players, and work on keeping them coming back.

Michael Braga is a director of DataSprint a Software as a Service tool focused on improving Profits, Customer Conversion and Customer Retention for their clients.

www.datasprint.uk