Business Analytics, consists of carrying out a series of business solutions to meet the needs of a business, achieve goals and achieve objectives. In other words, business analytics focuses on collecting data, enriching it, managing it, and analyzing it to extract relevant information for business decision making. For this reason, we can affirm that Business Analytics can serve as support for a company's marketing strategies since, to support some strategic decisions, these will be based on the information that data analysis has provided us.
Therefore, business analytics allows us to:
Achieve business objectives from the analysis of large volumes of data.
Detect trends and make forecasts from predictive models.
Practice these predictive models to improve business procedures.
One way to classify Business Analytics could be these three more or less overlapping areas:
Descriptive Analytics -> Use data to explain the past. It consists of preparing and analyzing historical data to identify patterns and trends. Techniques such as regression models, data modelling and visualization are often used in Descriptive Analytics.
Predictive Analytics -> Use the data to determine what might happen in the future. Predictive Analytics makes it possible to determine the probability associated with future events based on the analysis of available information (present and past), and it also makes it possible to discover relationships between data that are not normally detected with a less sophisticated analysis. Techniques such as data mining and predictive models are used.
Prescriptive Analytics -> Use the data to prescribe those actions that increase our chances of obtaining the best results. Prescriptive Analytics determines new ways of operating that allow us to achieve our business objectives. Techniques such as optimization or simulation are used, although the creation of a previous predictive model is usually required.
Success stories; in Business Analytics: The COTA (Uber) case.
At Uber, service quality is one of the priorities in its business model. In 2018 the company developed the system; COTA (Customer Obsession Ticket Assistant), based on Machine Learning to improve the speed and efficiency of your support system in the application. The main goal of the program was to reduce problem resolution time for the user.
For this they made use of all the previous information available as it was; ticket information, prices, support messages sent by users and information on trips made (descriptive analytics). This information was taken from hundreds of thousands of tickets that arrived daily on the platform from more than 400 cities around the world.
With this information, we worked on a system that helps agents resolve cases with greater agility and efficiency. Before COTA, the agent had to determine the type of problem from a list of thousands of possibilities. With the analysis of the history, it was possible to develop a system that suggested the solution to the agent based on all the previous information. (Diagnostic Analytics).
The automated workflow recommends 3 solutions to the agent, analyzing; the ticket, the type of trip and the context. (Predictive Analytics). This workflow is constantly fed back not only from the tickets that continue to come in, but also from interactions with customers and their satisfaction with the solution provided. This model resulted in a 10% reduction in user solution time.
SOURCE: https://eng.uber.com/cota/
What advantage does business analytics offer?
In its day, the arrival of the Internet generated a completely new phenomenon in which the market carried out its own analyzes comparing offers, exchanging experiences, etc. This new reality meant that brands had to adapt to a new context in which consumers increasingly knew more about the products they were going to buy. However, currently, it is not enough just to know more about the consumer, but information about the market and its trends or even information about the clients of other companies becomes something very useful for companies.
For this reason, business analytics offers a primary advantage that makes it possible for companies to make informed strategic decisions in this new context. Business decision making is faster, more effective and more forceful; these are based on real and quality information; and they are able to succeed and adapt to the development