DCN June 2016 | Page 21

Big Data & IoT competitive marketplace weapon, it’s even more critical that businesses make sure they make the most of the data generated. Let’s consider the challenge of customer retention as it’s a big issue for every business. The critical factors affecting customer retention include speed, accuracy, and personal relationships. To achieve effective retention, personnel need fast and efficient access to customer information from every touch point, including the IoT. They need to be able to fully understand each customer’s relationship with the company and the interactions they have had in the past. With these data based capabilities, the IoT has the potential to transform the customer experience. Achieving a holistic customer view In some instances, achieving a holistic customer view will mean extracting data from multiple data stores and combining it all in real time. This can be difficult to achieve when that data is sitting in disparate data centres or even in different racks within the same data centre. Fast and reliable connections are important to ensure these ‘islands’ of data can be combined. Some might argue that the solution is to pool all data in a single location. But, while that might sound enticing, the practicalities of dealing with legacy systems and dispersed operations make it little more than a pipe dream for most organisations. Instead, effective crossconnection between different data stores and applications is one of the best ways to provide the information customer service staff need in the timeliest manner. Being able to efficiently and effectively access and analyse data (regardless of its location) will have a dramatic and positive effect on the quality of service delivered. Ultra connected and agile data centres are the underlying foundation that supports great customer service across all industries. They allow data to be accessed instantly and workloads to be efficiently and effectively deployed as and where needed. Once these value adding pieces are in place, the humble data bits generated from the IoT are able to deliver real business value.