Data Science is a broad field with many potential applications. It’s not just about analyzing data and modeling algorithms, but it also reinvents the way businesses operate and how different departments interact. Data scientists solve complex problems every day, leveraging a variety of Data Science solutions to tackle issues like processing unstructured data, finding patterns in large datasets, and building recommendation engines using advanced statistical methods, artificial intelligence, and machine learning techniques.
The widespread benefits of Data Science for businesses are felt across the spectrum of organizational functions. Organizations are using Data Science to transform data into competitive advantages, fine-tuning products and services and identifying customer churn through analytics collected by the call centers so that marketing can act to keep them. Marketers are targeting customers using machine learning and product recommendation systems, which take into account socioeconomic data points to inform how to market to customers.
Data Science helps analyze and extract patterns from corporate data, so these patterns can be organized to guide corporate decisions. Data analysis using Data Science techniques helps companies to figure out which trends are the best fit for businesses during various parts of the year.
Through data patterns, Data Science professionals can use tools and techniques to forecast future customer needs toward a specific product or service. Data Science and businesses can work together closely in understanding consumer preferences across a wide range of items and running better marketing campaigns.
To enhance the scope of predictive analytics, Data Science now employs other advanced technologies such as machine learning and deep learning to improve decision-making and create better models for predicting financial risks, customer behaviors, or market trends.
Data Science helps with making future-proofing decisions, supply chain predictions, understanding market trends, planning better pricing for products, consideration of automation for various data-driven tasks, and so on.
For example, in sales and marketing, Data Science is mainly used to predict markets, determine new customer segments, optimize pricing structures, and analyze the customer portfolio. Businesses frequently use sentiment analysis and behavior analytics to determine purchase and usage patterns, and to understand how people view products and services. Some businesses like Lowes, Home Depot, or Netflix use “hyper-personalization” techniques to match offers to customers accurately via their recommendation engines.
E-commerce companies use recommendation engines, pricing algorithms, customer predictive segmentation, personalized product image searching, and artificially intelligent chat bots to offer transformational customer experience.
In recent times, deep learning, through its use of “artificial neural networks,” has empowered data scientists to perform unstructured data analytics, such as image recognition, object categorizing, and sound mapping.
Data Science Solutions by Industry Applications
Now let’s take a look at how Data Science is powering the industry sectors with its cross-disciplinary platforms and tools:
Data Science Solutions in Banking: Banking and financial sectors are highly dependent on Data Science solutions powered with big data tools for risk analytics, risk management, KYC, and fraud mitigation. Large banks, hedge funds, stock exchanges, and other financial institutions use advanced Data Science (powered by big data, AI, ML) for trading analytics, pre-trade decision-support analytics, sentiment measurements, predictive analytics, and more.
Data Science Solutions in Marketing: Marketing departments often use Data Science to build recommendation systems and to analyze customer behavior. When we talk about Data Science in marketing, we are primarily concerned with what we call “retail marketing.” The retail marketing process involves analyzing customer data to inform business decisions and drive revenue. Common data used in retail marketing include customer data, product data, sales data, and competitor data. Customer transactional data is used extensively in AI-powered data analytics systems for increased sales and providing excellent marketing services. Chatbot analytics and sales representative response data are used together to improve sales efficiency.
The retailer can use this data to build customer-targeted marketing campaigns, optimize prices based on demand, and decide on product assortment. The retail marketing process is rarely automated; it involves making business decisions based on the data. Data scientists working in retail marketing are primarily concerned with deriving insights from the data and applying statistical and machine learning methods to inform these decisions.
Data Science Solutions in Finance and Trading: Finance departments use Data Science to build trading algorithms, manage risk, and improve compliance. A data scientist working in finance will primarily use data about the financial markets. This includes data about the companies whose stocks are traded on the market, the trading activity of the investors, and the stock prices. The financial data is unstructured and messy; it’s collected from different sources using different formats. The data scientist’s first task, therefore, is to process the data and convert it into a structured format. This is necessary for building algorithms and other models. For example, the data scientist might build a trading algorithm that exploits the market inefficiencies and generates profits for the company.
Data Science Solutions in Human Resources: HR departments use Data Science to hire the best talent, manage employee data, and predict employee performance. The data scientist working in HR will primarily use employee data collected from different sources. This data could be structured or unstructured depending on how it’s collected. The most common source is an HR database such as Workday. The data scientist’s first task is to process the data and clean it. This is necessary for insights from the data. The data scientist might use methods like machine learning to predict the employee’s performance. This can be done by training the algorithm on historical employee data and the features it contains. For example, the data scientist might build a model that predicts employee performance using historical data.
Data Science in Logistics and Warehousing: Logistics and operations departments use Data Science to manage supply chains and predict demand. The data scientist working in logistics and warehousing will primarily use data about customer orders, inventory, and product prices. The data scientist will use data from sensors and IoT devices deployed in the supply chain to track the product’s journey. The data scientist might use methods like machine learning to predict demand.
Data Science Solutions in Customer Service: Customer service departments use Data Science to answer customer queries, manage tickets, and improve the end-to-end customer experience. The data scientist working in customer service will primarily use data about customer tickets, customers, and the support team. The most common source is the ticket management system. In this case, the data scientist might use methods like machine learning to predict when the customer will stop engaging with the brand. This can be done by training the algorithm on historical customer data. For example, using historical data, the data scientist might build a model that predicts when a customer will stop engaging with the brand.
Big Data with Data Science Solutions Use Cases
While Data Science solutions can be used to get insights into behaviors and processes, big data analytics indicates the convergence of several cutting-edge technologies working together to help enterprise organizations extract better value from the data that they have.
In biomedical research and health, advanced Data Science and big data analytics techniques are used for increasing online revenue, reducing customer complaints, and enhancing customer experience through personalized services. In the hospitality and food services industries, once again big data analytics is used for studying customers’ behavior through shopping data, such as wait times at the checkout. Statistics show that 38% of companies use big data to improve organizational effectiveness.
In the insurance sector, big data-powered predictive analytics is frequently used for analyzing large volumes of data at high speed during the underwriting stage. Insurance claims analysts now have access to algorithms that help identify fraudulent behaviors. Across all industry sectors, organizations are harnessing the predictive powers of Data Science to enhance their business forecasting capabilities.
Big data coupled with Data Science enables enterprise businesses to leverage their own organization data, rather than relying on market studies or third-party tools. Data Science practitioners work closely with RPA industry professionals to identify data sources for a company, as well as to build dashboards and visuals for searching various forms of data analytics in real-time. Data Science teams can now train deep learning systems to identify contracts and invoices from a stack of documents, as well as perform different types of identification for the information.
Big data analytics has the potential to unlock great insights into data across social media channels and platforms, enabling marketing, customer support, and advertising to improve and be more aligned with corporate goals. Big data analytics make research results better, and helps organizations use research more effectively by allowing them to identify specific test cases and user settings.
Specialized Data Science Use Cases with Examples
Data Science applications can be used for any industry or area of study, but the majority of examples involve data analytics for business use cases. In this section, some specific use cases are presented with examples to help you better understand its potential in your organization.
Data cleansing: In Data Science, the first step is data cleansing, which involves identifying and cleaning up any incorrect or incomplete data sets. Data cleansing is critical to identify errors and inconsistencies that can skew your data analysis and lead to poor business decisions. The most important thing about data cleansing is that it’s an ongoing process. Business data is always changing, which means the data you have today might not be correct tomorrow. The best data scientists know that data cleansing isn’t done just once; it’s an ongoing process that starts with the very first data set you collect.
Prediction and forecasting: The next step in Data Science is data analysis, prediction, and forecasting. You can do this on an individual level or on a larger scale for your entire customer base. Prediction and forecasting helps you understand how your customers behave and what they may do next. You can use these insights to create better products, marketing campaigns, and customer support. Normally, the techniques used for prediction and forecasting include regression, time series analysis, and artificial neural networks.
Fraud detection: Fraud detection is a highly specialized use of Data Science that relies on many techniques to identify inconsistencies. With fraud detection, you’re trying to find any transactions that are incorrect or fraudulent. It’s an important use case because it can significantly reduce the costs of business operations. The best fraud detection systems are wide-ranging. They use many different techniques to identify inconsistencies and unusual data points that suggest fraud. Because fraud detection is such a specialized use case, it’s best to work with a Data Science professional.
Data Science for business growth: Every business wants to grow, and this is a natural outcome of doing business. Yet many businesses struggle to keep up with their competitors. Data Science can help you understand your potential customers and improve your services. It can also help you identify new opportunities and explore different areas you can expand into. Use Data Science to identify your target audience and their needs. Then create products and services that serve those needs better than your competitors can. You can also use Data Science to identify new markets, explore new areas for growth, and expand into new industries.
Summary
Data Science is an interdisciplinary field that uses mathematics, engineering, statistics, machine learning, and other fields of study to analyze data and identify patterns. Data Science applications can be used for any industry or area of study, but most examples involve data analytics for business use cases. Data Science often helps you understand your potential customers and their buying needs.
Image used under license from Shutterstock.com