Who is your most important customer?

Think carefully about your answer because your most important customer is probably not whom you think it is.

“My most important customers may not be the largest and may not be the most profitable,” said Bill Schmarzo, Global EIM Competency Lead for EMC Consulting. “They may be the ones at the heart of a social graph that’s very profitable to me.

I recently sat down with Schmarzo, whose division is responsible for helping EMC customers apply Big Data analytics to real-world business problems, to chat about the role of consulting and services in the Big Data equation. He said his one of his goals is to help customers “think differently” about business analytics. Big Data enables new types of analytics that simply weren’t possible until now and that requires enterprises to change their thinking.

Said Schmarzo:

 I think that the most important thing that I can do and my team can do is to really help companies understand where and how they can use Big Data to really drive their business. And we start with companies by understanding what are their key business initiatives, what they’re trying to accomplish in the next 12, 18 months. And then going through a process and saying, “Ok, if that’s your key business initiative how can these other data sources, how can these analytic tools and capabilities help you?”

The new types of analysis enabled by the addition of social network data is a great example of how Big Data can have immediate impact the business. Schmarzo illustrates:

There was a customer we worked with in the telecommunications space and tried to answer that question and realized that their most profitable, big customers weren’t actually their most valuable customers. They found what they call this black hole effect where when a customer was to leave, they had a tendency to pull their first-level social network with them. If you’re a company and you can identify those most influential customers to make sure that they aren’t leaving you and that you’re treating them well, and you can figure this out before anyone else does in your industry, you have a huge advantage.

ServicesAngle

Services are a critical component of the Big Data picture. Big Data enables new types data analysis, such as social graph analysis, that are not always obvious or easy for the traditional enterprise to identify. Enterprises initiating Big Data projects should engage services practices with experience in both applying analytics to known business initiatives and identifying new use cases for analytics and Big Data.

You can read my complete interview with Schmarzo over on Wikibon.org. In addition to new use cases for Big Data, we also talked about the implications of cloud computing for Big Data, the role of data quality in Big Data projects, and more. And check out Schmarzo live inside theCube from EMC World 2011 below.

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