Customer Experience is a ‘Big Data’ Problem
Wikipedia defines 'Big Data' as "datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing." Traditionally, this has been the case in the fields of Astronomy, Genetics, Meteorology, Internet Search, Finance and Business Informatics. At ClickFox, we view customer experience as a 'Big Data' problem which we solve using our CEA solutions. Here's an example that will give you a glimpse into the complex environments we deal with on a daily basis. One of our customers generates 5B+ transactions (each made up of 3-5 interactions) equating to 200GB+ of data in 4K+ source files - every day! This poses several challenges:
- How do you completely ingest that much data quickly to ensure a true voice of the customer view that can be analyzed in a timely fashion?
- How do you join all of the disparate data sources together to create a comprehensive view of the customer experience?
- How do you sort through the massive volumes of data to isolate what is relevant and actionable for real-time business decisions?
ClickFox has developed a scalable service to process data on demand that partitions the data across a pool of CPU’s to achieve maximum performance. Some of our customers are currently each processing 1M+ records/sec and 47MB+/sec. If you're wondering what this speed means, it's as fast as the theoretical maximum read speed of a Blu-ray Disc (400Mb/s). And it can easily scale beyond this. In fact some of our newest improvements have delivered processing speeds of over 40% the current speeds. But processing speed is just one aspect of the problem. We have also overcome a lot of the hurdles around joining interactions from different channels. By combining content, context and customer experience we are able to be more business and process focused. Rather than separately analyzing each data silo we have a channel independent solution that aggregate tasks from disparate channels and delivers a true cross-channel analysis and graphical representation of business drivers. We can't quite reveal our secrets to the world, but we are extremely excited about breaking through these technological barriers and being able to offer our customers CEA solutions that have never been possible before. With ClickFox, 'Big Data' is no longer a customer experience problem! 