Do you remember the instance a decade back when your favourite Chinese restaurant or an apparel showroom sent you a text message with discounts on your birthday? Back in those days, those messages were probably the best things to happen to our younger selves. Some stores event went an extra mile and sent us postcards for our birthdays or anniversaries, remember? Though totally unrelated on our birthday, such messages, cards and any customer-centric offerings really made us happy back then!

The takeaway from this instance is that data has always been prevalent. It is not something new to have seen the light a couple of years back. It is only the emergence of tools and techniques to uncover valuable insights on customer behaviour and history that is of recent origin. And this has really got companies and industries talking about exploring the myriad of ways data can be used to gain a stronger hold in the market.

Around the world, industries are constantly looking to evolve into something bigger and better, and the availability of data is simply complementing their visions. As a compilation, we have listed some industries that inevitably need data for progress, evolution and crucial business decisions.

The E-commerce Sector

Be it the online versions of retail stores or specialised stores for niche products, e-commerce companies are dominating the market today. E-commerce companies have multiple data touchpoints that give information of immense value in terms of customer behaviour.

From heat signatures using the concept of cursor-and-eye coordination and the products you add to your cart to your cart abandonment behaviour and information on what your friends are buying, e-commerce companies can really sell things and commodities you never needed in the first place. Also, with predictive analytics, they also deduce the shelf-life of a perishable product you bought recently and send reminders to initiate another purchase. Deals and discounts based on your behaviour are just icings on the cake.

Travel

Leveraging on our inevitable need to move to a distant city away from home for work, travel companies are immensely utilising the power of data to make our travel more seamless. Though customer retention is the primary goal of travel companies, it still works to our advantage. On grass-root levels, marketplaces for private buses, flights and travel agencies have algorithms that work on demand and supply concept.

Have you ever noticed the prices of a bus shooting up within a few minutes you decided to check out other buses? Also, there are also specific discounts you get when you haven’t used the portal in a while, searched for accommodation on another website or simply the coming of a long weekend. Interesting much?

Healthcare

There are diverse ways data science is being used to bring out beneficial aspects of healthcare and wellness deliverance. The onset of electronic health records is proving out to be a breakthrough as clinicians and wellness practitioners are now able to retrieve patient information stored on a central portal easily. Personalized treatment, information on the pathogen, side-effects to specific medicines, recent lab tests and more information can be retrieved by doctors with the health records. Also, with the help of the Internet of Things, pharma companies are using data science to do away with counterfeit medicines as well. It is an exciting concept and application of data science if you read more about it. To add more, IBM’s Watson even discovered traces of chronic ailments on a patient that other veteran doctors couldn’t spot.

Banking and Finance

One of the most plaguing concerns for this sector has been fraudulent practices, and data science has been vital to helping the industry fight it. Network analyses and the monitoring of financial markets have proven to curb transactional malpractices. Besides, data science is also assisting in the spotting of irregularities and disparities in auditing. When it comes to loans, risk management is firmly put in its place with the data helping in the background checks, credit score analysis, assessing the credibility of the borrower and more. With mobile integration, banks are now able to take a firm stand against financial frauds.

Besides these industries, automobile with their connected car and autonomous car technology, governments with their smart city programs, telecom industries are now increasingly making use of data for better services and growth. With the amount of data we generate every single day, we believe data science will influence every industry it touches.

What are your thoughts?

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