The relationship between structured and unstructured data in real time can be analyzed by turning the structured and unstructured data (wide data) into fast data. Origin of a problem can be found by wide data. Quicker decision and analysis can be made by fast data. With the boom of Internet of Things (IoT), new challenges relating to the structured and unstructured data may arise. By turning wide data into fast data we will be able to retrieve massive amounts of data from various sources and then use them to identify and potentially assess their behavior in real-time.
Unstructured data can also be used to meet real-time data demands. When wide data is turned to fast data it opens doors to various opportunities.
Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/07/17/big-datas-companion-wide-data/

Importance of data increases upon the usage of data. It is said that customer relationship management system is only as useful as the quality of the data it contains. Good data or high quality data can provide the most recent picture of a customer. In contrast, bad data i.e. data that are of low quality are incorrect or inconsistent. Good data is important for any company because it provides you with important information and you can use to personalize customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and gain customer confidence, while bad data interfere with your ability to meet customer needs, therefore creating a divide between you and your customers. They are: decreased confidence; lost opportunities; and missing the big picture. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/3-ways-bad-data-hurt-customer-relationships-69607

Sometimes, marketers find it difficult to attract new customers. But, it is found that there are several ways to attract new customers with the help of CRM software. It is predicted that e-Commerce and CRM will be the fastest growing business applications in the next few years. The key is to maintain a balance between your budget and the need to reach to new customers. But as customer expectations rise, proper investments in CRM systems will help any business. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/updating-your-crm-system-to-maintain-and-gain-customers-69604

Predictive analytics make better use of data. Nowadays, predictive analytics using CRM data deal with anticipating customer behavior. Mobile CRM is playing an important role to deploy predictive analytics. If mobile CRM and predictive analytics are merged, it is required that the right information is sent to the mobile app. It is predicted that in the future, mobile CRM might include the apps that customers use on their mobile devices and it is also predicted that smart devices and mobile CRM apps could listen to conversations that salespeople have with customers, which will in turn produce a pop-up message to the salesperson to recommend a product based on that discussion. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/mobile-crm-considerations-with-predictive-analytics-69606

According to a research, 60% of people interact with brands through social media. Social media is important nowadays as it is an effective sales tool. It is also an important channel for post-sales support. Hence, social CRM facilitates lead engagement across social channels. It also allows the sales team to track prior communication and follow up with additional information. It also helps in customer communication and also improves customer visibility. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/how-to-use-social-crm-for-sales-68572

Customer Relationship Management is important in any sales department. But, if CRM is integrated with predictive analytics, then it maximizes sales productivity. Predictive analytics take the help of big data to predict customer behavior and they take the help of historical trend to predict customer-specific behavior. It helps the sales department in providing the right customized content at the right time to push leads into conversion. In a nutshell, the sales team benefits from CRM integration by improving productivity and generating leads. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/are-you-coupling-predictive-analytics-with-your-crm-68571

A bad CRM can affect the sales team in many ways. If there is no co-operation between sales and IT departments, it may affect CRM deployment. Poor vendor selection is another reason for CRM failure. If the CRM selected doesn’t work in accordance to the existing sales pipeline, then it may lead to productivity loss. Lack of training resources is another reason for failure in CRM deployment. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/5-ways-a-bad-crm-trips-up-your-sales-team-68540

Optimization has played an important role in corporate world enabling executives and managers in making best decisions. Using optimization technology and techniques has made day to day business issues easier. Optimization came into play since 20th century with the help of digital computers. Linear programming was the first optimization method used. It enabled analysts to achieve best possible outcome in a given situation. Computing capabilities became affordable enabling companies to use more complex algorithms to handle more ever difficult optimization problem. Optimization analytics is popular among businesses giving them potential to improve performance and create competitive advantage.  Read more at:http://www.smartdatacollective.com/robert-kugel/336864/optimization-analytics-comes-mass-market

Need for Chief Data Officer (CDO) in boardrooms has increased now days. Importance of CDO is same as that of big data in companies, as a person in charge of data team. There has been increase in number of companies who are employing CDOs. At present 43% of executives reported that their firm had appointed CDO, while two years back it was only about 19%. During financial crises in 2008 many companies lost their significant amount of money after their data had been shown completely wrong. That gives rise to Chief Data Officer, a person that can be held responsible for validity of data. He can protect businesses from loss due to crises and also to help appease law makers who were going to require change within reporting and storage of data.  Read more at:

https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-evolution-in-the-cdo-role

People are increasingly using mobile devices to interact through mobile browsers and apps. As a result mobile analytics is occupying an important position in the analytics world. Jeremy Levy, CEO of Indicative and previously co-founder of Xtify and Meetmoi, in a special guest feature in Inside Big data talks about how mobile analytics is changing and how to navigate in the changed scenario. He believes that the changes in the field of mobile analytics are driven primarily by three factors- access to attribution data, deeplinking and new platforms for some of the largest players in mobile. Again there are 3 factors that will define the success in the changed scenario- 

• Clean attribution

• Tracking deeplinks properly 

• Finally, flexible analytics tools

For more on this hit the link http://insidebigdata.com/2015/07/17/thriving-in-the-new-mobile-analytics-ecosystem/

Big Data appears to be the solution of every problem, especially when it comes to IT. But, one thing we often forget is that the big repository of data is useful only when one is able to generate actionable insights from it. Otherwise, it’s just another stack of data. With organizations becoming increasingly dependent on technology for every aspect of business operations, IT enterprises are finding themselves locked with big data with no useful insights. Raja Mukerji, president of ExtraHop, in an article in Inside Big data talks about IT operation analytics as the most viable solution to this problem and how it has emerged as a framework for a horizontal approach to Big Data in IT. He believes that ITOA will help release useful insights form IT Big data and the horizontal, silo buster approach will transform IT from a mere support system into a strategic business driver. For more on this piece follow the link http://insidebigdata.com/2015/07/18/taking-a-horizontal-approach-to-big-data-for-better-it-and-business-outcomes/

According to a recent study by IDG Connect, it was found that nearly half of respondents are still finding it difficult to draw insights from data. It is hard for the marketers to find out the impact of marketing & advertising programs. Marketers are still trying to find out answers to some questions like: How do we most effectively make the right people aware of our products and services? And then how do we figure out what we did right and wrong? Big data had come to the rescue, but still many marketers find themselves in very much the same place as 1900's. Columnist David Booth in his article writes about the areas that organizations should focus on improving their marketing activities. Read more at:  http://marketingland.com/reach-maximum-potential-intent-data-134086

They are often first point of contact with the customer, and a happy encounter makes a happy customer. Taking care of experienced call center agents and making employee satisfaction a priority produces numerous benefits for the company. ? Below is a list of a few things that you should be doing to take care of those employees who take care of your customers. • Excellent salary. Even in a very competitive industry, experienced agents can command high salaries befitting their expertise. They can get salaries that are higher than the average day job. Aside from their base salaries, these agents also deserve additional benefits and overtime pay for their hard work

• Incentives and commissions.  Aside from their salaries, agents also get additional money for reaching sales quotas or other milestones. 

• Awesome working environment. As a reward for their hard work, call center agents get all the pampering they can get through excellent workplace facilities. This is why most call centers provide their employees the works – immaculate bathrooms, cozy sleeping quarters, play areas, clean pantries with free coffee and so on.

• Career growth opportunities. If you’re like most agents, chances are you won’t be satisfied with being an agent for the rest of your working life. You will look for opportunities that can push you up the corporate ladder. A good call center provides its agents the chance to add more skills to their resumes so they can become eligible for higher positions in the company. A call center that takes care of its people’s career advancement produces agents who are not only successful with their jobs but also those who are actually happy staying in the organization.

Read more here- http://www.callcentertimes.com/Articles/tabid/59/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/407/CategoryID/1/NewsID/1028/Default.aspx

Big data - which admittedly means many things to many people - is no longer confined to the realm of technology. Today, it is important in any business. In addition to providing solutions to insurance companies' long-standing business challenges, big data solutions offer the power to transform processes, organizations and entire industries. Big data is especially promising and differentiating for insurance companies. With no physical products to manufacture, data is arguably one of their most important assets. Financial, actuarial, claims, risk, consumer, producer/wholesaler and many other types of data form the basis for every decision an insurer makes.

Insurance companies will realize value by effectively managing and analyzing the rapidly increasing volume, velocity and variety of new and existing data. By putting the right skills and tools in place to better understand their operations, customers and new markets, insurance organizations will be on the right track to compete and thrive in this global, dynamic marketplace.

Read more here- http://analyticsindiamag.com/has-the-insurance-industry-mastered-the-art-of-utilising-big-data/

Big data and internet of thing (IOT) have made it easier for companies to collect new data. This will help companies to have comprehensive view of consumer’s buying and viewing behavior which in turn is used to make competitive business intelligence. Today businesses are struggling to face high bills of Internet Service Providers (ISP) as they already have too much data to cope with. With huge investment, industries have spent time in finding solutions for crunching large data within limited time. There is huge cost involved in storing big data. But Software Defined Storage (SDS) gave storage the operational efficiency as other big data aspects. This provides flexible and scalable architecture to empower the business to meet big data fluctuation demand.  Read more at:https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/big-data-and-the-communications-data-bill

CRM solutions are important in order to improve the sales process. A good CRM solutions also help to identify quality lead. But, these benefits will be of no use if the deployment is not done in a correct way from the beginning. The causes vary for not understanding why the users need CRM. Companies must know how to minimize failure risk during CRM deployment. This can be done by aligning the business process in a proper way, by choosing the right technology, by upgrading the old CRM solution, by handling migration from old CRM solution to the new one properly. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/avoiding-failure-during-your-crm-deployment-68429

A cloud-based CRM is a powerful tool that helps a company to save IT resources. So, choosing the right vendor with good customer support helps you to diminish the impact of potential problems. In a research it was found that a company saves 21% off IT expenses by putting cloud-based apps to use. It was also found that cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools have many benefits especially during maintenance of system. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/how-to-choose-a-cloudbased-crm-vendor-with-reliable-customer-support-68432

Big data and financial services have played their role together to boost the company's profits. Big data is providing advantages to financial services in three ways. Firstly, big data is keeping financial companies ahead to develop more creative and innovative ways of using big data to predict future, which companies are going to earn profits and which type products will be demanded in future. Nowadays, financial companies can easily monitor and respond to changes that exist in financial markets. Secondly, banks are also using big data to become more customer focused. This can be done by tapping the reams of unstructured data like lifestyle information, social media activity, and customer feedback and support requests. Thirdly, big data can be used in fraud detection. Read more at:http://www.smartdatacollective.com/bernardmarr/335942/3-ways-big-data-changing-financial-institutions-forever

Nowadays, customer relationship management (CRM) software can help companies to customize their marketing campaign by reducing the usage of bad data. Bad data can decrease the quality of the content and may also lead to underdeveloped leads. Here automated marketing comes in. This helps in improving the quality of data. Eric Scott (An Analyst with B Studio), writes in his article about some steps to ensure that the data are cleaned up and providing the right metrics for a smooth and automated marketing campaign. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/4-ways-to-boost-the-quality-of-automated-marketing-content-68477

It is not easy to understand what a dataset represents and how to use that information. One can understand the data by interacting people who know about data and through other alternative means. Usually the problem of finding and understanding the data exists in many companies which leverages data to enhance their decision making and their products. Many technologies relating to data made it easier to process massive amount of data and visualizing results in a better way. But the absence of focus on empowering users to find and understand data has made it difficult for reliability and efficiency. It has been more concrete to measure and show progress of efficiency and visualization capabilities of the process. Read more at:http://www.smartdatacollective.com/venky-ganti/332052/data-time-investment-finding-and-understanding-data