Father Christmas and the Big Data Delivery

Father Christmas and the Big Data Delivery

Nobody understands the importance of an exceptional, tailored customer experience more than jolly old Saint Nick. Every year, he ensures the accurate delivery of his unique, personalised service to over seven billion people worldwide. He collects a wide variety of data, ranging from customer profiles of billions of children to GPS co-ordinates of where they live. That’s an incredible amount of information and a lot of records. And it’s no easy task. Customer request forms have been flooding in for weeks from multiple touch points and platforms, millions of addresses have changed, wishes are ever-changing but the expectation is always the same – a seamless, punctual service delivery. Who’s been naughty?! Who’s been nice?! No problem, he uses real-time analytics to detect and adapt to the changing sentiment of behaviours of his customer base, ensuring that everyone receives a personalised service. 

What Father Christmas does once a year is not too dissimilar to the task facing global enterprises everyday. Everywhere you look, companies are collecting, analysing and storing information in order to provide the best possible service to customers. All organisations today, store massive amounts of customer information and use software to research trends and drive people towards their products and services. Supermarkets create customer profiles using loyalty cards to personalise communications and offers. Hospitals hold the patient records of millions of citizens and analyse this data in order to predict readmissions and avoid further costly stays. 

So if December’s information hero teaches us one thing it’s that data, when managed, analysed and acted upon correctly, can help you know your customer better. And knowing your customer, whether naughty or nice, means that you can successfully usher in the Age of the Customer. Saint Nick’s attitude to guaranteeing a personalised level of service, his ability to manage and action huge amounts of data and his understanding of how to turn everyday customer records into actionable information which remains live, accurate and accessible from anywhere in the world, makes him our festive #InfoHero. 
