Analytics is a technology that companies are competing over, and rightfully so because of the constant data flood. Over the years, companies like American Airlines, Otis Elevators, American Hospital Supply have been taking advantage of killer applications to boost their revenues. These applications apply data in ways that improve customer satisfaction and optimized operations. From a supporting tool, analytics has become a strategic weapon.

While companies are questing over killer apps to focus all their efforts on profits and competitive advantage, organizations like Amazon, Harrah's, Capital One have dominated their industries by developing strong analytics across a wide variety of activities with an army of killer apps.

At a time when companies across industries offer similar products that can crunch data and use comparable technologies, business functions are the last point of differentiation. Analytics competitors take every last ounce of value from those processes. So just like other companies, they know what products their target audience wants, at what price they want, and how many of them will the customers buy in their lifetime. Analytics competitors use this information in a coordinated way, as a part of a strategy that is looked after by top leadership and decision-makers. Employees hired for their skills with numbers are trained with the best quantitative tools to make the best decisions.

Working Of An Analytics Competitor

One analytics competitor that has aced this technique is Marriott International. Over the past 20 years, they have been using a scientific system for optimally pricing their rooms for guests, and today, their ambitions are grander than ever. Through its Total Hotel Optimization program, Marriott has expanded the quantitative expertise to areas like conference facilities and catering, and made related tools available for property revenue managers and hotel owners on the internet. Marriott has also developed special systems to optimize its offerings to frequent customers to deflect them from its competitors.

Modeling & Optimization

Any organization can make simple descriptive statistics about different business aspects like the average revenue of an employee. But analytic competitors look beyond these basic statistics. They use predictive modeling to identify their most profitable customers and those who will likely cancel their accounts. They use data generated in-house and from outside sources for a thorough understanding of their customer base. They optimize their supply chain and can determine the impact of an unforeseeable activity and problems.

Leaders of the analytics industry use advanced experiments to measure the impact of intervention strategies and then apply the results accordingly. For example, Capital One conducts more than 30,000 experiments a year. These experiments have different variables like interest rates, incentives, and direct-mail packaging. The goal of these experiments is to find a way to maximize the probability of signing up potential customers for credit cards and making them payback.

Analytics competitors understand the importance of quantitative techniques. They know that business functions like marketing can improve with the right methods. These organizations don't use just one killer app for their advantage, they use multiple such applications to support many aspects of the business. In the fourth industrial revolution, businesses who want to be one of the industry leaders, compete or come close to their market position must have the right tools, expertise, and analytics app to compete and flourish.