Automated Predictive Analytics: The Gloves Are Off
The big data revolution has meant that there are nuggets of insight within customer data everywhere: CRM data, reviews, engineer logs, complaints, enquiries, surveys, social media etc. The ability to be able to harvest and analyse these unstructured data, and indeed join the heterogeneous datasets to provide predictive, actionable insight is a holy grail for marketers and customer services executives.
Yet firms are getting bogged down, spending too much time and resources cleansing and transforming data. The New York Times estimated that up to 80% of a data scientist’s time is spent “data wrangling”. CrowdFlower estimates “data preparation” at 80%. Further, assumptions and errors are an inevitable part of the process where human judgement and skill is required. More than this, 76% of data scientists view data preparation as the least enjoyable part of their work.
So is this inevitable? Whilst it might seem so, technologies are now appearing which can automate the vast majority of the work to dramatically speed up the insight from heterogeneous data.