Everything You Need to Know About
The speed of sound. The speed of light. The speed of electricity.
These are all pillars of measuring time—and it’s because of innovators, scientists, and philosophers across the generations that we have measurements and understanding of time.
But, the world has changed, and so has how we value time and speed.
In the digital world, real-time has become an essential component of analytics, which companies can significantly benefit from. But, there are some questions about real-time analytics, and we’re not referring to the philosophical ones.
What exactly is real-time analytics, and how does it work?
Read on to find out—and how your brand can leverage real-time analytics for deeper product analysis, customer experience, and more.
Many analytics platforms define real-time differently, from seconds to days to weeks. But what is real-time, and how does it work?
Generally speaking, real-time analytics utilizes logic and mathematics when processing data to provide fast insights, and inform agile business decisions.
Not everyone measures real-time in the same way:
At Scuba, real-time analytics is what we consider the purest form of real-time. To us, real-time analytics means the ability to continuously digest and analyze data streams, provide insights, and hone in on data points at their closest arrival—which can be within seconds.
Getting live, streaming data is key for businesses—and real-time analytics tools have the capacity to digest large amounts of data in a quick, efficient manner. In turn, this enables brands to quickly act on insights and data to improve their product, customer service, retention, and more.
Real-time analytics in theory is both exciting and promising. But how do real-time analytics literally work? Let’s take dive behind the inner workings of real-time data to find out.
While real-time analytics tools may vary slightly, the majority of them operate using four core components. Under the hood of real-time analytics, there typically are:
1. Aggregator: Collects real-time streaming data from many data sources.
Depending on the speed at which companies need data analyzed, real-time analytics tools can also include additional components but aren’t essential. However, fast insights, such as in seconds, tools may also incorporate the following:
Real-time streaming analytics and batch processing analytics are two methods leveraged by companies to deduce insights about their customer experiences, product, and more. However, the two are very different:
Depending on your brand’s analytics needs and goals, investing in real-time analytics or batch-style analytics may be best—and some companies even use both.
Curious about who and what companies use real-time analytics? Read on to find out.
Leveraging real-time analytics into your arsenal of tools has a plethora of benefits. By capturing live, continuous insights paired with customer journey visualizations, real-time analytics can elevate a brand’s customer experience, product analysis, retention, and more. In addition, real-time analytics provides several other benefits:
Real-time analytics can be leveraged by anyone—but can be challenging for those without advanced tech experience, like data analysts or engineers. However, self-service real-time analytics platforms, like Scuba, are built to empower teams across businesses with their intuitive, no-code design.
Regardless of what team you’re in (and tech experience), real-time analytics is a versatile tool that can be used by anyone:
It’s essential for marketing teams to understand customer journeys, points of success, and areas of friction. Marketers can leverage real-time analytics to gain insight into how well content, ads, and segmentation is working. Moreover, real-time analytics can improve and enrich customer data platforms brands (CDPs) use for better insights.
Some examples in which marketers can use real-time analytics:
Real-time data also gives marketers a more clear understanding of what customers want and resonate with. In today’s world, customer experience and personalization drive a brand’s success. So, marketers can tap into that with real-time analytics. By investing in real-time customer journey analytics, companies can increase their new customers and revenue by 44 percent.
Real-time analytics gives product teams quick, accurate, and expansive insights into how customers interact with product features, messaging, packaging, and more. For example, product teams can get a granular, real-time view of how a customer or prospect is navigating through a demo. Based on following that customer’s journey, teams can make agile changes in product or enhance a product feature that is wildly successful.
Analysts and data scientists can benefit from real-time analytics in a number of ways. Real-time analytics enables analysts to capture the most recent snapshot of a customer journey, spot trends, run queries, and conduct experiments with the most accurate data. Instead of relying on analytics tools that may not have the capacity to update data daily, analysts can provide their team and business leaders with data that is relevant, fresh, and constantly evolving. Some real-time analytics platforms, like Scuba, also provide analysts and data scientists with a system that automatically updates and continues to digest data as it comes in. Additionally, modeling data and building a common analytics model that everyone in the business can use is often another challenge that Scuba’s real-time analytics platform can resolve easily.
Data security and management are critical for business success, and real-time analytics can be leveraged by software engineers. Companies need to ensure they remain compliant with regulations, like GDPR, to protect against data loss and breaches. With real-time analytics, engineers can build and manage their data structures with data reliability and speed. Engineers can also utilize real-time analytics in the following ways:
Customer service teams leverage real-time analytics to provide better customer experiences, and gain deeper insights into a customer’s journey. Reviewing, monitoring, and analyzing data in real-time gives customer experience teams the ability to do the following:
Real-time analytics are key to success and profit for any brand—and can be leveraged by company leaders. Driving revenue and accomplishing business goals are top of mind for executives who are facing an ever-growing bar of success. A Forrester study found that 90 percent of enterprise leaders understand the importance of real-time analytics, and 84 percent believe executing real-time corrections is essential.
Executives can rely on real-time analytics to provide fast, accurate, and comprehensive analysis reports, and make informed decisions on those findings. Real-time analytics platforms, like Scuba, digest and unify data in a single platform and provides leaders with real-time visibility across different data siloes. Business leaders can use real-time analytics to accomplish the following:
Real-time analytics is revolutionizing the way businesses approach customer experience and product analysis. With insights that are fresh and quick to see, real-time analytics gives businesses and team members across the organization the power to make informed decisions.
However, not every analytics platform is equal. Some platforms provide near-real-time data analytics, getting businesses close--but not close enough. This is where Scuba can bring you up to speed.
Scuba is a real-time customer intelligence analytics solution that provides you with the answers you need in seconds. Scuba digests data from multiple sources and can store both structured and unstructured data, so your analyst teams don’t have to spend time prepping and cleaning data. Instead, users across a company can dynamically visualize customer journey maps in real-time, and analyze new patterns as they emerge.
Want to make better informed, agile business decisions and improve your customer experience at the same time? Explore Scuba today.
Watch this video where CloudBees merges customer data from multiple data sources, and then starts to perform deep analysis with Scuba in under an hour.