Today, predictive analytics has become a common term as organizations worldwide are either implementing it already or sternly discussing its implementation in their business processes. Whenever you hear someone talking about predictive data analytics, it is usually referring to a set of strategies being applied in a business challenge. 

At its core, predictive analytics is just a branch of advanced analytics that predicts future outcomes by combining statistical modeling, machine learning, and data mining techniques with historical data. Predictive analytics solutions are highly beneficial for businesses considering their ability to identify patterns to reveal opportunities and risks.  

Predictive analysis enables companies to understand their customers’ behavior effectively. However, the building of data predictions requires the incorporation of statistical methods and prominent experience.

It can be used in various industries, such as: 

  • Banking and Financial Services:Fraud detection, reducing fraud, maximizing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, credit risk measurement, customer retention, etc. 
  • Insurance: Customer churn prevention, accurate scoring, marketing assistance, etc.
  • Debt Collection and Personal Lending: Estimation of future cash flows, an accurate projection of expected receivables, recognizing customers’ spending patterns, etc. 
  • Oil, Gas, and Utilities: Prediction of equipment failures, reliability and safety risks, performance enhancement, etc. 
  • Retail: Merchandise planning, measurement of promotional campaign effectiveness, price optimization, offer planning, etc. 
  • Aerospace: Measuring the impact of maintenance operations, fuel use, uptime, etc. 
  • Pharmaceuticals: Clinical trials’ design and optimization, research, patient segmentation, side effect prediction, etc. 
  • Government & Public Sector: Understanding population trends, service and performance improvement, fraud detection, etc. 
  • Healthcare: Prevention of re-admissions, patient health decline predictions, etc. 

Apart from the industries mentioned above, there are a variety of other situations and sectors where predictive analytics can be used as an effective tool. 

Importance of Predictive Analytics in Today’s Business World

Predictive analytics is a core enterprise practice today. It is critical in sustaining competitive advantage and deploying data-driven risk management across diverse fronts. There are several benefits and use cases of predictive analytics that make it extremely important in today’s business world. 

  1. Fulfillment of Today’s Escalating Consumer Expectations 

Providing exceptional customer experiences is the top priority of every organization today. Predictive analytics can help businesses meet today’s escalating customer expectations by:

  • Precise targeted marketing for greater relevancy.It helps you to provide better and more personalized product recommendations based on the consumers’ past purchases and spending habits. 
  • Better products and services. Analytical quality control, streamlined services, reliability modeling, and expedited application processing help to meet today’s customers’ escalating demands. As the number of choices for customers increases, they will always go to the organization that offers outstanding quality with greater awareness and agility. 
  • Improved transaction integrity. With rapidly increasing transaction fraud levels, consumers expect utmost protection. But at the same time, sensitivity to false alarms also exists. With predictive analytics, the accuracy of fraud alarms can be increased, and proactive measures to security can be taken.  
  1. Enhancement of Core Business Capabilities 

Improving enterprise products and production efficiency with predictive analytics can help advance your core business capabilities. Every organization aims at increasing its product and service effectiveness consistently. Predictive analytics plays a key role here. Let’s consider a few examples to understand how it helps:

Insurance policies depend on predictive scoring to determine risk in the insurance sector. With precise identification of high-risk applicants, providers can effectively select and decide prices to minimize loss ratios. 

  • Banks can manage risk with predictive analytics by scoring loan applicants and credit card applicants based on their probability of defaulting on payments eventually. 
  • Product manufacturing, repair, and testing can be improved with predictive analytics by detecting faulty items during production and reliability modeling for failure or repair once the products have been launched.
  1. Maintenance of Business Integrity with Effective Fraud Management

Transactions are rapidly becoming automated, which is why fraudulent transactions are also rising. Leveraging a predictive model that uses your organization’s past records of fraud-related experiences to score and rank transactions can significantly boost fraud detection. Fraud is detected more accurately, more losses are prevented, the number of false alarms reduces, and information security is also ensured. 

  1. Increase Sales and Customer Retention

Predictive analytics can deliver a distinctive competitive advantage to several customer-facing activities by predictively scoring customers for sales-related behavior like purchases, churn, responses, and clicks. Some essential business applications of predictive analytics pertaining to sales and customers are:

  • Prediction of Direct Marketing Response. It helps increase profits by cutting costs by suppressing customers whose likelihood of responding is low. 
  • Churn Modeling. Predictive analytics can help with targeted retention by targeting effective retention incentives and offers only to the customers who are most likely to leave. It boosts the growth rate of your profits and customer base.  
  • Cost Reductions. Predictive analytics can slash expenses in many ways. Prominent examples would be predicting non-respondents to reduce campaign spending and holding back retention offers from customers who aren’t likely to leave. 

Some other ways predictive analytics help increase sales and retain customers are:

  • targeting sales resources by scoring leads 
  • market research survey analysis
  • increasing fundraising profits by scoring donors
  • increasing cross-sell opportunities by way of product recommendations
  • maximizing online advertisement clicks by way of behavior-based targeting and email targeting
  • scoring B2B applications and sales channels 
  • shunting collections, etc.

Conclusion

Predictive analytics is highly beneficial for businesses as they offer abundant opportunities for the evolution of enterprises. Today, companies have massive heaps of data in the form of transactional databases, images, sensors, log files, etc. Predictive analytics can help gain actionable insights from this data and structure it effectively. Apart from the reasons mentioned above, several additional benefits make predictive analytics necessary in today’s business world.