Here is a real-world example of how NOT to leverage data and analytics to communicate with your customers. My daughter recently got the email below from our cell phone provider warning her that she was about to exceed her monthly data usage limit of 2GB. She was very worried that she was about to go over her limit and it would start costing her (actually, me) an additional $10.00 per GB over the limit. (Note: the red circled "Monday, August 13, 2012" date will play an important role in this example later in the blog). Figure 1: Cellular Provider Email I asked my daughter what information she thought she needed in order to make a decision about altering her Facebook and Instagram usage (since those are the two data hog culprits in her case) so that she would not exceed her data plan limits. She came up with the following questions: How much of my data plan do I have left? When does my new month start? At my current rate, when will I run over for this period? Understand The Decision To Identify The Relevant Questions This use case provides a good example of the process that one can employ in order to identify the most relevant questions that need to be answered in order to support an organization's key business decisions. And it all starts by understanding your organization's key business initiatives. Step 1: Understand your organization's key business initiatives (in this case case, don't over run your monthly data usage plan). Step 2: Capture the decisions that an organization needs to make in order to support the organization's key business initiatives (e.g., alter Facebook and Instagram usage). Step 3: Identify those questions that need to be answered in order to facilitate making the decisions (e.g., How much of my data plan do I have left? When does my new month start? When will I run over for my current period?) Understand The Questions To Provide A Relevant User Experience Understanding the relationship between your customer's objectives, decisions, and questions that need to be answered is key to creating a user experience that provides the right information (and recommendations) to the right customer to make the right decisions at the right time. So to continue the cellular provider story, I went online to research my daughter's key questions: So given the results of my analysis, my daughter has nothing to worry about as she would have to consume nearly as much bandwidth in her final 24 hours (assuming that she does not sleep) as she's done the previous 30 days. The probability of that happening: near zero (or the same probability of me beating Usain Bolt in the 100 meter dash). The bottom-line is that the email should have never sent, as there was really nothing to be worried about. Using Big Data Analytics To Improve Your Customer Engagements Let's say the situation was different and there was some probability greater than zero that my daughter was going to go over her data plan. Then our cellular company should have provided a user experience that highlighted the key data and insights necessary to help make a decision about data usage.