Does Big Data Deliver Insights into Customers' True Intentions?

Increasingly these days, businesses are collecting big data. They are motivated by the idea that if they combine big data and artificial intelligence (AI), the future projections might be more accurate. Similarly, behind China's surge in mobile payments, a desire to collect huge amounts of information about customer purchases to develop sales promotions can be glimpsed.

This is not a recent phenomenon. Japanese financial service providers used to compete to develop models for determining the creditworthiness of borrowers through a scoring system. That said, such models are not widely used today. This is because however many scoring criteria we use on many items, there is still no knowing whether borrowers truly intend to default on their debt. At the end of the day, it is difficult to determine whether to execute a loan on the strength of a score alone. China's e-commerce giant Alibaba also created a credit rating system called Sesame Credit but has apparently failed to fully exploit it.

The customer trait of not really showing their true intentions is probably well known to sales staff. This is why sellers go out of their way to build long-term customer relationships and cultivate deep mutual trust. Only then do they try to find out their customers' true intentions and apply this in their future development, production and sales activities. This is also why the Ricoh Group has sales sites all over the world and attaches importance to the direct sales system. The more facile approach of trying to use big data to find out customers' true intentions is most likely to fail.

There are, of course, some situations in which big data is useful. For example, when making predictions about the office equipment we use, such as when they are likely to run out of toner or parts or when they will need servicing. Though a variety of factors may affect the equipment, the users' thoughts are unlikely to be involved and the use of big data will, therefore, increase the accuracy of predictions. In the healthcare field, the collection of big data to explore the activities of viruses and bacteria would doubtless help to advance treatments in the future. This is because, unlike people, viruses and bacteria do not lie, making it easier to predict their future behavior.

Accordingly, the collection, analysis and utilization of big data in certain carefully selected areas will provide an enormous boost to our business and to our customers. The entire Ricoh Group should therefore focus its digital expertise on big data initiatives and support its customers with their big data initiatives. However, before we do this, it is essential to gain an "insight" into the areas in which big data collection will be beneficial. That is because we cannot afford to collect useless big data for every customer that asks.