Beyond the Arc: Transforming Business Through Advanced Data Analytics

In today's competitive market, many companies struggle with how to strengthen customer relationships, increase revenue, and differentiate their business. How can businesses leverage vast amounts of customer data from enterprise-wide feedback channels and public sources such as social media, to meet these challenges and achieve key objectives? Solving these complex business problems through sophisticated data science and advanced analytics is a company called Beyond the Arc.

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Beyond the Arc is a twelve year old company that provides clients in financial services, media, high tech, and other industries with valuable analytic insights for improving customer experience and growing the business. The company combines strategic consulting with cutting edge data science to help clients set themselves apart in the marketplace, and provide their customers with a better experience across products, channels, and touch points.

Beyond the Arc focuses on a wide range of strategic data sources, and believes strongly in the potential value of social media. Social networks have revolutionized the customer experience and enable businesses to promote products and engage with customers in immediate ways, while gaining valuable insight into what consumers want and need.

“If you look at the future path of the financial industry, it all depends on understanding the customer patterns and intelligence, and we think social media is an incredible source for that. By observing conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, we can easily understand what the actual needs of customers are, the problems they face, and use the same data to identify opportunities,” says Steven J. Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc.

In their advanced analytics services, Beyond the Arc focuses on three key aspects of data science: predictive analysis, text analytics, and social media analytics.

Predictive analytics mines a company’s Big Data to identify customer behavioural patterns and emerging issues to help increase marketing effectiveness.
With text analytics, they uncover customer insights from unstructured data sources such as email and call centre feedback to help clients make targeted improvements. And with social business analytics, Beyond the Arc looks at millions of social media posts to help organizations identify ways to improve customer experience, increase acquisition, and build brand loyalty.

Serving a broad range of industries, Beyond the Arc specializes in working with financial/investment services, technology companies, and national media and entertainment. The company’s data science experts have helped a number of high-profile clients strengthen customer relationships by resolving pain points and increasing up-sell/cross-sell with more relevant marketing.

As an example, Beyond the Arc helped a top 5 bank uncover and resolve problems with its wire transfer processes, an issue that was putting the company at risk of attrition. In the first six weeks, Beyond the Arc applied Big Data analytics to look at millions of customer transactions to identify the problems. The company then conducted in-depth text analytics of customer service emails to capture feedback and complaints. Using advanced analytic strategies, Beyond the Arc was able to identify the core issues and help their client implement appropriate solutions. As a result, customer complaints declined significantly, and the improved processes helped reduce costs.

“Our ability to put ourselves in customer’s shoes helps us better understand their situation and needs,”said Ramirez.

Helping to power their analytics services, Beyond the Arc works with predictive analytics and text mining partners such as IBM and Clarabridge. Beyond the Arc continues to evolve their advanced algorithms and data science strategies to pioneer new ways to help businesses accelerate issue resolution, improve customer experience, and identify opportunities to increase competitive edge.