Customer Data Analytics Solution

A prominent English statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, once said, “As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information”. How insightful he was to emphasize quality, not quantity as a key value of information! Indeed, today, when people have access to a tremendous scope of information – big data, everything depends on how actionable this information can be. With the correct information technology, information translates into comprehensible graphs and recommendations that immediately prompt business owners how to capitalize on the available data. Our last case is a good example of such a technology.        

Background 

The success of marketing largely depends on the knowledge of a target audience. Of course, everything starts with doing marketing research and making predictions about who might be interested in your product of service. However, a better understanding of a target audience comes when you can already analyze what kind of people have actually bought your product or service. Knowing the demographics, social status, interests, etc. of these people, marketers can create look-alike audiences who are likely to be interested in similar products or services too. Furthermore, the availability of detailed data about the target audience allows to segment it and, thus, target each group with custom ads. 

An American startup working in digital marketing has developed unique algorithms for effective audience analytics. In particular, they set forth to build a comprehensive solution that would complement businesses’ customer data with missing details, define customer persona, and analyze the scope of a look-alike audience that the business can target in various states or regions. The final data analytics solution had to allow end users to get quick and comprehensive results and interact with the graphs in real time going deeper into the information they would be interested in. The next planned step in case of the project success was to complement the solution with machine learning algorithms. 

Considering our experience in big data and machine learning solutions and strong development and project management skills, Agiliway has been chosen as one of the contractors for solution development. Our responsibility was to develop the backend and the interactive UI of the solution.

Project Challenge  

Here are the project goals Agiliway has set for the development team:  

• UI that will correctly visualize the results of data analytics in the form of interactive graphs; 
• Backend that would allow managing users and access rights (it was necessary to prevent any security issues, as the platform was designed to manipulate sensitive customer data); 
• Flawless performance of the solution: Agiliway experts had to make sure that processing of big data analysis does not halt the response of the system and the graphs fetch and display the data almost instantly producing great user experience.   

Provided Solution  

Having analyzed the challenges of the project, Agiliway has chosen Laravel PHP Framework for building the backend of the platform and React JS for building a user interface.   

Laravel has been chosen as a stable open-source technology with the following advantages allowing to meet the challenges of the project:   

• Comprehensive out-of-the-box tools for authorization logic and access control;
• Fast performance of the web application;  
• Superior security and safeguards against the most serious security risks such as injection of SQL, cross-site scripting and forgery of cross-site requests; 
• Integrated automation tests that speed up and facilitate software testing. 

Agiliway has already had a chance to observe a remarkable capacity of ReactJS for building interactive graphs for big data platforms. Thus, this was the number one technology we suggested implementing. The following advantages of React JS made it the best choice for the development of UI of the platform:

• Declarative views make the code more predictable and easier to debug, which reduces the overall time to market of the solution;  
• React JS components manage their own states and the component logic is written in JavaScript, not in the template. This keeps DOM operations to the minimum and, accordingly, ensures fast performance for high-load applications; 
• D3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data, allows UI to build dynamic and interactive charts: these provide excellent means to data visualization and analysis, as users can dig deeper into the provided reports by simply manipulating charts.     

Value Delivered  

Having strong experience in BI and data visualization, Agiliway has managed to correctly define the challenges of the project and gain major project goals: 

• allow interactive, in-depth data analysis,  
• provide superior user experience ensuring high speed of data processing, and  
• implement superior security.  

More than that, ensuring fast testing of the solution and consolidating efforts of other teams working on the project, Agiliway has substantially reduced time to market of the platform.  

As a result, the company has entered the market as a strong competitor to the existing providers of customer analytics services. The success of the first iteration of the platform has made investors gain more trust with the startup so that they are willing to fund the second iteration introducing machine learning algorithms to increase the capacity of the platform.  

We are proud of the fact that the excellent performance of our development team and professional project management have made the startup choose Agiliway as a primary provider for the second iteration of the platform.