Human behavior is dynamic. Some people are creatures of habit and cautious. Others are spontaneous risk-takers. Some lead, others follow. And, to add to that, any random event can completely change people's actions. What you don't know about human behavior could be hurting your business.

But don't worry. You don't need to be a psychologist to take actions that drive more revenue to the bottom line. You just need to unleash the power of Behavioral Analytics. When you do, you'll get insights into customer behaviors that help you get more of the right customers, keep the customers you have (and keep them spending), and grow your revenues.

Behavioral Analytics is used by companies to make better, more profitable business decisions, and how to get started down the road to valuable behavioral insights. What you discover is that, unlike other analytics tools that require hours of training, Behavioral Analytics is easy enough for anyone to begin picking up on actionable insights that result in true business value.

Behavioral Analytics holds the key to unlocking meaningful patterns of behavior in human interaction data.Put another way, Behavioral Analytics identifies clusters of people that demonstrate a tendency to take similar actions such as clicking certain pages on your Web site, making purchases online or in your bricks-and-mortar store, responding to marketing offers, and so on.

Typical analytics offers a view into the past. That's helpful for drawing up operational reports, gathering metrics, and tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). But Behavioral Analytics kicks it up a notch by drawing from the past to give you insights into the future. Behavioral Analytics examines patterns in customer actions, and more importantly, determines the relationship between those actions. These tools can pinpoint what actions lead to other actions, which makes your focus crystal clear. For example, Behavioral Analytics can suggest which actions lead to a sale - a valuable insight for companies looking to increase conversion rates. If you know what led to a sale, you can make adjustments to optimize around that experience.

Behavioral Analytics doesn't stop there. It drills down even deeper to combine behaviors with affinities so that you can see how customers who take certain actions have a positive or negative tendency to take specific subsequent actions. For example, if you determine that most customers who call your 800 number after visiting your Web site make a purchase, you can then optimize your Web site to drive calls to your customer service agents and potentially increase sales.

The magic behind affinities is pinpointing the strength of patterns. Another good example is found in your local grocery store. Behavioral Analytics data reveals that shoppers who have cookies in their cart are highly likely to also have milk. In Behavioral Analytics terms, that means that cookie buyers have a high affinity to milk. But it doesn't work the other way around. Data reveals nearly every grocery cart in the store contains a carton of milk but not necessarily cookies, so milk sales don't drive cookie sales. In other words, with milk as the focus, there isn't a high affinity to cookies. The measurement of that affinity's strength is only one example of what separates Behavioral Analytics from just "analytics".

Imagine how long it would take a grocery store chain to come to that conclusion by manually wading through sales reports in search of this pattern. This insight might be forever buried, and opportunities to sell more cookies through strategic promotions could be missed. Behavioral Analytics combs through billions of records in a flash to offer these types of valuable insights.

Behavioral Analytics is revolutionizing how companies study and act on customer behavior. If you want to uncover key factors that drive sales, identify tactics that increase customer lifetime value, discover patterns in clickstreams (the recorded path a visitor takes through your Web site), and otherwise drive more value from your customer data, it's time to jump on the Behavioral Analytics bandwagon.

No two industries are exactly alike, but Behavioral Analytics can discover profit-driving insights in any customer-focused business, whether it's business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), brick-and-mortar, or online.

Behavioral Analytics can arm you with the information you need to take intelligent actions that drive positive results for your company. Behavioral Analytics offers your company the big picture. You can connect once-segregated data across multiple systems to identify customer interactions and behaviors across multiple departments.

For example, a customer may view your Web site, receive marketing materials, call customer support, interact with sales, and use a loyalty card to gather points - all over many weeks. Behavioral Analytics lets you merge all of these disparate datasets to discover holistic customer behaviors by using a customer ID, login, order number, or credit card number to track the customer through this process - even if the customer didn't make it all the way through. Through these connections, you can then determine, for example, that customers who download a third white paper and have spoken to a customer service rep tend to make a purchase within 20 days.