Creating a Data-Driven Enterprise in Media

Chapter 5. Comcast: How a Focus on Customer Experience Led to a Focus on Data Science

Comcast is on a mission to improve and enhance the customer experience. In search of what some at the company have called a “superior end-to-end customer experience,” Comcast recently made its customer experience team a part of its Technology and Product (T&P) group, aligning its next-generation technology initiatives—which include a focus on data science—with a customer-centric strategy.

Since the day Barbara Eckman, principal data architect in the T&P group, started at Comcast, she’s been working to move Comcast forward on its data-driven journey.

The T&P team uses data analytics to improve products and deliver better, faster, more reliable experiences to customers. To do that, the company collects large amounts of nonpersonal telemetry data about network utilization, latency, and throughput, as well as any technology issues that might be affecting performance.

And T&P is just one of a number of groups within Comcast using data science to support enhanced customer experiences.

“Our goal is to align more closely with customers,” says Eckman. She is part of the team that is providing a single integrated big data platform within T&P that streams data in near real time, through transformations and enrichments, eventually storing it in a data lake. From there it can be filtered, aggregated, and stored in auxiliary, special-purpose datastores like columnar databases. The idea is that eventually this ...