Business Intelligence (BI) is a very popular word in the business world. But not many of us know what exactly it is and why companies are considering it as one of their major business tools. Many business managers are using BI tools knowing what exactly they need from this, without knowing what it can really do. BI basically extract important insights from vast unstructured data & transform them into valuable business information. Companies can use this information to make strategic decisions, optimizing operational efficiency and enhance productivity. This information provides important insights of customer trends, buying habit, online shopping stats etc. which can provide immense value to any business.
BI tools can help companies with valuable data resources which can be used to achieve business goals by taking strategic decisions. Various customer interaction in the form of a voice call, chat support, email support can be analysed & measured by BI tools to understand customer preferences, purchasing habit, market trend etc. Ultimately, all these data can be used to increase conversion ratio.
“BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can take the right decisions”
Nic Smith with Microsoft BI Solutions Marketing
If you are the CIO of an organization & responsible for BI, you must be anxious. We are sure you must be looking various ways to understand it more & unlock the secrets held by the data. We all need reports now. That’s how business has changed. This is why analytics is trending in the world of technology. Business Intelligence tops the chart of analytics. But hang on, do you really know how BI is helping your business? Or you are just following the trend?
In this blog, we are going to explain how Business Intelligence is helping your business.
Quick Decision-Making
BI provides data which can add value to your business. With BI in place, companies can extract facts from a large amount of unorganized data at a very rapid speed. With an instant access to the business data, you can analyse internal information & take more efficient business decisions. BI teams ensure that the company gets real-time advanced business reports to ensure that they can efficiently utilize the information for a better result.
Evaluate your Marketing Activities
In an era of digital & mobile marketing, social media platforms, online campaigns and market research, Business Intelligence is crucial in helping organizations to evaluate their marketing expenditures. They can calculate the ROI from their marketing strategies. BI can be translated into analytical reports where businesses can take sensitive decisions on the basis of data, facts and numbers, rather than assumptions or intuition.
BI tools with analytical capabilities can provide you all the market insights, which can help you to decide where to spend money. Most importantly, by BI tools you can also identify the least effective marketing strategies, so that you can eliminate those & adjust your marketing budget.
Optimize Sales Strategy
BI will make your sales strategies more composed and effective. Before pitching any lead or scheduling business meet, it is always helpful for the sale steam to understand the lead’s business. BI tools can provide all the data related to the target company’s turnover, budget plans, future expansion plans, sales numbers, competitors and much more. This research can give your sales team more information to analyse and prepare sales pitch on that basis.
Without the use of BI tools, it will be always difficult for sales managers to predict which sales technique can be used to convert the lead or closing the deal quickly. Sales can’t happen on predictions, it happens through research & proper presentation. Sales gurus use BI & make modifications in their approach to preparing the sales pitch more specific.
Effective Business Model
When you have all the data, market insights, stats of customer buying habits, competitor market strategy, it is obvious that you will work more on making your business model more stable & result oriented. BI helps you to analyse your company’s own data as well as consider all the business information.
Ever thought why BI became so much effective? The answer may be it’s because of the revolution of ecommerce. Today whatever we need, it is just a click away. For business owners this means, they have to be very specific in placing their products, studying market trends, investing at the right place for their marketing initiatives, and evaluating their efforts. BI helped them to build a much more effective business model rather than simply fumbling around for the light in the dark.
Improved Competitive Intelligence & Market Intelligence
BI can help businesses improve their competitive edge. BI tools are used to discover, share and analyse metrics and turn data into more actionable information while accessing reports about your competition. BI solutions opened the door to access & study competitive intelligence from one centralized data warehouse. This gives magical decision making, more quick and responding advantage to your business consultants.
Similarly, Market Intelligence can be improved in many ways by effective use of BI. Identifying customer bottlenecks, monitoring consumer buying patterns, understanding consumer behaviour are few of the most desired information every business needs. With all these information businesses can respond to the market in a more actionable way. This helps businesses of all sizes to streamline their data systems to connect their users with the right information & right solutions.
Consolidated view of your Business & Customers
Business Intelligence has a key to your entire business information, irrespective of platforms and networks in a unified & robust dashboard. This can include both your customer related data & your business insights. Customer data can be taken from your CRM, Email Campaigns, Newsletter subscription list, website traffic, social media engagement and all these data can be arranged into a single holistic view. Your business team can use these data to interact & engage your customers in a more personalized way.
Similarly, you can put all your business related information like sales figures, financial reports, real time view of your marketing campaigns, employee records, competitor activities in a single holistic view. Without a single consolidated view of your business as well as customers, it would be little difficult to address their requirements & meet business objectives.
Save Time
A strong BI system can eliminate a lot of time spent in data collection, entry, analysis, control & use. These above things take a lot of human time & effort. An automated BI tool can collect, analyse, manage & use data in a faster & effective manner. Reports can be generated quickly as all the data is already placed at their right location behind the scene. It saves a lot of time as well as human effort. You can use your resource in some other productive way.
BI for Internal Operations
While most of the organizations don’t think much about using BI tools for their internal use, it can be a very effective strategy. Human resources department can use BI to analyse employee turnover, attrition ratio, potential candidates and they can use these data to attract quality work force to join their company. Inventory can be managed by the use of BI system. You can analyse how fast your inventory is turning, you can track your supply chain operations etc. Finance & accounts department can use BI to prepare financial reports, annual reports, business quotations etc.
Conclusion
Today we all are part of a business world, where organizations collect & store huge amount of data from various sources. If the data is not used in the right way, it will become a burden for your business & expensive too. It might be an option to analyse each & every data closely to structure business strategies, but it is time consuming & costly affair. With BI the process can not only be optimized but also it can be automated.
Talk to your CIO. Let them solve your problem to structure your business data. Make sure you focus more on data collection, storage, management & distribution. Your CIO will surely suggest a solution which can resolve everything. But there is one immutable fact; no single solution can deliver all your needs. Build a system which can integrate all your business requirements. An integrated system which you trust. A system which can understand your needs. Put a strong foundation for your BI needs.
Want to explore more on BI tools & possibilities? Apogaeis, would like to help you. We have one of the best BI consultants working for us. Now prepare your business plans with data. You can’t win markets by saying “I think”, “I believe”, you can only win by saying “Let me show you”. Let’s discuss Now – Contact here
