An increasing number of businesses have found business intelligence is a critical tool to ensure competitiveness and productivity. If you’re a business owner or manager, you are aware of the difficulties of assessing everyday business data and operations manually. This is where business intelligence comes in.
The business intelligence market is growing with countless tools available for retrieving, analyzing and gaining value from raw data. Whether you are an industry giant like Amazon, a midsize business, or a small startup company, business intelligence software can turn mountains of data into business opportunities for your organization.
In this fast moving economy, the only option is to keep up. A well-implemented business intelligence solution can help you compile complex data and make informed business decisions in a matter of minutes. Here is how business intelligence software can improve your business for the better:
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Data-Driven Decisions
Gone are the days when key business decisions are based on gut feeling and intuition. Business Intelligence software facilitates the easy collection, rendering and analysis of data through the use of analytic tools.
Reports are automatically produced based on data gathered from business departments, social media efforts, sales, marketing leads, digital initiatives and more. This provides a quick return on actionable insights. Less time is spent formulating reports and more time is spent considering potential outcomes and driving business decisions.
Visualization and Dashboards
Some reports can seem too abstract to interpret, reducing the ability to act on key metrics. Business intelligence systems offer visualization tools to provide a better understanding of historical data, real-time updates, forecasts and trends.
All the information is centralized and can automatically be converted, merged and reported with intuitive data visuals. They can also be accessed on dashboards through mobile devices and tablets, allowing instant access to key business metrics for marketing and sales.
Get to Know Your Customer:
Customers are the sap of any business. In order to generate more sales and profit, a company must be aware of their customer’s habits and needs to retain and attract new customers.
Business Intelligence software allows you to gain visibility into what your customers are buying and what they are not. Based on customer purchase patterns, you can make informed decisions on whether to expand on certain products or scale back. It can also help identify cross-selling or up-selling opportunities at certain customer touch points and target them more effectively.
Gilt, an online luxury women’s goods retailer, used a business intelligence system to gather information on its customers’ browsing and shopping history. These reports were used to target and customize its daily promotional e-mail sent to customers, which resulted in increased conversions.
For instance, there was a 100% lift in conversion for women classified as being likely to shop on the men’s site, but had not yet done so. This information allowed for better prediction of which customers would be attracted to which offers, maximizing sales.
Benchmarking
Business intelligence allows you to track where your business has been, where it is now and where it is going. The next generation business intelligence software involves analyzing unstructured data based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics to not only understand what happened, but also why it happened.
This helps a company assess its capabilities, compare its strengths and weaknesses, identify trends and market conditions and respond quickly to change.
By evaluating your performance in terms of customer and competitor experience, you can gain a complete view of prospective business opportunities.
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Productivity
Goal management and organizational productivity can often be overlooked in businesses. With business intelligence tools, you can input quantitative goals such as sales or target delivery time and track its progress on a daily basis. You can receive feedback from software on inefficiencies in your business by spotting internal trends and flagging what is underperforming.
With careful management of inventory and manufacturing expenses, you can detect cost-cutting areas in your business. This was the case for The Wine House, a wine retailer, who used its analytics software to identify the bottles low in demand.
Wine can’t go bad, but excessive inventory costs money and space to store. The Wine House saved $400,000 by pinpointing which bottles were selling and promoting sales for the ones that weren’t.By monitoring your inventory and tweaking production accordingly, you can increase your profit margins significantly.
Through smart use of your business intelligence software, you can unearth patterns and insights that would otherwise be difficult to find. Those without business intelligence software are missing out on a powerful and cost-effective tool for increasing efficiency and forecasting outcomes. When business intelligence software is implemented correctly, the benefits can be significant.
