Are you swamped in the ocean of data?

Do you feel that you are combatant in the digital-first world, but you lack sufficient tools to make informed decisions?

Be glad; you have opened the right door. Business Intelligence is the answer to your question. Before accessing the gold mine of data present around you, we’ll tap into how it helps businesses.

What is business intelligence all about?

“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

The Internet world is a whole new digital galaxy in itself. Today’s digital galaxy is filled with tons and tons of definition of business intelligence. In simpler words, business intelligence is all about structuring the unstructured data using BI software and converting it into meaningful pieces of information that help a business in making sound decisions.

Having a fortune teller that predicts all of your sales performances and financial success of the company sounds amusing. Well, you can consider BI as a fortune teller because it lets you envisage the future possibilities

Is it merely a software?

Quite often business intelligence is mistaken for software only that cruxes big data. The picture is vivid and wide in reality. Business Intelligence can be considered as a hut where best business practices, infrastructure, software, and several other tools meet to help in making sound decisions and boosts the performance of the organization.

What can BI be used for?

Business Intelligence is your rescue boat and can stop you from rocking the boat of your business. You can use it in different ways, some of them are:

· Business Intelligence can serve the purpose of measuring the manufacturing process efficacy.

· Business Intelligence can be of help in giving you a clear sneak-peak of whether your sales efforts are up-to-the-mark or not.

· For the measurement of your staff’s performance, you can use it.

The real thing is yet to come! If you are one of those who just can’t understand whether it is useful for your business or not, your rescue boat aka this blog will help you.

1. BI helps you in making informed decisions

Hustler is next to a buzzword in the industry nowadays. In the time to come, you’ll witness it fading. Businesses now are focusing more on the smarter ways that bring results in less time. Business Managers now have stretched the circle of intelligence and concentrate more on compressing the complex data and converting into meaningful insights.

The gold mine of your organisation’s data has thousands of veiled revelations to share. You unveil it when you take help of BI and convert the unstructured data into a structured one.

Little do the people are aware, even the website log is filled with data. The data is there within the conversation you have with your customers on Facebook and several other social media platforms; it is there in the past record of your sales. One doesn’t have to be a data scientist to make use of the data; Business Intelligence software is there to generate useful insights.

The analyzable insights that you receive from the data help in the decision-making process. The data-driven intelligence doesn’t only help in making sound decisions but also contribute to raise the financial graph of the organization.

2. You understand your customers better

Perhaps, many businesses ignore it, but the digital galaxy says that you need to understand your customers better so that they choose to stick to you for a prolonged period.

BI offers you more than the shallow analysis. Interacting with your customers on day to day basis inevitably gives you useful insights, but that isn’t enough. With the help of BI, you get a deeper understating of to which level your customers are happy with your services. If they aren’t happy, what measures you need to take to please them.

Moreover, you get to know how to reach out to your customers so that your voice is heard. Having no knowledge of the best ways to encourage your customers to interact with you leads your business to the forgotten zone.

Those days are long gone when hard sell used to rule. There is a major shift in the business world, and the focus has been diverted to the customer’s engagement.

Business intelligence acts like a springboard that gives you insights related to your interaction with the customers, buying behavior of your customers and buying trends. This all helps a business in devising winning marketing & sales strategy.

3. The employees become “Problem Fixers”

Business Intelligence surely empowers your employee in a way that they transform into problems fixers. In this era, the outdated method of following the chain and waiting for the answer to reach you doesn’t work.

Not only such methods are inefficient but also eat a good chunk of your time. Business Intelligence eliminates the need for waiting in line for the IT people to extract out the data and prepare reports. Your employees turn into problem fixers and don’t need to rely on the IT experts to get it done.

4. BI gives a kick start to your sales & marketing goals

Using Business Intelligence program is equal to opening the door to success. The in-depth analysis delivered by the business intelligence programme gives a kick-start to your sales and marketing goals.

Discussing the first in the lane, i.e. “Sales.”

I. Sales

Providing your sales team with the tools that help them in knowing the customer behavior is always beneficial. When they identify trends, they get more up-selling opportunities.

Here comes the second one, i.e. “Marketing.”

II. Marketing

Talking from the marketing standpoint, the predictive analysis helps in knowing the future trends. The business intelligence software helps marketers in understanding their customers in a better way.

For instance: A customer receives an email from an e-commerce store related to new offerings. Now the customer opens up the email and accesses the web site. The customer browses a few pages and views some products. Based on the data extracted from the website log, the e-commerce store can make a guess related to what the customer is willing to buy.

On the contrary, another customer receives the same email but doesn’t open it up. Here, the business Intelligence will help marketers in knowing how they can shape up an email that is favored by most of the customers so that there are maximum chances of you getting heard.

5. You stop relying on the gut instinct

All the why’s, if’s and when’s eliminate from the list, and you stop relying on your gut instincts to make decisions.

The springs of uncertainty always hang the mind in between, and the leaders keep thinking whether the made decision will work in favor or not. BI software bids farewell to the gut instinct and bring you the reliable data. When you are backed by the power of data, your journey of making informed choices starts right from there. You no longer get skeptical thoughts neither do you regret after making the decision.

6. BI boosts the Return-on-Investment

The outdated methods of doing things are falling off the curve now. Without the right method of analyzing the data, it is highly unlikely to make decisions that bring a positive outcome. Kudos to the ultimate solution in the form of Business Intelligence. With the help of right insights related to customers’ preferences and behavior, you save the organization from following the wrong course of actions.

A BI software lets you track, manage and measure the customer's experiences. This all adds to the company culture. Having the insights visible to the employees help them in thinking ahead of the department-specific solutions. They get a clear picture of whether they are meeting the current objectives and get to know what needs to be improved to reach the set objectives.

7. It gets easier to convince stakeholders

With the help of Business Intelligence, it is easy to convince stakeholders about the success of the organization.

Having access to the correct data gives them surety of the long-term success of the company. The data speaks for the organization, and the manually crafted pie charts are not needed. The reliable BI tool eliminates your stress of justifying the business and give ease to the stakeholder’s minds.

A real-world example:

Starbucks – The lofty user of BI technology

Starbucks is a renowned coffee chain that takes help of the BI technology. Via its loyalty card program, it collects the purchase data of individuals. With the help of that data and business intelligence technology, Starbucks comes up with different offers, their customers would likely opt for after which Starbucks send those offers to its customers.

Credit goes to BI for drawing the existing customers to Starbucks, time and again. Inevitably, their volume of sales increases when customers visit Starbucks more frequently.

Not only Starbucks, but a considerable number of businesses are using BI technology to generate more sales.

The bottom line

Companies that were witnessing the spiral going out of control took the help of BI to get back to the competition. Investing in BI is one of the finest decisions one can make.

Understanding your customers better, knowing their preferences with the help of data bring lots of advantages to the organization. Companies have covered miles from gut-driven decisions to reliable data-driven decisions. Business Intelligence is adding value to the current practices and will continue to add more.

According to Zel Bianco – Founder and CEO, Interactive Edge:

“As more data becomes more easily available we will continue to see a shift from BI being used just to interpret and represent data and more towards BI also acting as a “center of excellence” – a way to keep relevant and powerful data quickly accessible and shareable.”

With the limitless success of BI technology, it is justified to say that companies that are not understanding its importance are allowing the competitors to eat their possible chunk of sales and revenue.