Businesses from all domains and sizes keep themselves updated with the latest technologies, market trends, and statistics to sustain and thrive. In the competitive age, businesses want to enhance their operational outcome by utilizing resources in an organized manner and optimizing operations with the help of data-driven actionable insights obtained through business intelligence.
What is Business Intelligence and How it has Become Imperative for Businesses?
Business intelligence (BI) is a combination of applications, tools, technologies, and practices that collects business data and provides it to business users in an insightful and actionable user-friendly format such as charts, automated reports, intuitive dashboards, and graphs. Business users can access different types of data such as present and historical, in-house and third-party, as well as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from a variety of data sources such as the internet and connected cloud platforms.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) play an important role in identifying growth opportunities with the help of actionable insights derived from BI tools. KPIs are measurable and quantifiable components that are used to identify, track, and evaluate the performance of business entities.
These indicators are used as a benchmark to compare performance metrics with other organizations. It comprises a wide variety of manufacturing, supply chain financial, marketing, sales, and customer service metrics.
For example, Domo, a Outsource Business Intelligence Analytics, uses KPIs as performance-measuring indicators in its business intelligence systems to offer valuable insights to its users. KPIs provide quantitative and qualitative data to agile and proactive business users to refine their business processes with the help of real-time data.
Leveraging Business Intelligence to Improve Customer Experience
BI tools help companies optimize internal business processes, increase operational efficiency, identify market trends, and drive revenues with the help of insightful and actionable intelligence. It gives early warnings to business owners about rectifying operational inefficiencies and taking appropriate measures accordingly.
The BI helps businesses in making smart decision-making processes with the help of structured and analyzable data derived from different structured, semi-structured, and unstructured datasets. BI uses data mining and predictive analytics to analyse historical data and forecast future outcomes and trends. Business users utilize this data to make informed decisions on risk management, resource allocation, improving customer experience, and other business-related issues.
Driving Growth with Business Analytics
These tools help business users to create structured reports, answer ad-hoc questions, provide statistics for annual reports, and offer dashboards to act upon objectives and goals. The insights obtained from the BI tools deliver comprehensive insights into consumer behavior and buying patterns to formulate marking, sales, and business expansion strategies accordingly. By leveraging BI, business owners can link customer touchpoints and access purchase history, ongoing customer service cases, and the position of customers in the sales cycle. Based on this data, business users craft personalized customer experiences for customers from diverse complexities and cultures.
For example, Netflix, a cloud platform for streaming video content improved customer engagement with its content with the help of various business intelligence tools. Netflix uses cloud-based BI to recommend personalized video content for millions of its subscribers worldwide. This system is based on the content recommendation feature drives over 80 % of the streamed content on Netflix.
Similarly, American Express, an American multinational financial services corporation leveraged BI to reap the benefits of improving the functionality of its payment services with the help of the insights derived from the cloud-based business intelligence software systems. American Express has delivered novel payment service products to over 100 million subscribers and gained a competitive edge in the market.
Modern-day business tools are offered at competitive prices to small and mid-size businesses. BI tools offer higher returns on investments by generating extra revenue and accelerating product expansion. The developers are working on providing feature-rich and competitively-priced BI tools to SMEs.
