A couple of decades ago, the term “business intelligence” had an entirely different meaning. It would define the aptitude and understanding of individuals to run a business. Today, when you hear this term, it entails a completely different meaning. In the contemporary commercial landscape powered by technology, the need for business intelligence is gradually increasing for enterprises across the spectrum.
If you are leading a business and want to streamline your work and stay ahead of competitors, you need to embrace business intelligence tools and expertise.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is an analytical process. It uses data mining and visualization on your organization’s Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, and other data resources to help you make more data-driven decisions free of biases and errors.
The concept of business intelligence is to utilize the available information and data in the best possible manner to drive positive change while addressing inefficiencies and quickly adapting to new market realities. Today, whether it is a multinational conglomerate or a small-to-medium enterprise, it should harness business intelligence through data experts and relevant software tools to sustain and grow in the market.
5 Reasons to Gather and Utilize Business Intelligence
Gathering business intelligence through experts and software applications can help a business in multiple ways.
1. Business Intelligence Helps with Better KPI Monitoring, Reporting, and Generating Valuable Insights
Your people can use well-thought-out templates and customized reports to monitor your business KPI while using various data sources. The BI tools sift through customer, sales, operational, and other critical data points present in your ERM/CRM databases. These customized analysis reports are furnished in real-time in interactive tables, charts, and graphs.
When your KPI analysis is powered by business intelligence, you don’t just find out the numbers. You also get to find out what’s working and what’s not working for your organization. BI tools also let you modify those reports for their variables to get a more in-depth KPI analysis.
This deep analysis lets you infer valuable business insights. From employee management to marketing strategy and revenue generation to customer management, you succeed in finding out the pain points and strong suites of every aspect of your business.
2. Business Intelligence Lets You Improve Data Quality
Data has become one of the most prized commodities on the commercial horizon. Enterprises make a lot of effort to collect more data than peers for outperforming them through better decision-making and strategizing.
However, having large data sets doesn’t return you any results if they are crammed together in an unorganized manner. You need to “renovate” those databases with the right analytical tools to make them useful. The analytical, mining, and visualization features of business intelligence solutions let you organize your data in categories, hierarchies, and networks.
A company that has spruced-up data excels better than a competition with the same data but in an unoptimized form.
3. Business Intelligence Lets You Carry Out Informed Comparative Analysis
Gone are the days when organizations would do budgeting, planning, and forecasting on absolute terms. Today’s competitive market has made everything relative. When companies take crucial financial and operational decisions, they also want to factor in their competitors’ performance. BI solutions also let you analyze your competitors’ revenuer reports and growth projections for a better comparative outlook.
The benefit of using BI tools to run such comparative analysis is you can avoid erroneous decision-making. For instance, if your competitor is increasing its marketing budget for the next fiscal year, you may not need to follow in its footsteps due to considerable products and services differentiation. You can only get such insights from the comparative analysis run by business intelligence software applications.
4. Business Intelligence Helps Identify Emerging Marketing Trends
Identifying future marketing trends and capitalizing on them is a great way to stay ahead of your competitors. You can put the impressive and intuitive data analyzing capabilities of BI tools to find out what’s happening in the market and where it is heading.
Your organization can extrapolate data to identify potential sales trends while factoring in market conditions and consumer behavior. After finding these new trends, you can adjust and tweak your operations accordingly to fulfill future market requirements.
5. Business Intelligence Helps Improve Customer Satisfaction
Customer service often works as a tiebreaker when two enterprises offer similar products and services at the same price points. If you are using dedicated CRM software, you will receive a lot of consumer data in real-time. But as mentioned earlier, this data doesn’t offer any value in an unorganized form. By using business intelligence on your CRM resources, your organization can make sense of customer behaviors and patterns.
Understanding customer purchase patterns in depth enables you to improve their experience for better retention rates. You can also anticipate potential customer requirements by having your finger on the pulse of customer behavior patterns and changes.
When you can utilize BI tools in the five areas discussed above, you set off the cascade of good things. Firstly, your informed decision-making in the light of intuitive data analysis lets you focus on the right operational areas. Improved efficiency consequently increases overall productivity. The increased productivity levels are materialized in the form of higher profits and lower margins.
Microsys can help you harness business intelligence from your cluttered databases through data discovery, management, integration, and governance services. Its experts can also run a predictive analysis with the help of the available data to incorporate business intelligence into your decision-making.
Microsys deliver simple solutions for complex problems through a one-stop service. Our professional services will provide your business with a hassle-free experience and an end-to-end solution. You can focus on your business while we take care of your day-to-day system challenges.