The industry for business intelligence is evolving at a rapid pace.
Every year, the rising volume of data in the current marketplace pushes companies to think more carefully about how they can better understand and serve their customers. Businesses of all sizes are quickly learning that only with the right insights can they make the decisions required to outshine the competitors.
However, as the state of business intelligence (BI) continues to evolve, driven by disruptive technology and new demands, there are still companies that do not fully understand it. Many organizations overlook BI solutions as something that’s “nice to have” when the truth is that they are becoming essential to the modern landscape.
Here is your guide to the reality of business intelligence, and why it matters in today’s business world.
What is Business Intelligence?
The term business intelligence is wide and comprehensive, used to refer to the tools, infrastructure, and processes that companies utilize to identify and analyze critical information. Companies are accessing business intelligence software to help them extract valuable insights from an ever-growing quantity of data in their systems and operations.
Business intelligence technologies can be used with both external and internal data sources. In an external environment, they are used for the collection of information on things like market trends and competitive intelligence. In the internal environment, BI offers an overview of customer and industry pain points, key stakeholder requirements and lost opportunities.
Over the course of recent years, the business intelligence services in the landscape have evolved. BI does not just belong to IT anymore. Instead, it has emerged as a crucial part of business decision making. Companies can access data insights that transform into useful information for individuals across the company.
How Can Companies Benefit from Business Intelligence?
1. Smart Decision Making
BI converts huge amounts of scattered data into structured, analyzable insight – in other words, real business intelligence that can inform strategic decision-making across the company, which in the end, contributes to excellent financial figures.
2. Boost Sales and Marketing Goals
BI can deliver in-depth analysis to kickstart sales and boost the performance of marketing functions. BI tools can identify trends in customer behavior in a more fundamentally and strategically way and exploit all up-selling or cross-selling opportunities.
Additionally, BI helps to improve the visibility of sales information, which can be used to fine-tune and sharpen marketing campaigns. Also, it helps to track technical features and measure every campaign to ensure future marketing initiatives are as profitable and effective as possible.
3. Gives insights into customer knowledge
One of the main reasons behind the rising demand for BI tools is that it helps to understand how customers are interacting with any business and how best to reach them – or, more accurately, to encourage them to purchase any product or service. Various BI solutions provide the intelligence necessary for any business to reshape the new customer journey. Without this knowledge, it is easy to fall back off the competition.
4. Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience
BI offers an up to date, at-a-glance view of each customer of a business by taking in all real-time information, including ongoing service cases, previous purchases and where they are in the sales cycle. This provides the basis for enhanced customer service response, as well as spotting customers who might be in ‘buying mode’, and to manage any danger points where a customer service failure risks undermining CX.
With this newfound customer insight in place, businesses can conduct segmentation work to identify the typical profile of their most profitable customers, ensure that resources are being applied appropriately and that they are attracting the right type of prospects to meet the business growth targets.
5. Accelerate Return-on-Investment
The culmination of achieving all of the points above should be a vast improvement in any businesses return-on-investment across the company – from managing day-to-day efficiency, sales deal conversion metrics and customer experience, right through to analyzing, modeling and crafting future growth strategies. Without the right insight and disciplines, it is easy to fall back on old ways of doing things manually, on hypotheses and preconceptions – especially about customer behavior and preferences – and that could set a company on entirely the wrong course.
Cyclops provides brick-and-mortar retailers with insightful retail analytics. To find out more about Cyclops, visit our website: https://dayta.ai.