It is always said that “Better decisions can be made with better business insights” and to get better Business Insight industry uses Business Intelligence tools. Business Intelligence or often called as “BI” is application programs and technologies which is mainly used for collecting, storing, analysing and providing access to data. BI is all about creating business value for any organizations based on data & facts. BI provides more relevant information to any enterprise business user which helps them to make better decision more faster.
Business Intelligence uses methods and programs to collect the data, convert the data into meaningful insight. BI collects large amount of data generated by enterprise and presents into meaningful actionable way. On a very high-level BI can be used for:
– Performance Management
– Analytics
– Predictive Analysis
– Data Mining
– Access of organized data
– Identifying inefficient business process
– Identify hidden customer pattern
– Identify areas of strength and weaknesses
There are many types of BI applications that can be built like reporting, data mining, ad hoc query and data visualization tools, online analytical processing software, dashboards & performance scorecards. There are many BI Products in market which enterprise can use to fulfil their Business Intelligence needs. These BI Products comes with option of On-Premise or Cloud BI Software, and companies can choose to use any of these based on the best ROI and the resources they have to manage these BI software. There are many companies who offers BI products such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and many other SaaS companies who offers BI products and offering. Using some of cloud based BI tools can help you to create very powerful & scalable data models and insights. Cloud BI offers users to connect, analyze data and share insights on web, mobile or custom build applications. Using Cloud BI users can create interactive reports and easily scale their BI reporting solution.
Effect of Business Intelligence for any organizations are many e.g. Identify the knowledge/insight from the huge structured and un-structured data, find out what contributes most for your revenue/business, single view of customer data, discover why & what motivates customer behavior.
Any good and effective BI accesses all business data, from all of platform in a singular & unified dashboard system. This includes customer data from various systems like POS, E-comm System, OMS, CRM, email & campaign marketing, customer chats etc. and all data is aggregated into a single view of the customer and their interactions with any enterprise business.
In today’s world of huge data and various ways customer interacts with business it is very important to have a single view of customer. Using BI, it is possible to create a single unified view of customer from such a vast data and drive lot of business insights which helps business and drives more revenues. That’s why most company these days uses business intelligence which has helped them to grow their sales. Business Intelligence helps business to find when and where they should invest for marketing.
It is believed that retaining an existing customer costs less than making a new customer. And Business Intelligence is one such tool which if used correctly can help to retain existing customer. Now a days most of the companies are using Business Intelligence for improving Customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer loyalty. To improve customer retention there are ways which we can use in Business Intelligence. Here are few of the ways.
- Analyze your customer based on their journey on your website and predict their behavior. To do this we need to collect as much data as we can from various source of our business be it social media, campaign, order management system, CRM, their click path on website, chat with customer care, chat with bots or support agents. Once we have collected customer data from various sources, Business Intelligence tools allows us to deeply analyze data and understand customer behavior and pattern. Once we know customer behavior and pattern we can design better and improved User Experience and attract them to come back to business.
- Use Business Intelligence tools to influence customer behavior. Using BI tools, we can monitor and track customer response for a marketing campaign or advertisement. And based on this we can design and influence customer behavior as we know what is working for them and what they are liking. Various campaign can be run based on their demographic information, Gender, Age, Customer Journey on website. Using these customer information business owners can run specific campaign which works for their customer and it means more business and better customer retention.
Summary
In Today’s world, customers are demanding and to achieve customer satisfaction, customer retention and increased business, Business Intelligence has become necessity for all businesses. So if you are not doing it yet, May be its time to spend some time and see how BI can help you increase business as it is doing for others.
About the Author
A company co-founder & Director, Nasim Ahmad Ansari is now associated with “Facile Consulting” and “JCC Bowers” and serves as Director Software Development. Nasim is technologist who has held senior leadership role in Software Services & IT Consulting Company. Nasim has led large software development team and has worked as Offshore Development Head. Nasim has worked with companies and customers like Sapient, CIBER, AFS Technologies, Toyota, TESCO, Xerox, Disney etc. Nasim now works on technologies related to BI, Cloud, IOT & connected, intelligent, and autonomous transportation technologies (connected autonomous vehicles).
