8 Reasons BI Is Important For Business

Business intelligence (BI) is now an integral tool in today’s competitive business world. You need to make use of BI – the process that enables you to leverage technology for information analysis in order to make data-driven decisions – if you want to thrive in business and also, have a competitive advantage over other companies in your field.

Gone are the days when people made decisions based solely on intuition. Not to say that you shouldn’t listen to your gut, but back it up with proven data from BI to ensure you are making educated business decisions.

Below are 8 reasons why BI is important for all businesses today:

Make Informed Decisions

By having accurate insight into your business across all departments – operations, sales, marketing, customer service, etc., leadership can get a full picture of what is going on within the organization.  This insight allows them to make smart decisions based on the information provided.

Business intelligence helps the marketing department fine-tune their marketing spend by analyzing the results of each campaign and the yields it produces. BI also helps the sales department decipher the best ways of acquiring new customers and selling additional products and services to repeat customers by analyzing the year-on-year performance of their various paths and practices.

Identify Sales Trends

Business intelligence can give awareness of market trends and help detect major events that sales and marketing teams can capitalize on to boost performance.

For example, by identifying consumer behavior trends during significant events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, the company can develop offerings that address customer wants and needs. Also, this allows marketing departments to come up with strategies that will focus sales on targeted products.

Improves Knowledge of the Consumer

In today’s customer-centric business world, it’s key to know what your customers want. BI helps you to understand how your customers interact with your business – how they contact you as well as their buying trends.

For example, an e-commerce business that collects data on which age group of customers is attracted to its online store by each particular social media channel can tweak these campaigns to appeal to the specific audience they want to reach.  By narrowing down the target audience, marketing dollars can be used more effectively, and therefore lead to higher sales and profit margins.

Enables Great Customer Experience

Customer experience, or CX, is imperative to retaining customers as it builds satisfaction and creates a relationship between the consumer and the company. Keep in mind that it is always easier to sell to a repeat customer than to attain a new one. Therefore, it is prudent to take advantage of the existing customer’s feedback to offer your potential clients an outstanding CX.

 Surveys and reviews are a great way to obtain customer feedback and data. The information obtained can be used for targeted messages with product offers tailored to the client as well as, ensuring that the company is contacting the client via their preferred method of communication.

Improves efficiency and productivity

With a healthy BI system in place, an organization can identify and mitigate bottlenecks, discover priority areas and automate and collaborate on tasks across all departments.

To improve productivity, you would use the data gathered to glean what has been working most efficiently and what has become unproductive. By identifying areas that require improvement and making necessary changes, the company can become more productive and in turn more profitable

BI also leads to the sharing of information which can curb duplication of duties, save time and improve business processes. It can directly effect efficiency and productivity of customer service response, product development processes, marketing efforts, and also ensure effective use of employees’ time.

Gain Competitive Edge

BI can help gain understanding of current trends and gain insight into what competitors in the market are doing. This information can then be used to change operations that are ineffective, align your marketing strategies to suit popular trends, identify new business opportunities, and also piggy back on the strategies that are working for your competitors.

Tracking and analyzing a competitor’s entire stream of public communications can offer insight into the timing of their next big move and allow for a company to react quickly and potentially speed production on products that are similar in nature. Mikal Lewis used this kind of business intelligence to make sure his company meeting app, Qworky managed to beat a competitor to the market.

Improves ROI

BI improves ROI by helping companies significantly cut costs, boost revenue, and avoid wasteful expenses by giving them the necessary accurate and well visualized data to pinpoint best practices, identify potential weaknesses, improve customer service, raise employee productivity and make better strategic decisions.

Unlike in the past when only large organizations could use them, BI systems are quite affordable today. With numerous system offerings, businesses large and small can benefit from BI without breaking the bank. 

Need help implementing BI in your Business?

Contact the specialists at ASB Resources to help you choose the system that best suits your organizational goals. As top BI experts in the country, we can guide you on how to apply the system and run an effective BI strategy. Schedule a chat with one of our experts today!