Quite a few business leaders have made plenty of money just by following their intuition or gut feelings. However, human instincts are not all that magical. They’re just a person’s ability to subconsciously assess current situations based on past experiences. Business intelligence is similar but takes the guessing out of things. Digital technology fueled by data and information lets enterprises of all sizes analyze things and make the right decisions. Big data abounds, but it’s up to you to leverage it in ways that lead to increased profits for your company.
7 Ways Your Company Can Utilize Business Intelligence
It’s easy to just say you should use business intelligence to improve things for your company, but what are the specific things you can do?
- Better Customer Service: Improving your customer service levels can do wonders for your bottom line. In many industries, 40% of income might come from less than 10% of customers or clients. Use business intelligence to find and compile all data about repeat customers so you can leverage them for more revenue while also learning how to create more repeat clients.
- Convert Data to Actionable Items: Big data can help you learn how customers think about products and services, the ways they research them, how they decide to spend, and what impacts churn rates. Business intelligence lets you not just learn about all this but points to specific actionable information you can utilize.
- Enhanced Productivity: Business intelligence can help you free your organizational structure of bottlenecks while you refine your many processes. Tasks can be automated in many cases, and they can also be prioritized free of manual labor. This all leads to more organization and efficiency.
- Increased ROI: Better returns on your investments should lead to more revenue and profit. Business intelligence can help you accomplish that internally, in the customer experience, and in all dealings between your company and customers. Increased ROI gives you more financial resources for expansion and investment with what you’ve already got available to you.
- Learn What Your Customers Want: Modern consumers are bombarded with sales advertising dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of times per day. They’re very likely to tune it all out unless it speaks to what they want. Business intelligence can let
you switch to customer engagement that draws them in better. - Make Smarter Decisions: When you’re able to organize your company’s data, then business intelligence can empower you to make strategic decisions. A centralized and updated system results in improved financial performance every time you make smarter choices.
- Map a Better Future: Business intelligence can help you understand patterns both among your customers and your own workforce. Identify areas of potential improvement to address, but also look for previously understated strengths that you can grow from.
Business Intelligence Only Works If You Do
According to Align BI, one of the business intelligence companies in Utah, “Knowledge is power, but only if you know what to do with it.”
Business intelligence (BI) is a mix of practices, tools, apps, and technology that help you gather, collate, analyze, and report big data in ways that let you take informed business actions.
Business intelligence exists so that company leaders and operational directors can make decisions based on data more often than in the past. The general goal is always to enjoy more profits, but the many roads there can vary. They can include identifying and fixing business process inefficiencies, spotting opportunities for more business, or just cost-cutting. Accelerated decision-making can mean reacting to market events in a more responsive fashion than might have been previously possible. Even when outside motivators aren’t happening, you can always be looking internally for ways to optimize things. Taking even a little time to spot market trends means you can capitalize on them while there’s still time.
Entrepreneurs Need This
Many in the business community assume that business intelligence is only open to big corporations, but it’s actually available to midsized and small businesses, too. As Forbes points out, even entrepreneurs need to know about business intelligence. Even more than that, they need to utilize it.
Any level of business setting can benefit from the workable strategies that business intelligence provides. While a major corporation might only have to concern itself with keeping shareholders happy for the next quarter, a small business might need to make life-or-death decisions that determine whether or not its establishment even survives another year. On a massive scale, this is crucially important to the economy at large, given how small businesses drive so much economic growth and employ such a large percentage of the labor force.
One specific application that startups should look into is the use of certain key performance indicators or KPIs, so they can determine specific things that are paramount to their success. For instance, they can do this to know how is buying certain products or services. They can also learn the source of these customers and even ascertain very specific conversion rates. Knowing this can help a fledgling business serve its consumers better by coming up with improvements to current products or creating new service lines. Even a big company might need to do this to maintain its market share in the face of innovative competition.
Business intelligence is important. You can use it to boost productivity, but even that is just a smaller step toward the broader goal of boosting sales, profits, and revenue. Whenever possible, use custom solutions to learn specifically about your business. Granted, any insights you can get into your industry will help. Whenever possible, harness the powerful combination of big data plus business intelligence to grow what you already have, now and in the future.
