Business intelligence: From data to better decisions

The benefits of using business intelligence tools

Using BI tools offers enterprises several benefits, including consumer buying insights, improved employee productivity, performance tracking, and more. 

Leaders are empowered to make better decisions by using BI to harness better data. Better data leads to better data-driven decision-making.

Reporting: Customizable templates displaying reported data can represent financial operations, sales and marketing progress, and data sources. Automated reporting helps extract the most recent and relevant data. Then it transforms the data into easy-to-consume representations, such as charts, graphs, and dashboards. Templates can be interactive, meaning the user can enter different information and analyze the impact or outcome.

Business insights: By tracking relevant KPIs, such as employee performance, revenue, number of orders, and general turnover, you can highlight your enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses. Testing different approaches can show you what’s working and what’s not. Your business development department can then validate their decisions, considering the metrics that matter most.

Competitive analysis: Operating and managing large data volumes can provide a competitive edge. But the standard analysis doesn’t include forecasting, planning, and budgeting. Using BI tools enables easier performance planning, modification of products and services, and tracking of competitors’ sales and marketing efforts.

Data quality: To make data-driven decisions, you need to be sure of the quality of the data you use. For data to be considered high-quality it must be accurate, consistent, trustworthy, and complete. Otherwise, your enterprise could suffer from inefficiency, ineffective business decisions, missed opportunities, and financial loss. By using high-quality data, you can create a data-operating framework. That enhances communication between departments and ensures the same terminology and language is used to analyze the same data.

Customer satisfaction: Understanding customer behavior and patterns, processing customer complaints and feedback transforms into retaining old customers and gaining new ones. Repeated buying patterns and growing needs in real-time should be converted into better customer service.

• New opportunities: External and internal market data provide information on new market trends, sales channels, business problems, and opportunities. Using BI, you can build new strategies and impact existing ones to improve customer service. You can also build new sales approaches, spot bottlenecks, and open new business opportunities. The more data you have, the more long-term forecasts you can make.
• Operational efficiency: Having BI tools at your disposal saves the time involved in manually collecting data and creating reports. Managers can focus on ad hoc tasks instead of wasting time on tracking key metrics. BI improves overall efficiency and department performance, helps you set long-term goals and strategies, and compares results. Using BI tools can also help you make decisions faster and at the right time.
• Cost-effectiveness: More qualified customer interviews lead to better identification of your enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, you can cut the costs of operations that don’t bring any value. You don’t have to waste your resources and can improve the processes that are effective and increase revenue. Detailed competitor analysis can also help you to draft more efficient budget strategies and, as a result, increase profit.