Productivity is the key factor of business development. Your employees, strategies, and tools should all be focused on being more effective and efficient. Digital age businesses are all about gathering and analyzing business data. The most efficient way to do so is by using business intelligence. Make sure not to miss out on the perks of business intelligence and its unique way to gather and process data, and improve even your decision-making!
Business intelligence helps your business grow by improving your data analysis process and by monitoring your customers and employees.
1. Valuable Customer Insights Access
One of the first things that every business should know is how to treat their customers properly. There is nothing more valuable than customer experience or CX. People today rarely put products over ease of access or comfort. That is exactly why this is such an important part of a business.
All of this means that, if you want your business to grow, you need to know who your target audience is. Thanks to business intelligence (or BI) tools, you could easily gain this kind of knowledge. More precisely, you could monitor your customers’ interactions to get to know them better.
2. Improved Customer Service
Flawless products and services should go without saying when it comes to business growth, but what people tend to forget is that customer satisfaction is more than that. You need to know what your customers expect from you and what they need, and you should provide that to them. Customer satisfaction surveys, help desk automation, or touch base with customers could be some of the ways how BI improves customer experience.
As soon as you get to know your average customer, you’ll be able to make your business more accessible to them. BI tools are there to document the relevant data and help you keep track of customer buying behavior. Due to these insights, you’ll be able to work on strategies to attract more buyers and sell more to the current ones!
3. Enhancement of the Decision-Making Process
As it was already said, the center of a successful business is a happy and satisfied client. To cater to your customers’ needs, you should be well-aware of what these needs are. All of the business-related decisions you make should focus on the buyer and his or her experience.
The most efficient way to analyze the assessed data is by using BI tools. This can only benefit your business and it does more than just processing the data. You’ll know exactly when to enter new markets or how to restructure departments. Since the tools are completely automated, they operate with no human intervention whatsoever. That means that you can improve your decision-making process and cut costs at the same time.
4. Manual Data Entry Elimination
With the BI tools being fully automated and no human intervention, the chances of making mistakes are reduced significantly. Unfortunately, making a mistake can happen to any of us. People have to deal with various distractions, changes, or emotions, and all of these can affect one’s judgment.
Without manual data entry, you can be more certain of the quality of the work done. Another benefit is that this is a quicker way to process the data. Finally, you don’t have to worry about people getting sick or taking a vacation if you rely on business intelligence automation tools.
5. Department Linking
A company should work toward a specific goal. Having many isolated individual departments can get in the way of achieving this simple goal. Cross-departmental insights can get pretty complicated and they could become an obstacle in the company.
On the other hand, departments connected through business intelligence can work together without any kind of miscommunication happening. Due to a centralized repository and data available to all departments, the information is easily shared.
6. Simplifying Processes
Complex processes can leave a lot of space for mistakes to occur. The simpler the process, the better the results tend to be. For instance, BI automation can allow your employees to use their time better. Furthermore, manual data entry takes a lot of time, which can be easily solved by the centralized repository.
Storing and managing stock is another issue easily solved with BI tools. The inventory-based data analysis can prevent over-stocking easily due to the historical data analysis and stock metrics. No more will you have to think about data inaccuracies and you’ll also be able to analyze cash flow.
7. Optimizing ROI
Speaking of cash, you’ll probably want to know what your ROI situation is like. Return on investment refers to what a company gains as a result of the marketing campaigns. Keeping track of the sales is essential for this purpose.
Optimization of ROI is the key since you’ll want to make your investment worthwhile. As soon as you get the relevant pieces of information on your investment, you and your employees will know how to act in the future. Well-thought-out strategic decisions are irreplaceable when it comes to capitalizing on this.
8. IT Involvement Reduced
Late reports and bottlenecks can get in the way of your business growing. Missed opportunities also decrease productivity in your company. Having multiple departments request various reports or pieces of information from the IT teams can become pretty overwhelming for the said teams.
If all of the employees don’t have access to the data, they risk getting outdated reports. Customizable reports and data processing, as well as dynamic visualization, are the features that make BI a good option for boosting employee self-sufficiency and minimizing the involvement of the IT teams.
9. Better Employee Performance
Besides being perfect for monitoring customer behavior, BI tools can also be great for monitoring employee behavior. Every employee has his or her strengths and weaknesses. By being aware of them all, they can become more productive than ever before. Your human resource department could already be working on this, but it could do an even better job with the help of business intelligence.
Tracking individual or team performance won’t be a problem. With custom metrics, you could observe the impact in real-time. Meeting deadlines and avoiding bottlenecks is also much easier when you have the business intelligence tools working for you. Due to these task management analytics, your employees can stay focused and accountable from the beginning to the end of a project.
10. Effortless Hiring Process
As BI tools can easily gain insight into what strengths and weaknesses are of people as individuals or as teams, you can already tell that they are pretty useful when it comes to hiring new candidates. To meet the needs of your customers, you’ll need the right teams. Setting up a team of professionals may sound like a simple task, but it can get pretty tough.
You first need to have good employees for individual work. That means that you should train your future employees properly. Business intelligence does it by assigning tasks to build their skills. However, self-esteem and loyalty are equally important as is a skill. That is why BI focuses on these as well, while also motivating the employees to finish their tasks with positive reinforcement badges, for instance.
11. Competitor Monitoring
Finally, BI tools allow you to monitor your competitors as well. You are not alone in the market and that fact should never be neglected. By observing your competition, you can know whether or not you’re doing a good job with service offerings pricing for instance. You could also notice some of your weaknesses and improve them in the future.
While this can be manually done, it’s much more efficient when done through BI tools. No matter how excessive amounts of data there are, these tools can sort through them quickly. Not only that, but they can also find the links between you and your competitors. Having this type of data can help your employees improve your business and solve issues in real-time.
Final Word
Increasing productivity in your company is the best way to improve your business and grow. Business intelligence allows you to take advantage of the data analysis process and maximize your efficiency.
