Business Intelligence (BI) systems are a set of Tools, Strategies and Processes that enable companies to capture, process and analyze large volumes of data (business information) and transform them into actionable insights to make strategic and tactical business decisions.
Imagine a good BI system as an airplane cockpit where the instruments and the automation enable the pilots to navigate even in bad weather or limited visibility.
A well planned and accurately implemented BI system can deliver a lot of business benefits for any company. Let’s summarize the Top 10 of these benefits to better understand how valuable they are.
The tribal knowledge of a company could be very useful in many cases, but this knowledge is sometimes based on beliefs, wishful thinking or misinterpretations rather than facts. These wrong perceptions can divert important business decisions far from the optimal path and can cause Customer Experience degradation or even financial losses.
An accurate analysis of historic-, real-time-, and contextual data enables business leaders to make decision based on facts.
Competitive Analysis / Benchmarking
A good BI system acts like a monitoring tool that provides high level insights about your competitors’ key performance indicators and enable you to benchmark your own performance. If you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can adjust your operation and address the discovered gaps.
Identify Growth Patterns
With the help of a clever BI tool, you can identify patterns that most likely lead to larger opportunities and/or better financial performance. Through an Ideal Path Analysis, you can create new business processes or optimize the existing procedures that can deliver better customer experiences and higher employee motivation.
Track Key Performance Indicators
To understand your past and current performances and better predict future trends it is not enough to monitor the Key Performance Indicators in real-time. It could also be beneficial to track them continuously to better understand intraday or seasonal changes and learn from typical patterns or from the events that triggered them. The KPI tracking can help you to better forecast resource needs and predict future results.
Predict Trends (Good or bad)
Once you start tracking your major business KPIs you can leverage various predictive models to forecast future events and you can analyze future performances even before they are happening.
A good BI tool will enable you to preform corrective actions to double down on good trends or stop bad trends before their possible negative consequences appear.
Customer Behavior Insights
Do not miss the opportunity to capture and analyze all possible data that can enable you to better understand your customers’ feelings and behaviors. You may be surprised how much data you already have that can be easily aggregated and processed to gain crucial customer insights.
If you know what your customers do, how they feel or what they are up to you have greater chance to better serve them and finally turn them to your brand ambassadors.
Identify New Opportunities
Analyzing historic data, predicting future trends and identify the possible gap between them can open a door for an educated Opportunity Analysis. If you are able to understand what you could have been doing better, you can adjust your processes before you repeat the same mistake again or miss an opportunity.
Business Process Optimization
A good BI tool not only tells you what could or should be done differently, but also can tell you what could be further optimized. Even if your processes work fine, a BI system can easily find you further optimization opportunities by cutting through unnecessary curves or by suggesting new process steps that may create further opportunities.
Improved Customer Experiences
Customer Experiences are critically important to make your business sustainable and prospering in the long term, however they are fragile by nature. Easy to lose customers’ trust and very hard to regain them.
The best way to provide good Customer Experiences in a consistent manner is if you are able to monitor CX signals and have a system in place that can immediately react to bad signals. A good BI works like an alarm system that can send a signal to other systems to perform the desired corrective actions before the things escalate.
Optimized Inventory Management
A BI system can be used as a monitoring tool to drive optimization outside of the customer experience and service process as well. Their analytical result can be a good input for Inventory Management or other Logistics Systems to avoid waste of time or effort or optimize cost, space, just in time delivery and so on.
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In summary you may consider a BI System like the eye of the enterprise that can oversee your entire operation and service procedures and help your employees or other systems to react on CX trends in real-time at the right time.
If you’d like to learn more about our BI solution, click here or schedule a Demo with our experts.
Tibor Vass – CMO of Eccentex
