Business Intelligence, or BI, is a term that has become quite popular over the last few years. At first glance, it seems like strange techno jargon or like machines have started their rise to power. The truth is that BI should be an important part of your company’s strategy. In fact, you might have already been doing some business intelligence tasks without even realizing it. In this article we’re going to teach you what business intelligence is, why it is important to your company and how to use it to improve your profits.
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
According to CIO.com, business intelligence is defined as “an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting.” In layman’s terms, business intelligence is a type of software that you use to gather information about your customers, website visitors, etc.
The type of software you choose to use for these tasks is important. According to the Select Hub business intelligence requirements checklist, you need to make sure that your BI programs can access data in real time, be expanded as the field develops (and this field moves quickly so inflexible software rapidly becomes obsolete), that the software stores and configures the data it collects in easily accessible and easy to read reports, and that it has top-notch security.
Why is Business Intelligence Software Important?
Think of all of the market research that went into your product and company development. You worked hard to collect all of that data, right? Business intelligence collects much of that same data in real time, along with information like how far your customers get along your sales funnel, how long they spend on your site, which pages are the most popular, which items are looked at but not purchased, etc. Instead of having to comb through pages of reports and manually collect the data you find into the reports you need, BI software does all of the work for you and you don’t have to worry about the margin of error that you would need to consider if a human was doing all the work. Plus, think of all of the time (and payroll) you’ll save by running the code instead of having to spend hours doing everything manually!
How to Use Business Intelligence Software to Improve Your Business
There are lots of ways that BI software can help you improve your company—not just its profit margins, but in overall customer satisfaction, workplace productivity levels, marketing strategy, product development, etc. We’ve already talked about the benefit of running a code instead of having a human do the work. Here are a few other examples of how BI can help your company:
Decision making: Instead of making decisions based on what you think (or are “reasonably sure”) is going on with your audience, etc. you will have cold hard and objective data to help you make your company’s decisions. You can evaluate your current choices by what you’ve done in the past with real numbers that will tell you what worked and what didn’t.
Improve Customer Satisfaction: Your reports will tell you what sells well, what doesn’t, how many customers complete the buying cycle and (this is especially important for web-based sales portals) where in the buying cycle customers usually bail out. This information can help you decide which products to keep developing, how to improve your site and products so that you make more sales, whether or not a product line or service provides a good ROI or not, etc.
There are lots of ways to use business intelligence to help run your company more smoothly and profitably. What we’ve outlined here is just the beginning. As you work with and explore the software, you’ll find plenty of other ways in which BI is an integral to your operations.