How Business Intelligence Solutions Can Drive Customer-Centric and Business Metrics
What is Business Intelligence?
Business success is dependent on attracting new customers, retaining existing ones and selling more, at the end of the day. Businesses generate a lot of data via ubiquitous consumer interactions on a variety of digital touch-points. This data is business, the business is data. In this effect, Business Intelligence (BI) helps organizations bring order within the chaos of big data. It helps companies collect, analyze, and present business information via strategic dashboard reports, using cutting edge data visualization tools.
BI applications are an antidote to the quaint ways of collecting, storing, and making sense of data, thereby saving business stakeholders time and energy; at the same time delivering relevant data to improve profitability.
BI solutions help businesses crunch more data and run thorough analysis on a variety of factors, which would otherwise have been impossible with legacy reporting processes. This in turn enables organizations to extract hitherto unknown or dormant insights from existing data sets. Business intelligence tools also help companies make more informed and better decisions about marketing, sales, and numerous other strategic business activities, thereby improving profit margins.
In order to appreciate the true value of BI there’s a certain set of questions each organization’s BI initiative should answer;
Will BI help in optimizing our advertising initiatives?
Your BI initiative should help you see the real results of each of your advertising investments. Which campaigns are driving more traffic? Which campaigns are helping you achieve more sales conversions? Which format of ads is highly effective? Answers to these questions help you get the best RoI out of your ad campaigns.
Can BI help us in building a winning selling platform?
Does your website allow visitors to find their way to the right product or page with ease? Navigating through a shopping site should be seamless, but designing one is nothing but it. Your BI analytics reports should enlighten you on the most used navigation elements your users love or are accustomed to. Which elements of navigation are being used or neglected by users? How effectively linked is your onsite search bar, is it leading users to the right landing pages? These questions allow you to design the perfect page to help users, buy easily, and come back for more, eventually.
Can BI help me understand my consumers better?
What products are being sold frequently? What links are driving consumer traffic to your site? How accessible are your products to users? How effective are your email campaigns? These questions help you understand who your consumers are and where they come from.
Will BI help me get more from search engines?
Nearly 65 percent of web traffic comes through search engines (Google). Questions such as a) what keywords/keyphrases are driving traffic to your site? b) What SEO strategies are delivering highest RoI? help you eliminate the least effective campaigns and concentrate on the ones which are successful.
Can BI help me streamline our social media initiatives?
All of us have been smitten by the Social Media bug. But how often do we get influenced by sales campaigns on popular social media sites? To help you gain insights on your investments on social media, your BI initiative should be designed to answer questions such as a) which/what kind of social media initiatives are driving traffic? b) how much of the social media engagement is bringing better RoI? Not all social channels are relevant, and not everyone consumes a particular type of content. Applying abject scrutiny to your social media engagements will yield better RoI.
This is how a marketing dashboard looks
These questions are not the only ones which should matter, but they are necessary to be part of your Business Intelligence initiative to drive higher profits.
Besides consumer facing factors, BI could enhance and optimize the business side of things as well.
Sales and Profitability Analysis
BI solutions should initially influence your sales strategies and eventually drive them. Analysis should highlight product demands and uncover trends. It impacts responsibilities of every stakeholder that include executives, managers and external suppliers for making sense of the data obtained by identifying trends and business opportunity areas.
Store Operational Analysis
Business Intelligence led analysis helps you maximize traffic through providing insights on store operations and help you make fact-based decision-making. Monitoring stores across various geographical locations, running campaigns backed-up by data are just a few initiatives which can be performed through the help of business intelligence.
Merchandise and Inventory Management
Sales analytics, derived from BI dashboard tools help you showcase the right products at the right time on your site. It helps you narrow down on the best promotional practices. In addition, you can also improve merchandising logistics, minimize stock-out scenarios and streamline inventory.
Market dynamics are hard to predict and can severely affect inventory management. BI helps you prepare diligently to avoid product stock outs due to unexpected circumstances. By using BI tools, you can rapidly determine where and which products are in-demand. It also helps formulate strategies for on-product discounts and promotions.
Marketing analysis
Through effective analysis, you can achieve targeted promotions based on user interaction/behaviour on your site. BI tools help you gain valuable insights through reports, scorecards and analyzing data to determine strategic opportunities for promotions and new sales channels. This will help you deliver better customer experiences and maximize RoI.
At the end of the day, every organization’s aim is to outperform its competitors by effectively building a strong base of loyal consumers who eventually become brand advocates. In order to achieve this, the organization needs to:
- Collate business data from a lot of sources
- Build a bridge between business and business data
- Develop a cohesive structure to understand unstructured data such as likes, tweets, clicks, videos, etc.
- Generate valuable insights through data and let business decisions stem from those very insights
Though elements of instinct separates the selling of the same product versus marketing it uniquely, success ultimately boils down to metrics. Amazon, eBay, and other eCommerce giants thrive on the competitive front by cleverly using business intelligence solutions to measure their business outcomes on a regular basis.
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