What exactly is Business Intelligence about?
You know it’s critical to understand your customers better than the competition. You’ve heard that gathering customer insights can boost that understanding. And you may have noticed a lot of buzz about business intelligence. But what’s behind those concepts? And what do they mean for a business? Here’s the deal…
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the tools and techniques used to turn raw data into useful information for business analysis. Once affordable only for the biggest companies, BI is now easy-to-use and budget-friendly for small and midsized businesses.
Using BI doesn’t require you to purchase costly new software or learn complex techniques. In fact, you can take advantage of technology you probably already own, like Excel. Excel can help you discover, visualize, and analyze your data. And Power BI for Office 365, a cloud service, works with Excel to provide a complete self-service analytics solution. The upshot for you? You can organize your customer data in a single place, create personalized dashboard and interactive reports in as little as five minutes, and analyze the resulting information to discover new sales opportunities or business risks. And, you can do this from any device.
For example: maybe you’d like to know more about how customers perceive your bicycle shop. You can take your internal customer data, like who bought a bicycle from you, and combine it with publicly available resources such as a community survey about bicycle shops. You can then identify sales trends among existing and potential customers – based on their shopping preferences or purchase intentions – and optimize your product promotions and shop experience to attract more customers. Or perhaps you want to understand which of your marketing efforts is working best. You can create collaborative Power BI sites that put all the data together, across digital, sales and support, for instance, so your team can make and share reports from anywhere. This allows your whole team to spot opportunities and focus marketing efforts where they will make the most difference.
The bottom line: BI technology can give you more customer insights. And these can help you build better customer relationships and deliver more profits for your business.
Habanero Data Blogging Team
