How can Business Intelligence Improve Business Growth?

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Business intelligence is one of the trending topics in the twenty-first century. The fact it takes into consideration real-time data, analyses it, and then renders value-backed decisions, BI tools have become the go-to tool for businesses in the digital age. However, there are organizations that are reluctant, and wonder whether business intelligence is worth the hype. 

What is Business Intelligence? 

Before going ahead, let's first go through the basics of business intelligence or simply, understand what exactly do we mean to say by the term business intelligence. A broader definition of BI, according to the Gartner IT glossary, “Business Intelligence is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure, tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.”    Technically speaking, business intelligence is the combination of software tools that are competent in assessing and analyzing raw data. Besides, it also involves best practices that help gather data, process them, and then provide significant insights facilitating smarter decision-making.

Why is Business Intelligence Important?

For ages, entrepreneurs have been relying on what we call gut feeling or intuition to make business decisions. While that helped them survive the fall, the new-age business requires a better model for analyzing information and becoming data-intelligent. This is where BI solutions come into play. Business intelligence combines data from one or more sources, analyzes and processes it to convert the same into meaningful information.  Simply said, the primary purpose of BI tools and similar applications is to help businesses make better decisions in real-time. Besides, it also helps reduce operational costs while improving efficiency at the same time. 

"BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can make the right decisions"
 
Nic Smith with Microsoft BI Solutions Marketing

What are the advantages of using Business Intelligence?

It is pretty much clear that business intelligence helps organizations gain visibility over raw data, converting them to meaningful insights, one that can drive business decisions smartly and wisely. 

Put together, business intelligence helps:
 

• Improve the process of decision-making, backing them by hard facts and not intuition.
• Automate the process of gathering data and optimizing business processes. 
• Trace relevant data, and convert them to information. 
• Reduce the cost of operation, and enhance operational efficiency. 
• Stay at par with the ongoing industrial trends. 

5 ways BI improves Business Growth?

Having said the above, we now move ahead to see 5 ways business intelligence helps businesses grow.   

• Enhances the process of decision-making

The business world has moved from being product-first to customer-first. Meaning that organizations that are successful in catering to customer queries win the trust and are more likely to grow today and in the future. To do so, it is important to first understand what they expect out of your business and then offer them exactly the same.   
With BI tools coming to play, organizations can now accumulate data from disparate sources, analyze and assess them to make business decisions. The Beauty here is that organizations can now put their incompetent, raw, and unstructured data to use, for the good of their business.   
Further, these tools are automated and can operate without human intervention. As a result, organizations cut on the overall cost spent on gathering data and studying them to derive meaning from the same.   

• Gain In-depth Customer Insights

Customer Experience or as we call it CX is now an important metric for marketing. As a matter of fact, a survey conducted by Gartner reveals that marketers now compete based on their company’s CX score. The more the better.   
This is probably because there has occurred a dynamic shift in how customers treat business entities. No more do they prioritize products when selecting a company. The present-day customers look for comfort and ease of access. With BI tools, marketers can easily track and monitor customer interactions.   
This allows them to gain a holistic view of the customer's journey, and further refine marketing strategies to convert them to buyers. In other words, business intelligence tools allow marketers to know their customers better and take measures to improve the satisfaction level    

• Efficient customer service

Next to decision-making comes the concept of serving your customers day in and out. Given the competition that surrounds the business industry today, growth is about offering best-in-industry service to the customers, and not just offering flawless products.  
In the words of Maya Angelou: 
 
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”
 
Following the Pareto Principle, 20% of the customers can bring in 80% of the overall business revenue.
 
The key lies in the service provided and the satisfaction gained from it.Interesting to know how Business intelligence tools are smart enough to document all of the customer data, identify insights, and monitor their buying behaviour for improved business growth. Leveraging the above, business professionals can easily create strategies and act on them to reach out to potential customers to make sales.   
Note: When you offer customers exactly what they anticipate, you are better positioned to convert them to buyers. 
   

• Improved Productivity

Business intelligence tools and/or software are designed in a way that they can operate without any human intervention. Meaning that the process is largely automated. This ensures that all of the business activities are carried out without any hassle, improving end-to-end productivity.   
Further, the organization can effectively track data at all hours of the day, eliminating bottlenecks, and improving business processes. The dashboard feature present allows the concerned professional to view and analyze data with ease. An added benefit of Artificial Intelligence tools lies in the fact that they are cloud-hosted. This makes it easier for the entire team to refer to the data without any hassle. All of this together, refines the approach, increasing the end-to-end business productivity.   
 
Read More: Artificial Intelligence Key Trends for 2021  

• Optimize ROI

Lastly, BI solutions enable effective calculation of the business ROI and further optimize it for the good. ROI or the return on investment is what a business gains in return from the marketing campaigns and/or events.   
Business intelligence tools offer detailed insights on the sales journey, making it easier for marketing professionals to make strategic decisions. Additionally, the tool generates reports based on the data.   
Businesses can further capitalize on the above, adding to the sales efficiency.  Furthermore, it increases the rate of conversion, thereby increasing the overall return on investment. 

Read More: Artificial Intelligence And It’s Importance For Businesses

Conclusion

"Business intelligence is a specific subset of data management that allows businesses to derive actionable insights from contextualized data": Adam Uzialko.

 The above clearly indicates the fact that BI is intended to find newer avenues of business, one that is driven by data. Further, use this data to deduce actionable insights, and make smarter decisions. With that being said, integrating BI tools has now become a necessity for business organizations. 

Have you integrated one for your business solutions?