8 benefits of business intelligence

Without collecting and properly analysing data about your business, you may soon lose your customers and be left behind

Living in a technology-driven world, you can observe and experience how quickly everything that surrounds you, including your competitors, undergoes a digital transformation. What most companies find essential when it comes to regaining their competitive advantage is data. Without collecting and properly analysing data about your business, you may soon lose your customers and be left behind. Luckily, there is a tool that can help you, and it is business intelligence. If you want to understand better how business intelligence can help you to remain competitive, continue reading.

What is business intelligence?

Even though its name may be confusing, business intelligence is one of the hottest technology trends. It is a set of tools, applications, operations, and technologies that gather data and present it in a graphic form for you to explore. Visualising data is an excellent way to make it easier for you and your company to understand the current state of your business. However, business intelligence does not do the job for you. It does not perform the data analysis itself but enables you to gain information about your organisation, run queries against that information, generate comprehensible reports, and thus draw conclusions. Presenting data in a graphic form helps you learn about your company and spot business opportunities you otherwise could have missed.

How does business intelligence work?

Automation makes the process of collecting and analysing data and translating it into insightful information smooth and easy, but the results are extraordinary. The tool gathers all the data about your organisation and presents it in dashboards, charts, maps, and graphs so you can analyse it. That way, it shortens the time you usually spend mining, merging, and translating data and provides real-time insights into your business. The critical thing to mention is that business intelligence gives you access to information concerning business operations and customer behaviours happening now and not in the future. It does not predict future opportunities but enables you to do so – basing the predictions on processes and decisions made so far.

Key benefits of business intelligence

Buying a business intelligence tool is a great way to discover new things about your company. For the development and implementation processes to be successful, you need to know precisely what kind of data you want to collect or are already ordering and what kind of insights you want to receive. Moreover, using business intelligence enables you to:

1. Eliminate guesswork

When running a business, you should never make critical business decisions based on your gut feeling. That way, you may be slowing down the growth of your company or even risking its future. With business intelligence, you gain comprehensive and reliable real-time insights about your organisation, which allows you to make accurate, data-driven decisions. This removes the need for making the best guess.

2. Improve efficiency

Obtaining important business metrics requires hours of looking for information from within multiple databases. However, collecting data does not equate to gaining a deeper understanding of your business, and this requires lots of merging, reporting, and analysing the results. A business intelligence tool performs all those processes automatically, providing accurate real-time information and saving you time, which you can now spend on more challenging tasks.

3. Track your customers’ behaviours

Every company relies on its clients. You do not need to run an online store to be interested in your customers, their behaviours, and opinions. Tracking every stage of the entire sales cycle and gaining insights into your customers’ behaviour allows you to turn information into profit. With business intelligence, you can discover your customer preferences and thus meet their needs.

4. Spot new opportunities

Another advantage of business intelligence tools is that they give you actionable information, which helps you to create successful strategic plans. It allows you to see how efficient (or not) your business processes are and gives you the possibility to spot whatever may be slowing down your company. You can also learn more about your customers, their behaviours, and the entire sales cycle, which enables you to take different approaches and discover which one is the most beneficial for your company.

5. Work from anywhere at any time

As all valuable insights are stored in the cloud, any member of the organisation can access them whenever and wherever it is necessary. You no longer have to spend time sharing updates as everyone can view real-time information without needing to search through endless files, which you also no longer have to create as business intelligence does all that work for you.

6. Increase sales

By gaining insightful sales information and learning about your customers, you can address their needs and thus boost your sales. Business intelligence collects and analyses data concerning the behaviour of your customers, the efficiency in every stage of product development processes, and market trends. It is also helpful in improving your post-sales customer service, which significantly impacts building your brand and gaining new customers.

7. Save business history

Prescriptive analytics is one of the most essential features a business intelligence tool can offer. The solution itself does not predict future trends in the market or customer behaviours, but it helps you to estimate future predictions based on historical data. When you store enough information, the tool can merge, analyse, and display critical trends from the past and get you insights on which business operations have led you to past success.

8. Turn goals into results

With accurate real-time information, your company is able not only to establish reasonable goals but to achieve them. Business intelligence provides you with better-quality data, which enables you to develop better strategic awareness. By automating data collection, you can also reduce operating costs and estimate how big you need your team to be to handle challenging tasks. Overall, you learn what kind of goals your company can achieve and what keeps you from turning them into results.

The business intelligence tool is a powerful solution that helps you to make data-driven decisions and thus gain a competitive advantage. It allows you to explore and understand the nature of your company. Analysing data presented in a graphic form boosts the productivity of your company and enables you to grow.