What do you gain from data-driven decisions

Nowadays, companies around the world implement different business strategies in order to gain a competitive advantage, however one of the most successful tactics is shifting from trusting your gut to analysing data when it comes to making important business decisions.

James Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, once said, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Business data is an infinitely better source of knowledge than your intuition – or even multiple Excel sheets completed manually – as this is highly prone to errors. Business intelligence tools enable you to collect and analyse data in a quick and effortless way. They automate the process of gathering information and provide you with deep insight into your business operations. What can your company really gain from making data-driven decisions?

Benefits of making data-driven decisions

There are many factors that enable companies to succeed, including skilled employees, a healthy work environment and favourable market conditions. However, the real secret of a successful business is making data-driven decisions. Using business intelligence tools enables companies, regardless of their industry, to:

• Gain flexibility – gaining a wide range of business knowledge enables you to become more agile and adjust your company to the ever-evolving market. You can easily follow your business operations as well as the market trends in general and thus be ready to innovate.

• Improve customer experience – with a deeper insight into your customers and their behaviours at every step of their journey, you can effortlessly become more customer-focused and provide excellent customer service to make sure they are willing to build a long-lasting relationship with your company.

• Drive sales – gaining access to real-time business data allows you to provide your clients with exactly what they are looking for. By determining what the most popular products or services you offer are, you can refocus your marketing campaigns and thus gain more clients.

• Detect new opportunities – by collecting and analysing valuable information about your company, its operations and the industry in general, you may find it easier to detect possible errors and spot new or missed business opportunities. Next time they occur, your company will be ready to take them.

• Streamline employee collaboration – when all employees have access to historical and present business data, you can easily build a transparent and healthy work environment. Your team can now reach the same level of business knowledge and improve cooperation.

How to become a more data-driven company

Storing large volumes of data is not enough to gain insights into your business operations, on the contrary, it can often slow down your systems and be highly costly. If you want the data to become valuable, you need to analyse it using suitable tools and implement suitable strategies. In order to collect and analyse business information with minimum effect you need to:

Build a data-driven strategy – analysing all of the data gathered by your organisation is a time-consuming and often inefficient process. Before implementing the necessary tools, try to determine which information your business can benefit the most from and which processes you want to improve. Building a business strategy to make more accurate data-driven decisions will streamline the next steps of the process.

Acquire business intelligence tools – the reason business intelligence has been one of the hottest technology trends for a while now is its simplicity combined with the results it allows to achieve. BI is a set of tools that collect given data and present it in a graphic form for you to better understand it. What makes BI unique is the fact that it does not tell you what to do, it allows you to estimate it yourself whilst gaining deep insight into your business at the same time. You can find out more on Business Intelligence here.

Integrate your systems – it is important to remember that different departments in a company often use separate systems which may lead to inaccurate data reporting. In order to ensure seamless dataflow in an organisation, it is best to integrate the systems as this not only builds a universal source of information for everyone in the company, but it also improves the productivity of your employees by automating multiple tasks. You can discover more benefits of systems integration here.

Today, the market is highly challenging. If you want to stay in the game, it is vital to improve the decision-making processes in your company by relying on an accurate and compelling data source. Introduce business intelligence tools to your organisation and gain insightful information on what you can improve to grow your business.