Business intelligence tools are helpful for companies to stay competitive and maximize revenue streams. Organizations at every size and stage use BI software to analyze, manage, and visualize business data with BI reporting.
Here are ten benefits business intelligence software can add to any business:
- Fast and accurate reporting
- Valuable business insights
- Competitive analysis
- Better data quality
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Identifying market trends
- Increased operational efficiency
- Improved, accurate decisions
- Increased revenue
- Lower margins
The Benefits of Business Intelligence Software’s
Fast and accurate reporting:
Employees can use templates or customized reports to monitor KPIs using a variety of data sources, including financial, operations, and sales data. These reports are generated in real time and use the most relevant data so businesses can act quickly. Most reports include easy to read visualizations, such as graphs, tables, and charts. Some BI software reports are interactive so that users can play with different variables or access information even faster.
Valuable business insights:
Businesses can gauge employee productivity, revenue, overall success as well as department-specific performances. It can uncover strengths and weaknesses since BI tools help organizations understand what’s working and what isn’t. Setting up alerts is easy and can help track these metrics and help busy executives stay on top of the KPIs that matter the most to their business.
Competitive analysis:
The ability to manage and manipulate a large amount of data is a competitive edge in itself. Furthermore, budgeting, planning, and forecasting is an incredibly powerful way to stay ahead of the competition, goes way beyond standard analysis, and is also easy to perform with BI software. Businesses can also track their competitor’s sales and marketing performance and learn how to differentiate products and services.
Better data quality:
Data is rarely squeaky clean and there are many ways that discrepancies and inaccuracies can show up – especially with a hacked together “database”. Businesses that take care of collecting, updating and creating quality data are typically more successful. With BI software, companies can aggregate different data sources for a fuller picture of what is happening with their business with BI reporting.
Increased customer satisfaction:
BI software can help companies understand customer behaviors and patterns. Most companies are taking customer feedback in real time and this information can help businesses retain customers and reach new ones. These tools may also help companies identify buying patterns, which help customer experience employees anticipate needs and deliver better service.
Identifying market trends:
Identifying new opportunities and building out a strategy with supportive data can give businesses a competitive edge, directly impact long-term profitability, and gives the full scope of what is happening. Employees can leverage external market data with internal data to detect new sales trends by analyzing customer data and market conditions, as well as spotting business problems.
Increased operational efficiency:
BI tools unify multiple data sources, which help with a business’s overall organization so that managers and employees spend less time tracking down information and can focus on producing accurate and timely reports. Armed with up to date and accurate information, employees can focus on their short and long term goals and analyze the impact of their decisions with BI reporting.
Improved, accurate decisions:
Competitors move quickly and it’s important for companies to make decisions as quickly as possible. Failure to issues with accuracy and speed could lead to lost customers and revenue. Organizations can leverage existing data to deliver information to the right stakeholders at the right time, optimizing time-to-decision with BI reporting.
Increased revenue:
Increasing revenue is an important goal for any business. Data from BI tools can help businesses ask better questions about why things happened through making comparisons across different dimensions and identifying sales weaknesses. When organizations are listening to their customers, watching their competitors, and improving their operations, revenue are more likely to increase.
Lower margins:
Profit margins are another concern for most businesses. Fortunately, BI tools can analyze inefficiencies and help expand margins. Aggregated sales data help companies to understand their customers and empowers sales teams to develop better strategies about where budgets should be spent with BI reporting.
