What made Apple what it is today? Innovative thinking? Excellent product? Exceptional marketing? Definitely those. But most importantly it was Business Intelligence. They developed products which met precise needs of their users without their customers even knowing what their needs were, what they really wished deep inside. That’s what every business is aiming for today. To know not just what customers want, but what their needs are. And they are doing that with the help of analytical tools and detailed reports.
Global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market is forecast to reach $18.3 billion in 2017, an increase of 7.3 percent from 2016, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. By the end of 2020, the market is forecast to grow to $22.8 billion.
Humans are generating over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data about themselves everyday with 90% of this information remaining unstructured. To know the customers better, businesses need to have access to this information, study it and take business decisions accordingly, competitively, to emerge as a winner. Thus, they are investing in powerful Business Intelligence reports and analytical tools to derive insights on consumer behavior as well as market trends, and then based on that make more informed decisions accelerating their business performance and improving overall operational efficiencies.
So how are businesses exploiting market intelligence to create their competitive edge?
- Knowing customers: Business Intelligence empowers organizations with rich data resources that helps them understand their customers better and segment them accordingly. From customer preferences to their experiences, customer behavior to their needs, to knowing the source from where the customer consumes the information, to what influences their consumption – organizations are equipped with this information that guides them to make strategic decisions and generate a competitive advantage. In the long run, such information will help in improving business performance, delivering on customer promises, and building long-term customer relationships. Analytics-based customer segmentation has helped companies around the world reduce their customer acquisition costs by over 30%. With such vital knowledge, businesses are also able to minimize the customer attrition rate.
- Determining ROI: BI ensures optimal ROI as businesses can monitor and measure the corporate performance. As per Harvard Business Review organizations have been able to escalate their conversion rates by over 70% through careful use of intelligence reports!
- Predicting Customer Behavior: Predictive Analysis is one of the most recent, and possibly the most exciting of use cases in Intelligence and Analytics. With detailed data available, companies are capable of predicting the actions customers are likely to take, before they have actually taken them. This helps organizations in proactively targeting customers. One of the most striking examples of this is Amazon, which tracks customer purchasing patterns and accordingly recommends products or modifies the offerings that are shown to increase sales.
- Informed and Faster Decision Making: Business intelligence empowers organizations to make informed decisions for internal as well as external purposes rather quickly to help them achieve their business objective. Internally, businesses evaluate individual employee performance against their KPIs to make the necessary improvements. They receive real-time advanced reports to ensure that the company is optimizing their assets effectively whereas externally, strategic decision making is driven by businesses taking into account critical customer information based on current and historical behavior along with future trends and expected demands.
- New Business Opportunities: A robust Business Intelligence solution enables organizations to obtain insights about potential opportunities which may have been otherwise overlooked.
- Reduced Labour Cost: Though hardly the biggest benefit, minimized labor costs are surely one of the tangible benefits of a well implemented BI system. The automated system makes data collection and report generation less laborious and quicker. Manual processes such as training for developing and maintaining reports can also be avoided.
Business Intelligence is a game-changer. With deep insights and real time reporting, enterprises use these tools to enhance their business performance but most importantly to create a competitive advantage. Embee’s Business Intelligence Solutions are custom made to individual business requirements and help you acquire the competitive edge. If you have not yet invested in a dynamic BI tool, now is the time to do it.
