Handling a business can be overwhelming, especially when the business owner is left to handle every aspect. One of the best ways to take some load off is using software in specific operational areas. One of such areas is business intelligence.
Business intelligence involves the use of processes and applications designed to take all your unique business quirks into account before processing your raw data to offer you a well-thought-out, complete, and customized solution. It focuses on data analytics and any other form of analysis your business requires to meet goals. Continue reading to further understand what BI software is and how it can help.
What is business intelligence?
When asking what is business intelligence software, you also need to ask, what is business intelligence? Understanding the concept allows you to know what the tools help with and what they can achieve once employed. Whether short-term or long-term, the foundation of all businesses is business intelligence. BI and its tools don’t apply to a single kind of analysis but rather a series of intelligence tools and processes working together to interact with relevant insight from your organization’s raw data. The data collected and explored ultimately helps in business decision-making, optimizing overall business performance, and getting ahead of competitors.
How does BI software work?
In many organizations, data is retrieved and stored in varying places, making data-tracking very difficult. The inability to streamline data sets or information from the different data sources makes decision-making hard and close to impossible. With BI platforms, you quickly gain access to accurate information. Their process involves retrieving data from all your sources, integrating them into a single platform for thorough analysis and processing.
Your data sources can be from sales analytics or marketing, operations performance, or customer relationship management. Typically, BI software displays all data reports in a highly visual manner for better understanding. It might be in graphs, charts, and other data visualization formats.
Why use business intelligence software?
Described below are a few benefits that come with using BI software.
Increased Revenue
Business intelligence software delivers up-to-date information, which helps your stakeholders ask better questions concerning what is working and what’s not working in your business. They can compare and contrast across different dimensions, allowing them to identify the business’s shortfalls quickly and easily.
Accurate and Timely Reporting
Using various data sources, from operations, finance, and even sales data, your employees can employ customized reports or templates to better monitor your company’s KPIs. The reports generated with help from business intelligence software are produced in real time, using only the most relevant data. The data reports are displayed in tables, charts, and graphs, making them highly interactive for all stakeholders, whether technical or nontechnical. The high level of interaction allows business users to play with the many variables to create different outcomes even faster.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
BI programs allow you to better understand the patterns and behaviors of your customers. They do this by collecting real-time customer reviews and translating the raw data into understandable patterns you can study to identify customers’ buying patterns. With such data insight, you can create strategies that help businesses anticipate customers’ needs and deliver better service. This ultimately helps your business possess a competitive advantage, retain customers, and reach new ones.
Better Data Quality
Data handled manually often comes with errors and discrepancies. Even though there’s no such thing as squeaky-clean data, business intelligence tools do reduce the occurrence of errors and discrepancies. These tools and applications aggregate your different data sources, collecting, updating, and creating quality data that delivers a fuller picture of what’s happening in your business.
All in all, employing a BI tool means your organization listens to its customers, studies the competition, and improves its overall operations, ensuring that better strategies are implemented, resulting in increased revenue.
