Top Benefits of Business Intelligence

Discover the benefits of business intelligence and the right BI solution for your business.

Behind every business is a wealth of important data. This data includes everything from the cost of acquiring new customers to the success of a customer service team. 

Most businesses store this data across countless systems. And, in many cases, the way the data is structured from team to team isn’t the same.

This can make it difficult for businesses to turn their data into actionable insights. The value of data is lost, and critical decision making happens blindly. 

Business intelligence is an important method for unearthing the story behind your data and avoiding value loss. Using business intelligence solutions, organizations of any size can analyze and transform data sets into reports, derive insights, and more.

Use this guide to discover what business intelligence encompasses and how the right solution can transform how you approach organization-wide data.

What is business intelligence (BI)?

Business intelligence encompasses applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices with the aim of improving and optimizing decisions across your business, as well as the overall performance of your business on a day-to-day basis.

How do business intelligence and business analytics support decision making? Simply put, through BI, your company can combine complex data sets and use the resulting analysis and insights as a foundation for future strategy. 

It doesn't end there. Business intelligence aims to turn static data into an understandable story. Through visual reports, data sets that may have offered little meaning to an average user can become something powerful.

For example, if an organization is interested in lowering its customer acquisition costs, BI efforts can combine and analyze costs associated with customer acquisition from all teams, including marketing, sales, and customer experience. Using real-time reporting, business leaders could determine areas where improvement is needed. Strategies could be adjusted for each contributing team while understanding the impact these changes will have on the overall business.

Benefits of using BI tools

For most organizations, accessing data is a messy process. Important information can be siloed in each department. A marketing team might store their data in a marketing platform, while sales teams keep track of important customer information in their customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Simultaneously, an IT department might be tasked with owning overall business data, housing this in data lakes that require high levels of expertise to access or use.

Manually merging all of this data to create actionable insights is unwieldy. Often, data formats are incompatible, or the information owned by each department is conflicting. 

This is where the right BI tool comes in handy. BI tools capture information from multiple sources and make analyzing and reporting on that data intuitive. There are numerous BI tools on the market, most of which share key characteristics that bring the following benefits.

Rapid data analysis and reporting

Business intelligence software is designed to make analyzing and reporting on data sets more efficient than manual processes. By connecting multiple data sources to one BI tool, organizations can gain better insights into the overall performance of their business.

This cuts down on tedious methods of manually uploading spreadsheets for analysis, as data sources can be connected directly to the software. Additionally, even non-technical team members can use business intelligence tools to quickly grab important data and turn it into easy-to-digest reports. 

BI tools, generally, don't require complex coding knowledge and instead utilize drag-and-drop dashboards so teams can put together the custom report they need.

Efficient team collaboration

When leadership wants to see the overall impact of a business strategy, BI tools can provide the information needed for insights across an organization. The end result is that rather than teams compiling reports and analyzing data manually, everyone can come together to collaborate and focus on improving metrics. Using a shared BI solution, every team member can feel better prepared to discuss the impact their particular efforts are having on the greater story.

Many teams use BI tools to build dashboards that can be accessed daily. These dashboards are a great jumping-off point for a morning meeting or weekly discussion. Every team will come to the table with the same information, making it easier for innovation to take place.

Decisions driven by real-time data

One key BI benefit is the fact that decisions can be driven by the use of real-time data. Manual gathering of data and connecting the dots between departments leads to significant lag times. This makes it hard to make intelligent, timely, data-driven business decisions. With a BI tool, businesses can access real-time reports that reflect what is currently happening across an organization.

This becomes especially critical for companies where seasonality significantly affects business processes. Rather than looking back at last quarter’s data and trying to make decisions for today, leadership can see what is happening right now and make decisions that will meet current customer and employee needs.

Better insights into the customer experience

Too often, customer experience teams are left reacting to issues, rather than proactively solving them. Using BI tools, customer experience teams can create reports encompassing the entire customer journey.

This can help teams discover where issues are born and how they might mitigate them long before a customer is unhappy. With BI tools, customer experience (CX) teams can collaborate with support, marketing, sales, and product teams to identify areas for improvement early on, creating a more positive experience for customers.

Empowered employees

In many organizations, when an employee wants to access data, they need to go through an IT team member or analyst. This can lead to massive backlogs, delaying access to data. When it comes to meeting key performance indicators (KPIs), employees who are stuck waiting on reports can become frustrated. Opportunities they could have taken to ensure they meet goals are missed because they didn’t have the data they needed in time.

On the flip side of the equation, this labor can become a massive time drain for IT professionals tasked with continually providing data sets. Constantly responding to data pulls can cause other technical debt to increase.

Through a BI tool, all employees are empowered to access the data they need the moment they need it. Employees can discover key information in real-time that can help them reach their department or role-specific goals. This also frees up analysts and IT professionals to focus on higher-value tasks.

Reliable and trustworthy data

Teams storing their data in silos can create conflicting data sets within an organization. Bad data can then, in turn, lead to the wrong business decisions. By combining data sources into one powerful tool, data can be cross-checked both internally and externally.

This can help clean data across personas, such as customers, employees, sales, and marketing. The end result is that the data leveraged for business strategy is more reliable and can be governed in one easy location. Something as simple as ensuring that customer information matches across all management systems can improve marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.

A leg up on the competition

One of the key advantages of business intelligence is that it enables businesses to become more competitive in crowded markets. Using BI tools, leadership can understand the bigger picture as well as the overall performance of their business.

Seeing how every moving part of the business contributes to either success or demise can help leaders build better roadmaps for the future. Additionally, these reports can be turned into meaningful stories rather than static spreadsheets. A visual dashboard can help inspire new ideas, as large data sets become easily digestible viewpoints.