17 Benefits of Business Intelligence

#1 Increased revenue

Starting off with an obvious one.

Increasing revenue is one of the biggest benefits of business intelligence.

It is likely the most important goal for any business.

BI software enables you to establish KPIs that align with the business strategy.

This provides visibility into your business performance and ROI.

When you’re using BI effectively, you are far more likely to see your profit margins increase.

Providing an improved business performance.

#2 Reduced costs

BI software is a critical tool to find ways to cut costs down.

It can collate financial data from all areas of the business and note the ones with the highest outgoings.

Find creative ways to reduce spend to help with your profit margins too.

#3 Competitive advantage

Track the sales and marketing performance of your competitors, creating ways to differentiate your products and services.

Handling a large amount of quality data effectively will also give you a competitive edge.

Utilising BI tools, you can budget, plan and forecast far more effectively than your competition.

#4 Speed of decision making

As a business, you make key decisions all the time.

Making decisions is heavily reliant on the data you had at the time.

If the data is not accurate or slow to be seen, it can have a detrimental impact on decision making.

By using BI, you can leverage data to ensure key stakeholders instant access to the information they need, at the right time.

Ultimately, improving time-to-decision.

#5 Operational efficiency

Measuring and monitoring performance is important for all businesses.

BI tools cover key metrics such as:

• Employee satisfaction
• Employee performance
• Employee productivity

This will inevitably encourage better operational behaviour.

#6 Data-driven business decisions

For example:

#7 Data quality

Business that collect, update, and create quality business data will make informed business decisions.

With business intelligence systems, you can combine different data sources to create the “big picture”.

According to Accenture,

#8 Boosts productivity

Business intelligence tools can be critical to ensure competitiveness and productivity.

With BI solutions, you can encourage more intelligent responses to trends in material usage, production, supplier information, staff, and more.

#9 Employee satisfaction

Business intelligence tools are designed to be scalable, providing data solutions to:

• Departments who need it
• Employees who crave data

It should provide a seamless and intuitive user experience for non-technical users to look at internal data.

#10 Identify market trends

Businesses can develop a competitive advantage by identifying new market trends and establishing a strategy based on data generated, providing valuable business insights.

You can leverage external market data with existing data to detect new sales trends by:

• Analysing customer data
• Analysing market conditions
• Raising existing and potential business issues

#11 Increased margins

You can use BI tools to analyse inefficiencies and help expand margins for your business.

For example:

Use BI to find bottlenecks in your sales team processes, identifying sales weaknesses.

Once found, you can develop better strategies to be more cost effective.

Alternatively, you could distribute budgets into the more efficient business processes.

BI helps you find these issues, so you can react quickly.

#12 Market leadership

Business analytics and accurate reporting speeds up processes and unlocks insights you can turn into actions.

With these insights, companies identify buying patterns, understand internal and external markets, adopt new technologies before everyone else 😉

Making you a market leader.

#13 Customer behaviour insights

Business intelligence tools are key to identifying behaviour patterns from your customers.

BI is great for marketing.

To deliver greater customer satisfaction, you can optimise your marketing campaigns based on previous customer purchases and responses.

#14 Identify new opportunities

Through analysing strategies, competitive analysis, and marketing campaigns with BI software, you can create significant insights and reports to identify sources of high ROI and gain that competitive edge.

Revenue growth is vital to any business.

#15 Foster a data culture

Utilise BI tools to manage the data for your business.

Data loss and manipulation is very common for businesses.

It’s important to keep data centralised and under control.

With a business intelligence solution, you can ensure that the right people have access to the right data.

#16 Increase collaboration

It’s important for different departments to work together seamlessly.

With BI, departments can share insights and collaborate to encourage growth within the business.

#17 Customer experience

Most businesses obtain customer feedback in real time.

This information can help businesses retain customers and reach new ones.

It's also a great way to receive constructive criticism to help the company to grow.

BI tools could help your business to identify trends from your customers, which help customer experience employees anticipate and deliver better customer satisfaction.