While there is much to be said for the admirable traits of hard work and dedication, there’s a good reason why the most successful organisations dedicate themselves to working smarter, not harder. Thanks to technological developments over the last decade, there is no better example of how to apply this mantra than business intelligence software.
In a nutshell, business intelligence software gives organisations the ability to monitor, manage and analyse data relating to business operations with greater accuracy and less manual input. By presenting data streams in digestible and easy-to-understand formats, business intelligence software offers greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of a business – from manufacturing to logistics to customer service. Ultimately, this serves to inform decision making and enables organisations to optimise their activities.
In recent years, business intelligence tools have undergone a seismic shift as artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks like automated predictive insights and natural language processing have been integrated. For example, business users are able to use natural language interfaces to query large data sets and gain insights at the touch of a button.
Similarly, automated data cleansing is an important integration within business intelligence software that takes much of the legwork out of preparing and tagging content in spreadsheets and other software. This frees up team members to step away from tedious and repetitive tasks in favour of those that require genuine human input.
Visualising information
Pretty pictures for the sake of appearances offers little benefit to an organisation but easy-to-understand visualisations that provide genuine insight can be invaluable. Business intelligence software helps to provide high quality data visualisation capabilities, which makes it more straightforward for teams to interpret information and act on those insights accordingly.
Mining data
One of the strengths of business intelligence tools lies in data mining. Powered by AI and machine-learning, the ability of these software solutions to discover patterns in data and draw insights from them has advanced significantly in the last 5 years. Importantly, the very best business intelligence tools can also be integrated seamlessly with warehousing solutions, databases and other systems.
Inventory management
Purchasing, procurement and inventory management is often a case of “rinse and repeat”. But within those ongoing tasks there can be important insights that can be gleaned and acted on with the support of a powerful business intelligence tool that relies less on human endeavour and more on integration of data sources.
Sales intelligence
Organisations can only act on opportunities that they have identified. That almost goes without saying. So, the value of business intelligence in advancing the number of opportunities drawn from data sources can be critical in helping a company gain a competitive advantage.
Having clear and detailed reports to hand when negotiating with potential clients or making decisions within the sales function can be the difference between closing a deal and losing it.
Customer intelligence
The way that businesses interact with their customers has gone digital in a big way. From email campaigns to social media engagement, understanding how best to attract, support and process customers requires powerful solutions – particularly given that no business can provide 24/7 coverage to thousands of users. Instead, social media intelligence and message intelligence tools serve to monitor what customers are saying in real time and give companies the ability to be agile and responsive without draining resources.
Being able to extract topics from these data sources, detect issues, reveal hidden demographics and uncover audience needs can also be hugely important in supporting a business’s retention and prospecting activities.
Ready to incorporate message intelligence into your organisation’s suite of software tools? Find out more by visiting Cortical.io.
Leave a Reply