Business intelligence software

Business Intelligence Software

posted in: Entrepreneurs, Finance

The success of a company depends on its strategies for marketing and customer relationship management, and how it competes and adapts in the market. You need to be able to analyse your organization, your customer’s requirements and what your competitors are doing.

Business monitoring and evaluation activities includes data and text mining, online and offline analytical processing, and business process management. Business intelligence software is a tool for gaining insight from data with speed and power.

With the increasing potential value from data analytics, knowing about software is important for almost any career in business management. Even if you don’t use the software routinely yourself, you need to know its capabilities in order to manage others who do use it.

Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence software is a broad term for a wide variety of applications and platforms used by organizations for the identification, extraction or analysis of business data. The purpose of such tools is to facilitate and support better decision making in the business.

The most popular business intelligence tool is MS Excel, which is used widely across business for tasks that range from simple to highly complex. It’s an example of a tool that is simple in many respects but has the power to be developed for sophisticated, high-power uses.

Use of business intelligence software helps in understanding your own business. However, before it is implemented, there are a number of factors that need to be considered; for instance, the sponsorship and commitment of senior management towards the project, the business objectives, the amount and quality of semi-structured or unstructured data, and the end user acceptability within the organization.

As far as the selection of powerful business intelligence software is concerned, all it requires are the tools that help with the collection of market research data along with the capability of objective assessments. It should fit neatly within your framework for business management, with material implications for decision making.

The point of having this software is to allow sophisticated business analytics to be carried out that supports good decision-making. Analytics can be learned in a business school, such as the Gies College of Business, at both bachelor and masters levels.

Customer Feedback Software

If you want your business to be successful, then understanding your customer’s needs and their satisfaction should be your top most priority. Should should look to welcome all kinds of feedback even, and perhaps especially, if it’s negative. Now, let’s discuss how business intelligence software helps you with that.

At the basic level, this can be achieved by tracking ongoing sales, making after sales services and tracking any other administrative activities related to customers such as periodically conducting short surveys that encompass customer needs, expectations, and satisfaction levels. All such activities can be carried out smoothly if you have powerful business intelligence software. It also provides statistical analysis regarding customer preferences, market trends, sales forecasting, and performance management.

Competitor Analysis

Another important aspect of successful business is to understand your competitor and amend your marketing strategies accordingly. Business intelligence software can be used to gather and manage specific information regarding the competitors demographics, number of products or services that they provide, and their future offers for customers, or any other strengths and weaknesses that the company possesses.

After the required data has been collected, compiled and analysed using business intelligence software, it’s used for business plans; for making appropriate amendments in company’s existing marketing and customer related strategies. These strategies help in working on a company’s weak areas and creating road-maps to compete effectively in the market.

Planning to revitalize your business is certainly important, and it involves the use of BI software for smooth performance of the activity. However, first you need to assess where you lack, what are your weak areas and how you can improve them. Appropriate selection of business intelligence software and its utilization brings you closer to achieving your goals faster than you expect.