For Part 1 of this series, please click here.
And for Part 2 of the series, click here.
Once you understand the foundations of business intelligence and how to interpret data through visualizations, there are plenty of practical applications for BI in the workplace—whether you’re in sales, marketing, human resources, finance or management (or any other department that works with data).
With traditional BI, business users would send a request to the IT team and typically wait several hours or days to get a response. But BI has come a long way since then. Today’s BI platforms are designed for regular business users—not just data analysts—so they’re user friendly and provide access to near-real-time insights.
For example, self-service BI is “an approach to data analytics that enables business users to access and explore data sets even if they don’t have a background in BI or related functions such as data mining and statistical analysis,” according to TechTarget. That means you can query, analyze and visualize data on your own, without having to get the IT team involved.
There’s also embedded BI, which embeds analytic capabilities directly into applications you already use in the workplace, which means you don’t have to toggle between different applications—it’s just part of your regular workflow. It’s also easy to create and share reports, so colleagues and departments can coordinate their efforts—based on the same data—rather than operate in silos.
When it comes to practical applications for BI in the workplace, the world is your oyster. Not only can you use BI to ask questions and query data, but you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress in meeting your goals—including what isn’t working.
Say, for instance, a marketing campaign doesn’t seem to be producing the expected results. You could do a deep-dive into the data to figure out what’s going on and course-correct if necessary. If an anomaly is impacting your business—such as a major supply chain disruption or natural disaster—you could adjust your tactics to rapidly respond to those conditions.
BI Use Cases for Sales and Marketing
If you’re launching a new product or service, you’ll want to know which marketing campaigns are driving the best results. For example, you may be wondering if certain campaigns are landing better with certain customer segments, or if you need to do more advertising over certain social media platforms. That’s where BI can help, especially when used in conjunction with customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Customer Segmentation: This allows you to segment customers with shared characteristics, such as demographics, socio-economic status or buying behavior, so you can more effectively tailor product offerings and marketing campaigns to the right customers at the right time.
Ecommerce Personalization: You can use customer segmentation for A/B testing to personalize marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement and conversion rates. For example, you could offer personalized perks to your most loyal customers.
Churn Analysis: You can also identify customers who’ve stopped doing business with your company or are at risk of leaving. By identifying sources of customer dissatisfaction, you can implement retention strategies—and then measure whether those strategies are successful.
Optimizing Product Placement: By analyzing a customer’s preferences and purchase history, you may be able to discover patterns in buying behavior that can then be used to optimize promotions, cross-selling, upselling and even product placement.
Sentiment Analysis: By analyzing customer sentiment from surveys, reviews, social media and other unstructured data sources, you can gain insight into how your brand is perceived. You can then use those insights to improve products, services or marketing strategies.
Other BI Use Cases
From optimizing your supply chain to hiring employees, BI has the potential to transform almost any department in your organization. It can be used to improve strategic planning and decision-making processes, boost organization efficiency and employee productivity, and help retain customers, increase sales and reduce costs.
Here are some common use cases and how BI can help:
Supply Chain Optimization: Using BI, users can look for patterns and trends to make data-driven decisions about inventory needs and measure their success over time.
Inventory Management: Using BI, users can look for patterns and trends to make data-driven decisions about inventory needs and measure their success over time.
Quality Control: Users can analyze sensor data on the shop floor or production line to optimize workflows, predict future maintenance needs and ensure products meet quality standards.
Fraud Detection: BI can be used to identify potential risks, flag anomalies and detect suspicious transactions to help prevent fraudulent activities.
Employee Performance: Line-of-business managers can use BI to improve the performance of their teams, while HR managers can use it to streamline recruitment and retention.
These are just some of the potential use cases for BI—the sky is the limit.
BI isn’t just for data analysts, and it’s not just for large multinational corporations. Find out how Wyn can empower users with self-service BI and interactive dashboards to quickly find important insights and make impactful business decisions.
Vawn Himmelsbach
Vawn Himmelsbach is a writer and editor specializing in enterprise IT, writing for national newspapers and technology trade magazines on everything from AI to zero-day threats. She also spent three years working abroad as an Asian correspondent, covering all things tech.
