Business intelligence (BI) includes technologies, architectures, and processes that help derive insightful business information from large amounts of both unstructured and structured data.
You can use BI tools to amass data and uncover trends, inefficiencies, and other bits of information that help you understand the very nature of your businesses. Most BI tools also allow you to visualize your findings through reports, dashboards, or data visualizations to make it easier for key stakeholders to make important business decisions based on facts versus gut feelings:
- Boosts ROI: You can use KPIs and growth metrics to measure and enhance business efficiency.
- Recognize opportunities: Find new prospects for profitability by analyzing unstructured data using quantitative and qualitative metrics.
- Remove waste: Find roles and processes that add inflated strain on your resources and identify product features that don't add enough value to the company.
- Encourage smart decision-making: BI software enables you to collect, render, and analyze data with analytic tools that are indispensable for making informed business decisions.
- Improve business productivity: It becomes easier to achieve quantitative objectives like timely delivery targets and monthly sales because you get to follow daily progress and study it for any discrepancies in real-time.
- Better access to necessary information: Built-in visualization tools let you understand historical data and get real-time updates so you can truly understand your business inside and out.
Drawbacks of Business Intelligence Tools
While business intelligence tools can give organizations a competitive advantage, if your organization collects data from multiple sources, many BI tools require data connectors to aggregate all of your information. The more data you have, and the more complex your tech stack is, the longer your time-to-insights can become.
BI tools also often:
- Require deep technical experience to create the queries to answer the users’ questions and don’t provide a self-service visual front-end
- Rely on static legacy BI dashboards
- Provide nice visualizations with small-scale data, but aren’t built for the demands of today
- Great for generating SQL and making queries easy to write by business users, but SQL is often not the best or fastest way to access event data
Major Industries Improve BI Insights with Customer Intelligence
As technology evolves, and the limitations of traditional business intelligence tools are becoming more apparent, a new trend in analytics tech stacks has emerged.
Businesses across multiple industries are looking into continuous intelligence technology--a design pattern that integrates real-time analytics into business operations--to improve the inefficiencies of legacy BI tools.
Customer intelligence works by processing current and historical data in real-time, and unveils what actions can be taken in response to business moments. For example:
Improving Business Intelligence in B2B SaaS
BI tools can assist SaaS-based businesses in a number of ways, including making their data more accessible.
For example, CloudBees, an enterprise software delivery company based in San Jose, CA, implemented a BI + customer intelligence platform to help them analyze the granular details of how its customers were leveraging the CloudBees product suite in real-time.
Historically, CloudBees found it challenging to gain actionable insights from its data because:
- Data from different sources had mismatched field names
- It was necessary for them to build custom extract and load processes
- Had limited "data people" to help provide the data for the data consumers, and to support engineers and developers.
CloudBees paired its existing BI tool, Segment, with a customer intelligence tool Scuba Analytics, to dive deeper into their data. Scuba Analytics made it easier for CloudBees to add new events for tracking, while automating the process of collecting the insight and making it accessible to all internal users.
Improving Business Intelligence in Media
In the media industry, understanding the customer journey, end-to-end, and having immediate access to data is important for understanding content planning.
Turner Broadcasting-owned sports website, Bleacher Report, recently shed some of the niche data analytics and business intelligence tools they previously used, to simplify its data analysis processes.
By implementing a customer intelligence platform into their workflow, they were able to get immediate insights into user behavior and make data-informed decisions on how to plan, create, and share engaging content with their users to:
- Increase conversions
- Reduce time to insights by 95%
Customer Intelligence with Scuba Analytics
Are you looking to move beyond curated dashboards and data prepping to unify business intelligence (BI) and data science for real-time business decisions?
Scuba Analytics is purpose-built to work with time-series data at a large scale and to return results in seconds without aggregation or caching. Scuba Analytics focuses on behavioral analytics across marketing, sales, product, and data science teams to make it easy for your team to share outcomes, results, and feedback and iterate accordingly.
Want to learn more? See how Scuba can help improve your business intelligence analytics.
