In the decade of data, every business is a data business. Whether you sell physical products or digital services or anything in between, how you use your data will make or break your organization’s success.
That’s why the importance of business analytics cannot be overemphasized. Business analytics allows you to examine your company's data and make strategic decisions based on the insights gleaned from that data.
When business analytics become widespread and an organization becomes truly data-driven, the benefits are tremendous. More than 87% of executives cite empowering their business users with business analytics as essential to their success. Which makes sense, given the research shows companies leading with data are increasing productivity, customer engagement, and product and service quality by more than 80%.
But knowing where to get started with business analytics isn’t always as clear cut. Here are eleven examples of how to get the most out of your business analytics software.
1. Identifying customer segments
Business analytics can be used to understand customer characteristics, buying behaviors, personas, and preferences. With this information, businesses can clearly identify trends, cohorts, and patterns within their customers to identify commonalities and create similar groupings
2. Enhancing customer experience
It’s not an understatement to say that experience is everything for modern businesses. By analyzing customer data such as purchase history, transaction data, feedback surveys, etc., businesses can identify ways to improve customer experience. This could involve changes in product features, customer service processes, or any number of other areas. Often, this requires breaking silos between datasets and bringing multiple datasets together, often in a modern data stack, to get a true 360-degree view of a customer.
3. Improving operational efficiency
By analyzing data related to operations and processes, businesses can identify opportunities for improvement. This may include streamlining processes, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency. Often, this involves leveraging supply chain analytics to identify opportunities across the entire lifecycle of a product.
4. Developing better products
If you want a great product, you need to understand what your customers want and need. By incorporating business analytics into your product strategy, you can gain deep, meaningful insights into what customers are doing with your product, where they are finding value, points of friction, and additional opportunities to deliver delight, such as by adding embedded analytics.
5. Optimizing pricing models
Getting pricing right is truly one of the most important activities a business undertakes. Too high and you scare away customers. Too low, and you’re leaving money on the table. Business analytics can be used to analyze sales data to identify price points that optimize profitability for a particular product or service. Ideally, this is an ongoing process, continually reevaluated as market conditions evolve, competitors react, and customer sentiments change.
6. Assessing risk and fraud prevention
Businesses can utilize data from various sources such as financial transactions, contracts, and customer feedback to identify potential risks and prevent fraudulent activities. To uncover these activities, business analytics tools can be used to identify patterns in data that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. This helps organizations prevent, detect, and respond to fraud quickly and effectively.
7. Improving product sales performance
Customer expectations and desires are constantly changing. Businesses can better understand what motivates customers to buy certain products or services by analyzing sales trends, metrics, and customer behavior. This helps them optimize sales campaigns and increase revenue.
8. Forecasting future outcomes
By analyzing past data and leveraging predictive analytics, a subset of business analytics, businesses can understand the likelihood of certain patterns or outcomes emerging. This allows them to plan for the future of their operations, prepare for potential risks, and capitalize on opportunities more effectively.
9. Enhance marketing campaigns
Great marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach existing and potential customers, build your brand, and create revenue. But great marketing only happens when data is used to optimize campaigns at every step of the way. By bringing together data around customers, revenue, and other sources, marketers can get fine-grained understanding of which campaigns are working, which aren’t, and why. This helps them create more effective campaigns and maximize the return on their marketing investments.
10. Measuring customer loyalty
Winning a customer once is hard. That’s why you never want to lose one. With the right business analytics tool, customer loyalty and engagement with a company’s products or services can be easily measured. With these insights, organizations can identify ways to increase customer retention and loyalty, reducing overall CAC and creating a healthier business.
11. Streamlining decision making
At the end of the day, the entire point of analytics is to drive data-driven decision making. Business analytics helps companies extract meaning and insights from the massive datasets they have in their cloud data warehouse. Every role today relies on data to make decisions, which is why the most effective business analytics initiatives rely on self-service analytics to put data in the hands of any employee.
Make better data-driven decisions
The above examples are only a few of the many ways business analytics can be used to improve your company. Business analytics is essential for any company that wants to make data-driven decisions. If you want to start using business analytics in your own company, sign up for a ThoughtSpot free trial today. With ThoughtSpot, you'll be able to analyze your data and make better decisions for your business.
