Most brands understand the value of business intelligence as a larger, more nebulous concept. Business intelligence, in itself, comprises many of the complex data points and analytics that brands encounter each day. However, many top companies don’t understand that business intelligence also has value and applications for overall product development.
While predictive analytics and business intelligence can’t formulate a product for you, the umbrella term of business intelligence encompasses analytics, data visualization, data warehouse options, data mining, and much more. By reviewing these disparate data points, it’s easier to get insight into customer preferences, make product adjustments, and leverage data analytics for the consumer’s direct benefit. Here’s what you need to know
Business intelligence tools identify what isn’t working.
If you’re looking for a concise business intelligence definition, it’s a method of data analysis that delivers actionable insights derived from raw data. Often, business intelligence depends on large swaths of incoming data and works to reconcile that alongside your historical data from past business operations. Your business analytics ultimately help each business user make a more informed decision. While you might be tempted to rely on business analytics for strictly financial decisions, the historical data can also help you identify product development bottlenecks and leverage your BI tool to remove them or adapt your lineup to accommodate.
Say, for instance, you run a commercial mattress company, and you’re looking to develop a product like the popular Beautyrest mattress. To start, you should understand that the Beautyrest is also likely a product of BI tools. When you’re in the R&D stage of your product cycle, you can use a BI system to collect and interpret several data points to eliminate common hurdles and production bottlenecks and incorporate analytical processing to review business performance. This helps with the overall product cycle and can even influence business decisions such as developing a mattress for side sleepers or back sleepers, incorporating memory foam or gel foam, or finding ways to tweak a new mattress.
Business intelligence makes it easier to parse customer feedback.
As a business user interpreting customer feedback and reviews, it’s easy to get lost in the finer details that your end-users bring up. It’s also nearly impossible to combine feedback from every customer to develop the hybrid mattress, mobile app, or foodstuff, depending on your target market. With certain BI applications, it’s easier to use your business intelligence system to interpret customer feedback, gain high-level performance metrics, and set insightful predictions for future use cases. That way, even though you have access to all the necessary customer feedback you could need, you can get more accurate business analytics from this information.
Naturally, for most brands, big data offers the appeal of competitive advantage. When you follow business analytics best practices, you’re able to apply useful information and real-time data to make better decisions for your product lineup. This actionable information often leads to greater innovation and further analytic applications. Whether you’re using top BI applications or interested in data science and self-service BI, think of these tools as something of a decision support system. The right BI software should empower your product lineup, not detract from it.
BI software touches on multiple product points.
No matter your product marketplace, you don’t have to be a data science expert or business intelligence analyst to get the most out of tools like machine learning, predictive modeling, and other BI technology. When you incorporate data management and data preparation concepts throughout your product cycles, you’re applying competitive intelligence to each project, no matter the budget. Use your business data more smartly and leverage modern BI to help you meet your data quality and product development goals. You’ll be surprised what a set of methodologies and data sources can do for your business activity.
