Business Intelligence: The Catalyst for Profitable Customer Relationships

It’s a mad rush out there for acquiring new customers and retaining the ones you already have. Let your guard down and you’ll lose them to the competition. Overdo it and you may end up burning a whole lot of money for small returns.

Business Intelligence should empower enterprises to control the flow of their finances in a manner that goes beyond basic accounting. Visibility of your finances is the lever that controls –

• Marketing budgets
• Hiring budgets
• Digital spends
• Discounts and deals
• Incentives

Choosing the quantum of each of the above depends on the quality of business intelligence to tell you –

• Who your profitable customers are?
• What is their share of your customer base?
• What makes them profitable?
• Which of your product offerings are most attractive to them?

The reason businesses struggle to answer these questions and improve customer profitability is that information pertaining to the customer journey is spread over various transactional databases. That’s because different sets of tools are used for their respective merits. For instance, you may choose a demand side platform to tap your customers, but rely on Google Analytics to measure effectiveness.

From an analysis perspective, challenges are posed by the different ways in which data is saved by each tool. No two tools follow the same format for recording events. Even with the best data talent, analyzing such data (we are talking millions of rows and tons of unstructured data) is a painful and lengthy process.

Businesses who want to deploy data-driven initiatives, not only have to comprehend with scarcity of qualified data scientists, but also deal with weeks and months of delays owing to data wrangling woes. And hiring data scientists worth their salt is anything but cheap.

Notwithstanding such challenges, the fact remains that business leaders need all the information they can get about customers, wherever their position in the sales funnel might be. They need to be able to take actions that –

• Help retain and acquire customers
• Convert unprofitable customers into profitable ones
• Reduce or eliminate losses resulting from risk prone decisions
• Help in re-pricing or re-packaging products and services
• Ensure that the most profitable customers are always satisfied

There is no dearth of business intelligence tools/solutions to speed things up and get the job done. However, some of the common things that go against the popular ones are –

• They are ridiculously expensive
• They are not as easy to use as they are made out to be
• They have limitations – nothing over a few GB, no more than these X rows or Y columns
• Findings are not easy to share and stops your team from collaborating
• They give high level insights but granular insights are hard to come by

This is where DataScout makes all the difference, it’s an intuitive business intelligence tool that’s been designed with business users in mind. It has all the powerful features found in Tableau and Paxata, but well within the reach of small and medium enterprises.

Its drillable dashboard gives users complete control over the insights they want. For instance, a sales manager reviewing real-time regional sales performance can instantly drill down to city level and track hot deals to coach respective sales reps.