Regardless of the size of your business or the customer you serve, the information and insight you can glean from a Business Intelligence (BI) tool can transform your company and the experience you deliver. And the good news is that BI is no longer just for big enterprises with teams of developers and data analysts. More and more BI platforms now have “low code” functions and simple integration tools that get you up and running with insights and dashboards without dedicated staff or expertise. So, what are you waiting for?
Urban legend has it that McDonald’s once proclaimed themselves to be a “training company”, not a “hamburger company”. Whether or not that’s precisely true – the notion is a powerful one. In creating Hamburger University (yep, it’s a real thing) they understood the strategic importance of strong training to ensure consistency in their operations and customer experience across the globe.
Similarly, BI platform tools make it possible for every company to become a data-driven company – regardless of size or industry. And that’s inspiring. Because with all the digital tools, apps, and services in every Canadian business, there is no shortage of data being created daily. The trick is to make use of that data to inform and improve your sales, marketing, and operational decisions. You get insight into customer behaviour and team performance to improve your competitive agility.
How We Use BI To Deliver Better Service & Client Experience
Think about it … the very nature of business reporting is retroactive and backwards looking.
It usually goes like this: we wait for results at the end of a period (weekly, monthly, quarterly). We gather the data that matters from the relevant systems and people, and we present it in a report to the folks that care. Sometimes it’s sales performance for the boss to review. Sometimes it’s an activity and services report to a customer or client. Usually that report is a document, often with charts and other data visualizations to tell a story about what happened in the past period. And then we repeat that exercise for the next period. Reports piled up somewhere – doing nobody any good—and our view is always focused in the rearview mirror.
Leveraging Business Intelligence tools to create live data dashboards for your key systems helps you change your view to the present and to the future of the business.
How We Use BI To Deliver Better Service & Client Experience
Before IT Weapons invested in a BI platform, our own monthly and quarterly IT infrastructure health reports for clients used to take dozens of effort hours from cross-functional teams.
Every. Single. Time.
By the time the data was gathered, analyzed and put into a report, it was getting stale. We often delivered information and insight weeks after a period ended.
If we’re honest upon reflection, not terribly useful for an IT leader who relies on fast access to accurate information to make technology decisions for her organization. So, we invested in a powerful BI platform to automate the collection of data and present visualizations and real-time dashboards for key areas of our services. Things like server and storage capacity levels, network performance, service and project statuses and more.
The result was a customized dashboard portal for our clients that we now call our Insight Hub. It now lays at the heart of our entire service delivery framework. It liberated so many of our team members from the repetitive tasks of data collection, so they could focus more on the analysis and recommendations that really matter to our clients.
The BI platform also empowered our clients to access the information and insight they need, when they want – rather than merely at periodic intervals as part of a quarterly or monthly meeting rhythm with us. Self-service options for insight and information makes for a much better client experience.
Empower Better Decisions & Boost Your Confidence with Business Intelligence
The proof is everywhere when it comes to the value of Business Intelligence tools for your business. They can help you reduce and control costs across various parts of your company. They make it easier for your leadership group to find and share meaningful insights with hundreds of data visualizations, built-in AI capabilities, tight Excel integration, and prebuilt and custom data connectors.
Business Intelligence tools can deliver dynamic real-time reporting on the health and risk profile of so many parts of your operations and customer engagement. It’s like having a GPS in your car rather than merely a map in the glove compartment (like those old Excel reports you keep creating). A BI initiative can help you plan your progress, adjust for changes along the way, and pivot before trouble slows you down.
You’ve got the data, it’s time to do something with it. We couldn’t be happier that we did.
