From customer satisfaction surveys to subscribing to a brand’s newsletter, data is all around us - and it’s the key to making critical business decisions and improving your customer experience. With the global Business Intelligence (BI) market looking to grow to $33.3 billion by 2025, it’s a major element of the digital transformation journey (What is Digital Transformation and Why Do You Need it Now?).

So get ready as we take you on a journey into the world of Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools - what they are, and what they can do for your business.

What is a business intelligence (BI) reporting tool?

A Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tool is a database that pulls and holds all the data from your business systems, giving you detailed insights to help you make data-driven decisions.

What Does it Do?

• • • Collects, processes and presents the data through visual cues, analytics and reports.
    • Transforms the raw data into actionable insights for decision makers to refer to when making important business decisions.
    • Shows your KPIs, operational efficiency, identifies new opportunities, and studies new market trends and patterns.
      
      

Now that we know what a BI reporting tool does, we caught up with our Head of Data & Development, Sam Yap-Choong to share his thoughts on why it’s a crucial element of business success.

"Decision making is often expensive and resource-intensive, so you need to be 100% confident that you’re doing the right thing for your business. BI reports remove all the guesswork out of decision making and gives you the ability to actually draw insights that you can act on - so you can make better decisions which are right for your business."

6 Benefits of using a business intelligence reporting software

1. Fast and Accurate Reporting

From the data your business systems collect, you can build out customised reports to monitor your KPIs. Anything from financial, operational, marketing and sales can be slapped together into easy-to-read graphs, visuals, charts, tables and dashboards.

Having an interactive software lets you filter the variables into a format you can draw insights from. With all this being done in real-time, you’re getting accurate up-to-date data at your fingertips to help with those crucial decisions.

2. Better Quality of Data

Discrepancies and inaccurate data can lead to wrong business decisions, especially when humans handle it manually. BI reporting software comes in clutch by stripping away the mundane time-consuming data collection and creating endless spreadsheets - while also providing highly accurate and good data quality. It brings together all the data from the systems you use and analyses them to give you a complete picture of what’s working, what’s not, and where the business can improve.

3. Enhanced Operational Efficiency

Your business won’t be restricted to using a single platform for everything, and so the data that comes from all these platforms need to integrate to give you the whole picture. With Business Intelligence platforms, you’ll cut down the time you’d spend on manually inputting all the data from your multiple sources. The high quality data gets pumped out at a rapid speed so that you can build timely reports, focus on short and long-term goals, analyse your decisions and see the impact it will have on your business.

4. Informed Data-Driven Decision Making

With real-time and accurate data analytics at your disposal, it’s 5x faster for businesses to make informed data-driven decisions. The easy access to real-time data puts your stakeholders and decision makers in the perfect position to make decisions that ensure business success.

5. Boost in Revenue

Generating and increasing your revenue is an essential aspect of any business, and data-driven decisions can help skyrocket your income. With detailed data that makes you question why something has happened, it allows you to identify weaknesses, find ways to improve through new opportunities, and give your business a boost in the revenue department.

6. Identifying Market Trends

You should always be looking to improve and stay ahead of the competition, and that’s exactly what Business Intelligence reporting software does - it gives you a competitive edge. A boost in revenue allows you to replicate what’s working, as well as identify new market trends that could bring in some serious dough.

The advanced analysis gives you a full scope of what’s effective in the market right now, as well as detecting new things that can become a problem down the road. By spotting this early, you’ll be able to alter and improve your business process, and explore new opportunities of income streams.

We asked Sam for his thoughts on HubSpot’s reporting dashboard, and how it helps Hype & Dexter and our clients. Here’s what he had to say:

"It gives us visibility on conversions. While the end goal for any business is the number of customers, it’s extremely important to understand the customer journey so that we can optimise our clients’ campaigns - thereby boosting revenue numbers and marketing efficiency. With HubSpot’s reporting and analytics, we are able to granulate and understand the customer journey in detail, allowing us and our clients to analyse the strategies in use, and the success and failures that come with them."

Who better to sum it up than our data guru, Sam, himself? So we nudged him for some wise words of wisdom he’d pass on to his younger self if he were looking for a new BI reporting tool.

What advice would you give a business looking to invest in a business intelligence reporting tool?

"You should start by considering how your marketing CRM and data stack is being used, as it’s almost as important as your BI tool. It’s extremely important that both integrate and mesh well so that it’s user-friendly for your users. There’s no point in thinking of them separately as they both need to be considered and used in tandem.

Make sure your BI reporting tool has as much vision over the customer journey as possible, and can easily interpret these numbers into ideas for your users."

If you weren’t sold on the implementation of a Business Intelligence reporting software before checking out this blog, these 6 benefits should convince you to get one right away.

Looking to transform your reporting and analytics, or anything digital for that matter? Give us a call today. We have the expertise to deal with small or big businesses and the passion to take you into the digital space. So get in touch with us and let’s get the ball rolling!