Business Intelligence: Making Better Use of Customer Data
By Allan Pulga
It’s one thing to gather customer data, but using it to better your business is entirely another. Making the most of your “business intelligence” involves analysis and careful distribution of information, according to the BI pros behind Business, The Ultimate Resource.
“Make (customer data) available to the right people,” they say, in an excerpt released last month by A&C Black Publishers. “Review data and focus on questions important to your business. Where possible, create a data analysis team to be responsible for identifying the data required, collecting it, analyzing it, and distributing it.”
Get the right BI software. The article suggests retailers can use BI software to speed up and simply the data analysis process. Good software programs include selective reporting processes, which allow you to select the right data for different audiences within the company and to customize reports. “It this way, people get the level of information they need.”
Create a data analysis team. Form a network of people in the company who can tell you what questions need to be answered and quantified. They should understand what metrics are important to the business and how these are created applied. These are the people who should feed information to the rest of the organization.
Make data accessible. Ensure the reports can be exported into tools like spreadsheets, graphics and slides and decide how often you need to provide analysis. “To save time, you may be able to automate the more frequent processes and keep the level of analysis simple,” says the article. Most people just want the highlights – your users can drill down through the data to get more details.
Track customer satisfaction. “Effective business intelligence allows you to identify early indicators of customer dissatisfaction, such as late shipments and the reasons behind complaints, returns, and claims.” Customer service teams can use this information to be more responsive, making efforts to increase retention rates of high-profit customers, spot early indicators of customer dissatisfaction and maximize the profitability of each service relationship.
Measure the cost of service relationships. Companies can adjust pricing based on how returns, order changes, claims and other factors affect the bottom line. When the true cost of a service relationship is known, pricing can be adjusted to increase profitability.
Measure all customer-facing activities. The metrics should also be applicable to all customer channels and distribution media – marketing, customer services, or sales activities. “This allows you to monitor the effectiveness of customer marketing or communication programs: for example, comparing the cost per lead on the Web versus direct mail, or cross-selling over the Web compared with the call centre,” says the article.
Develop high-profitability strategies for marketing. “Business intelligence tools can be the key to developing highly profitable marketing strategies.” Software allows you to understand and analyze effective marketing campaigns or profit levels by customer. Marketing teams can use the software to explore any combination of data – like revenue by customer, product or region – making it easy to spot trends. It also provides access to transaction-level data, to find information about what could be driving trends.