Turning massive volumes of transactional or unstructured data into business intelligence requires specialised tools. These tools can mine data sources and present it to users in a way that can help them make informed decisions that help organisations be more efficient and more competitive.
Information is corporate lifeblood and all businesses need to know how healthy they are and compare your vital signs with your competitors. If you can't put your finger on the data you need when you need it, you risk losing business and the confidence of your customers.
Business Intelligence systems can also be associated with data warehouses or data lakes, essentially database repositories designed to support an organisation's data regardless of where it is sourced from. Data warehouses can contain enormous amounts of information, typically with customer or supplier transactional history at their core.
Business intelligence or data mining tools are used to dig through this information revealing patterns and relationships across business activity and over time. This kind of analysis can help organisations with their strategic and competitive positioning. The benefits may include identifying who the best and worst customers are, which products make the most or least profits, fine-tuning of marketing or pricing policies, the retention of customers and predicting market trends.
Combined with artificial intelligence and natural language query tools, complex or hidden insights can be surfaced or contextualised when particular business scenarios are triggered. For example, an inbound call can recognise a customer's phone number and provide a customer service representative (CSR) with a 360 degree dashboard of the customer's recent sales orders and deliveries, e-mail interactions and open service tickets, with each linked to its source system. The CSR is then empowered to assist the caller quickly and efficiently.
