Getting to Know Your Customers with Business Intelligence

Better products and services will have to be created and strong customer relationships will have to be fostered.  Fortunately, you can leverage the data that you have about your customers to improve customer satisfaction using business intelligence.  By ensuring that your customers are happy now, you can rest assured that the next time they have to pay for a product or service, your company will immediately come to mind.

Leveraging Customer Information

By taking the information that you have and strategizing around what new information to collect, you can use business intelligence to get to know your customers better and make informed decisions on products and services that can help them right now or in the future.  With products and services that are uniquely tailored to the customer, your sales team can leverage the results of your analysis to your company’s advantage.  Anticipating that your customers might be budgeting and offering them a product that will help them cut costs is one way to gain loyalty and repeat business when money is tight.  In addition, being aware of the inevitable for your current consumer base is very important.  As much as companies need to attract new business from a younger generation to stay buoyant, they also need to be aware of the changing needs of their current customers in order to capitalize on their hopefully improved purchasing power.  By tracking and analyzing customer information, you can anticipate your customers’ needs and desires.

Who can Use Business Intelligence?

Any business that uses an IT system that records and stores data about customer activity, revenue, and profit can benefit from business intelligence.  Your company can use BI to determine how well you measure up to customer expectation and where you are lacking.  Using the information generated by your business intelligence system, you can decide which direction to go to improve your relationship with your customer and your bottom line.  The ability to mine and apply CRM (Customer Relationship Management) principals to your customer data can prove to be invaluable for your sales team regardless of your business’s size.  You can focus in on your customer and present them with options that are more appealing to them right off the bat instead of filtering through a variety of products and services to see which one fits while you have them on the phone or in the store. 

Business intelligence is only as good as the results it produces for a business, but by using the information you get from your customer data, you can see improvement for your company.  The more satisfied your customer, the greater the chance they will remain loyal to your brand.  They will be more willing to recommend your product to their friends and more likely to purchase your product over another company’s when the time comes to buy again.  Business intelligence can help you gain the advantage over your competition by focusing on your customers in addition to your other Key Performance Indicators.