Business analytics involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting conclusions from the vast array of data available today. These days, businesses utilize data analytics tools to determine how they can leverage them to solve business issues and increase efficiency and productivity. Almost every business out there has a keen interest in business analytics. It helps them change the way they make decisions. But, why has its popularity suddenly increased? Why is there a high demand for business analytics professionals everywhere? The reason behind such a thing is need, affordability, and availability. When starting with the first reason, businesses need to innovate to stay three steps ahead of their competition. Plus, today’s customers have increased demands. So, to survive in such a cutthroat market, managers and business owners need to make tough decisions to respond to various market-driven forces.
When talking about affordability and availability, companies continue to collect enormous data. It is down to the recent technological advancements and the affordability of hardware and software. They have all the data with them, but they direly need analytics professionals who can draw conclusions that make sense to have a headstart against the competition. While saving money and time, business analytics will gain more popularity amongst numerous businesses. Let us look at some other reasons why companies swear by business analytics. You can see them listed down below:
It Enhances Customer Experience
To ensure a business can retain its existing customers, they give business analytics a go. For example, it allows companies to analyze a customer’s interaction online and their previous purchasing habits.
It can be as simple as changing icon placement or notifying the customer with a pop-up message when they add a product to their online cart. When a business makes such improvements and additions to its website, it promotes brand loyalty. It improves the overall online experience.
It Allows Businesses to Conduct a Competitor Analysis
Sure, an online analytics degree will teach you all the basics and advantages of business analytics. Still, it is through real-life experiences that businesses can learn its actual importance. Nowadays, every business knows about their competitors. An effective way to stay miles ahead of them is by knowing about their strategies, what they have in store for the market, product development, their USPs, etc.
Through SWOT analysis, businesses can acquire information on all the things mentioned above. They can then use such information to gauge where they stand in the market against their competitors. Knowing so will allow them to adjust their strategies to remain competitive and relevant in the challenging marketplace.
It Improves Product Management
When talking about retail companies, they have millions of product ideas and actual products in the production pipeline. So, who can they decide the release-timing of a particular one? Yes, the answer to such an age-old question is by utilizing business analytics. Through its use, businesses can analyze the importance of products depending on their season and customer demand.
They utilize the information presented to make better, more informed decisions about the launch of new products and the seasons they might sell in. It will eventually reduce wastage and overstocking of inventory.
It Reduces Manufacturing Costs
When it comes to the extreme usage of analytics, Intel is a company that does it better than everybody else in the market. Whenever they came out with new technology, their quality control department conducted more than 19,000 tests on every chip they manufactured.
After predictive analysis came into play, they would always know what chip required which particular tests before they launched them. Using such a strategy, they saved around 3 million dollars in manufacturing and testing costs. So, in short, business analytics will cut down manufacturing costs.
It Improves Efficiency
Employees are not the only ones that need to be efficient. Businesses can always analyze their other resources and processes to gauge their performance. For example, a grocery store could cut down its refrigeration costs by analyzing its cooling unit’s temperature. They can do it by finding their cooling unit’s temperature if it is below the optimum level. If it is, they can set it toa higher degree, which will decrease power usage without affecting the food quality.
Businesses can consider such an example and conduct a thorough analysis of their entire business process to know what is functioning correctly and not.
It Allows Businesses to Identify Frauds
Businesses, especially finance firms, can reap countless benefits by using business analytics. However, the biggest one is identifying fraud. They can analyze a previous customer’s transaction habits to identify any risk of potentially fraudulent purchases. They can also gauge the level of risk a client can present them via a thorough predictive analysis.
Such a thing will reduce losses, identify potential security threats, detect fraud, and promote longer-lasting customer relationships.
It Adds Value to Advertising
A marketing strategy is an expensive investment. It is why marketers need to stay on their toes and know techniques to provide them the best ROI. It is why analytics experts suggest that marketers utilize A/B and C split tests. When talking about online advertising, every landing page, product description, and even something as simple as a pop-up gets evaluated and adjusted to ensure the best results.
Furthermore, the product placements on a webpage also get assessed to know about the best location, so the buyers don’t miss them. Once everything is proper and up to the mark, it will drive more engagement and sales.
Overcome Obstacles
Whenever a company faces obstacles, its first thought is to halt all business operations till things get better. However, something like this can lead to downtime, which results in losses related to money and product production.
Through business analytics, companies will know about obstacles before they even come in their way or make more effective decisions to solve them. They can also analyze past issues to find out patterns to know when a particular problem will plague their operational processes.
Conclusion
Business analytics proves to be powerful productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness improving tool for business everywhere. In the light of such a trend, experts believe that the usage of business analytics will increase by 71 percent over the next three years. And such an increase will be more apparent in the years to come. So, considers the benefits of business analytics mentioned above and incorporate them into your own business. It will allow you to crush your competition and bring in more sales and revenue.
