Illustration of visualization in business intelligence

4 Types of Business Intelligence Leaders Need Now

Business intelligence is defined as a process of collecting and processing business information to derive insights and make profitable business decisions. Smart business owners and leaders rely on a variety of business intelligence to make better decisions. With more digital tools at our fingertips than ever before, it’s important for business leaders, especially small business owners, to tackle future business decisions with a new arsenal of weapons.  In this article, we’re going to focus on 4 types of business intelligence leaders need now.

What business intelligence is and what it accomplishes

Business intelligence helps organizations become data-driven enterprises, improve performance and gain competitive advantage. It enables organizations of all types and sizes to:

  • Improve ROI by understanding the business and intelligently allocating resources to meet strategic objectives.
  • Unravel customer behavior, preferences and trends, and use the insights to better target prospects or tailor products to changing market needs.
  • Monitor business operations and fix or make improvements on an ongoing basis, fueled by data insights.
  • Improve supply chain management by monitoring activity up and down the line and communicating results with partners and suppliers.

4 types of the most needed business intelligence

1. Website visitor behavior

It’s not enough to simply know how your website visitors arrived on your home page (or any other page on your company’s website).  It is equally important to analyze their visitor behavior, from how fast they scrolled your pages to exactly how they experienced – and likely absorbed – the content on your web pages.  For this aspect of intelligence gathering, we recommend Inspectlet and Hotjar. Both provide visitor session recordings so you can make better judgments about your website and blog content and its ability to achieve the conversion rates you’re looking for.

Session recordings are also a great way to determine if your site is lacking some type of content (visual or messaging) that visitors expect to see. Again, that can help you improve your brand messaging and conversion rates.

2. Customer sentiment

Online surveys remain the most reliable, economical, and widely-used method to reach a larger audience for data collection. The major benefits of using an online business intelligence gathering platform are a real-time analysis of the results, cost-efficiency, ease of use, and flexibility. That’s why we’ve built survey and customer review capabilities into our online appointment scheduling software, EZnet Scheduler®.

Survey results contribute to analyzing what customers feel about the current status of the product or service, areas for improvement, and customer expectations and needs. All of these insights enable companies to make changes, implement strategies, and become more customer-centric organizations.

When you stop to really think about it, a form is a type of survey because forms are generally used to collect specific information from a respondent in each field, unlike surveys which are used to gather generalized data such as opinions, attitudes, values, etc.

For example, when a prospective customer signs up to either buy a subscription to EZnet Scheduler or to get a 15-day free trial, they fill out a form in which they are required to enter their name, the industry their company operates in, and other information that enables us to build a profile of our “typical” customer. That, in turn, enables us to tweak everything from our website messaging to our pricing model to our customer service approach.

3. Visual data

In the context of business intelligence software, data visualization is a fast, effective method of transferring information from a machine to a human brain. The idea is to place digital information into a visual context so that the analytic output can be easily deciphered by humans. Think pie and bar charts, which are some of the earliest examples of data visualizations. And heatmaps.

Heatmaps, which are enabled in tools like Inspectlet and Hotjar, enable you to visualize your website engagement — clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior — to illustrate things like the average drop-off point on your blog posts or what your users expected to be clickable content.

4. Social media tracking

It is as important to monitor your social media traffic and engagement as it is to evaluate your website and blog traffic and visitor behavior. While all social platforms have built-in analytics tools, you can go way beyond that with a tool like Keyhole.

Keyhole enables you to get into the nitty-gritty of data gathering. Unlike traditional trackers that let you find individual mentions, Keyhole goes deeper to find trends, insights, and analyses of your preferred hashtags, keywords or accounts.

Another impressive feature of Keyhole is that Keyhole lets you see data in real-time and visualizes it as heatmaps to visualize your global impact. But on top of all of that, Keyhole also lets you see all of your competitors, too. By getting key benchmarking metrics as well as competitive intelligence, Keyhole can help you beat the competition.

About EZnet Scheduler

EZnet Scheduler® is a cloud-based, SaaS appointment scheduler with built-in resource management and credit card processing functionality. Our advanced data security guarantees the safety of your data and your customers’ data.  That’s why Software Advice rates us as one of the best for value, quality, and features.

EZnet Scheduler screen shots
          EZnet Scheduler is accessible on all devices, Windows/Android or Apple.
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