How Business Intelligence Can Help You to Better Understand Your Customers

Introduction

The market is growing rapidly and the data becomes huge and from multiple resources, which means that the demand for user-friendly analytics tools is growing too. From here, the need for business intelligence systems arises to help make sense of the organizational data. This paper should help identifying the role of BI in customer relationship management and how it becomes vital to use such intelligent tools in the crazily growing data age.

Business intelligence (BI) is the use of computing technologies (applications and software) to collect business data from multiple resources and analyze it then transform it into useful insights that help managers and owners to take the right actions in order to improve the business performance and meet the goals required to business success. The need for BI emerged in the latter part of the 20^th century and it has become an integral aspect of the decision making processes.

Business Intelligence can help the company in understanding its customers in order to improve its relationship with them, such as faster conversion of potential into actual clients, reducing the number of outgoing customers and increase sales to existing customers, and that in its turn will increase sales and revenue (Habul & Pilav-Velic, 2010). This paper will discuss some of the techniques BI uses in improving the relationship with customers, but first, it will explain the concept of BI system and the role of each component.

Figure 1 shows a conceptual model of Business Intelligence in e-business, this mode defines e-business as implementation of any electronic transaction-related activities from enterprise external environment, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Point of Sale (Pos), and so on. After the data is gathered from the web store and stored in a central database, business intelligence converts the data into information and knowledge that can be used for enterprise decision-making. Technologies used include extraction, transformation and load (ETL), data warehousing, data mining and data analysis. The results provide an overall view of e-business data flow patterns in visualized form such as dashboards, reports, graphs, alerts and so on. The technologies used in business intelligence are further described in the next section (Sheng Hooi, 2012).

Figure 1.

Conceptual model of business intelligence in e-business (Ranjan, 2012)

Architecture Of Bi

Business Intelligence has four components: a data warehouse and its source data, business analytics – a collection of tools for manipulating, mining and analyzing data, business performance management (BPM) tools for monitoring and analyzing performance, and a user interface (Sheng Hooi, 2012).