If you’re drowning in raw data, business intelligence software is a must-have tool for extracting usable insights. Depending on your needs, there are many business intelligence use cases to get the most out of your chosen solution.

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What This Article Covers

• What Is Business Intelligence?
• BI Use Cases
  • Understand Customers
  • Leverage Prescriptive Analytics
  • Chart Internal Data
  • View and Share Insights
• Business Intelligence Features
• Companies That Use Business Intelligence
• Top BI Software
• FAQs
• Next Steps

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is software designed to manage and analyze data from various internal or external sources. Its insights can help streamline processes and improve key metrics through data-driven decision-making.

There are many different business intelligence tools with several features they share. This inclusivity means there are many different circumstances in which you can apply the functionalities available to you.

BI Use Cases

Companies across industries can benefit from applying business intelligence to internal or external data, whether you’re looking to track and aggregate KPIs, assemble robust customer profiles or otherwise put your data to use.

Here are some common business intelligence use cases:

Understand Customers

For many companies, customer analytics is one of the most powerful features of business intelligence. Insights from customer data enable you to improve customer experiences and overall satisfaction.

Profiles and Demographics

Understanding who your current and potential customers are — and crucially, identifying what separates the two — is the backbone of any sales process. Business intelligence collects and organizes data on the people who interact with your company.

In addition to helping you retain existing customers, interpreting this demographic data can help you intentionally target marketing efforts to reach and convert potential customers.

Habits and Patterns

Business intelligence can also provide information about how customers interact with your business. What percentage of shopping carts on your online store do customers abandon before purchasing? Does viewing one item tend to predict buying another?

Analyzing this data can help you fine-tune your sales processes, guide customers through sales funnels and more.

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Leverage Prescriptive Analytics

One of the most powerful applications of business intelligence is prescriptive analytics. This type of analytics points toward specific actions you can take in response to the data.

Strategic Decisions

A main strength of business intelligence is its ability to draw usable information from raw data. These insights can indicate areas for potential improvements and even guide larger-scale strategic decisions.

Chart Internal Data

Business intelligence also provides tools to analyze data from within your business, from operations and project management to budget or HR concerns.

KPIs

Establishing key performance indicators is crucial for any business. When combined with business intelligence functions like prescriptive analytics, KPIs can be one of any organization’s most valuable data points.

With business intelligence, you can track KPIs, evaluate whether you’re meeting your goals and identify new or overlooked KPIs.

Problem Areas

If your KPIs are lagging or you know there are inefficiencies in your business, but you don’t know where, business intelligence tools could be the answer. You can trace inefficiencies to their sources through descriptive analytics and find solutions.

View and Share Insights

Analytics and data-driven conclusions are only useful if you can understand and communicate them with visual analytics tools. Presentation and interpretation methods are key benefits of business intelligence.

Data Visualization

Business intelligence can provide charts, graphs and other visual aids to interpret data. These can be a major benefit for internal communications and for ensuring that the conclusions provided by business intelligence are understood and put to efficient use.

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Key Features

Most business intelligence solutions share the same core set of features that make them suitable for the use cases discussed above, including:

Data Collection

Business intelligence brings multiple data streams together from different sources, then processes and organizes them into a useful form. This process may involve data mining and ETL functions to prepare for the analytics step.

Analytics

After collecting the data, BI uses analytics to convert it to actionable insights. Depending on the specific features available, these analytics can identify issues, track patterns and build models to help shape strategy.

Dashboarding

Business intelligence tools also provide executive dashboards to display and organize key data feeds. The content can be hosted on cloud-based platforms so your team can access, monitor and edit it as needed.

Companies That Use Business Intelligence

Companies in many industries use business intelligence to collect, analyze and use data, including giants like:

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola uses BI to project sales revenue, analyze spending and forecast economic conditions. It also helps the company evaluate marketing campaigns and decide about introducing new products.

Walmart

Large retail companies like Walmart use BI for reporting and analytics. These companies typically have massive, constantly growing databases, so effective business intelligence operations are crucial.

Business intelligence tools can clean and organize all that raw data, even from disparate sources, and convert it into useful insights for a competitive advantage.

Netflix

Like many streaming services, Netflix applies BI algorithms to track user preferences and recommend shows and films. This strategy provides each user with a customized experience to maximize their satisfaction.

As it produces original content, this viewing data also helps Netflix decide which series to support and which to cancel.

Top BI Software

Plenty of business intelligence tools are out there, each with its own features and benefits. Check out our top picks below:

Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI is a widely used platform in multiple industries. It provides dashboards and other visualizations through an easy-to-read interface and can incorporate data from many sources.

Different versions are available at varying price points tailored to users ranging from individuals to large companies.

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Oracle Analytics Cloud

Oracle Analytics Cloud offers a highly customizable business intelligence solution using AI and machine learning. Users can request analytics reports through natural language queries with chatbot support.

The platform emphasizes predictive analytics, using past and present data to establish trends and build models for the future. Machine learning algorithms also identify trends and generate data visualizations.

MicroStrategy

With a focus on analytics, MicroStrategy is a highly scalable and user-friendly business intelligence tool. It connects to multiple data sources to build your company’s big picture and leverages collaboration features to keep your team in the loop.

It offers cloud-based, on-premises and hybrid deployment options as well as mobile-friendly apps so you can access data and reports from anywhere.

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FAQs

What does business intelligence do?

Business intelligence converts raw data into useful information and strategic insights. It can provide decision-making guidance, generate customer analytics and identify inefficiencies in workflows and processes.

What’s the difference between business intelligence and business analytics?

Though there’s plenty of overlap between them, business intelligence and business analytics refer to different processes.

Typically, business analytics focuses on using data from the past to forecast the future, while business intelligence looks at both the past and present to incorporate real-time data. Most business intelligence software includes business analytics features.

Who uses business intelligence?

A variety of professionals within your company will find use cases for business intelligence, from sales and marketing departments to project managers and dedicated data engineers.

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Next Steps

The right business intelligence software can provide you with new capabilities in numerous situations. If you’re in the market for a business intelligence solution, get started with our free requirements template to lay out your must-have features.

What are the most applicable business intelligence use cases for your organization? Let us know in the comments!