The influence of Business Intelligence in Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is increasing continuously, thanks to the large number of ways in which it’s helping them increase their revenue. It has made data more important than ever, and now companies are finding new ways of making money from their data, all because of BI. Here we’re going to take a look at four ways in which SMEs are monetizing their data with BI.
#1. Reporting Transactional Data
SMEs are utilizing BI enabled business reporting software to report transactional data. And this is a very important trend, because according to experts it can eventually lead to analysis of that data, and later prediction of transactions that take place in SMEs.
#2. Churn Analysis
The importance of customer retention is already well-known in business world. One can’t make a profitable business by continuously losing old customers and acquiring new, which is the reason behind all the talk about controlling customer churn. Now it’s a good news that BI has started to make a difference for SMEs in this area as well. Techniques like advanced churn modelling to understand why customers leave are being utilized by SMEs as well, which is helping them retain their customers.
#3. Profiling Customers
For success of any marketing campaign it’s important to know the market. That’s why marketers profile their customers by creating “personas.” And the good thing is that BI is helping SMEs a lot in customer profiling too. Since customer profiling requires constant and concise data mining, BI is the perfect tool to satisfy this requirement. By constantly mining enterprise data it reveals many patterns about the customers of SMEs, which serve as nuggets for those companies while creating customer personas.
#4. Targeted Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
Cross-selling/Up-selling makes for a large revenue stream in most SMEs. However, in order to get the maximum revenue out of these streams one must know which channels are the best, which customer profiles to target and when to target them. Fortunately, BI is again available to help. By analysing transaction data for some time it learns about purchasing habits of customers and then helps marketers strategize their campaigns according to those habits.
Conclusion
BI has opened new doors of possibilities for SMEs by presenting numerous ways of utilizing their data. As a result, its popularity will continue to increase among SMEs, which will in turn lead to BI becoming more intelligent and useful with time. Therefore, you too should give it a try for your SME.
