Business intelligence (BI) systems transform data into insights that businesses can harness to increase their understanding of customers, markets, and operations. They may then make better business decisions.
Insights from BI systems also help to connect the enterprise, create a unified view of CX, and inspire tactical customer journey improvement.
When combined with another powerful CX technology – i.e., automation – these benefits become more accessible, while enterprise reporting takes a giant leap forwards.
How Do Business Intelligence and Automation Work Together?
In cases where the full potential of business intelligence has yet to be realized, BI automation can remedy this problem.
By automating the data analytics processes, the system may trigger actions based on the results. Automation also aids in extracting essential insights from information, predicting changes, and providing a detailed, instructive report on any cautions within the data.
Ultimately, automation in business intelligence aids in the automatic extraction of insights, reducing the need for data analysts and scientists when making CX decisions.
4 Business Intelligence Automation Use Cases to Remember
Whether a company is already on the path to becoming data-driven or just getting started, there are four ways automation can help reach the full potential of analytics and BI:
- Aggregating and Assessing Data from Every System
Businesses can connect the BI system with various enterprise data sources, virtualized environments, and sometime non-API systems.
Automation may then help with everything from retrieving and analyzing primary customer data to transforming third-party data into a format analytics tools can understand.
Encouraging each department to follow a unified method of communicating data will make enterprise reporting much more effortless. However, robotic process automation (RPA) can quickly interact with multiple systems, extract data from one, verify it, and send it to another.
Finally, companies can compile it into a single data source for analysis, such as a line-of-business system or customer data platform (CDP).
- Ease of Insight Communication
When organizations discover critical information in BI dashboards, they should rapidly and clearly communicate it to the relevant personnel.
It shouldn’t matter if these are executives, department leaders, or other analysts; the relevant individuals need to see the analysis results as quickly as possible.
Automation can help here. Automated reporting and dashboards make sharing findings with the people who need to see them easy.
Companies can even go a step further and set up alerts that notify them – or other members of the CX team – when specific customer KPI thresholds are crossed.
- Insight Prioritization
Automated BI solutions can quickly prioritize and filter insights for CX analysts and business users. After, the solution cleanses, transforms, and aggregates data from various sources before extracting insights.
Typically, business users have little interest in all the generated insights; they only want those that will have the biggest impact on the business. Automation reduces the manual effort in sifting through the insights and surfaces only the most relevant examples.
- Customer Sentiment Discovery and Response
Automation in BI helps detect negative sentiment and encourages immediate action to improve CX.
Companies can understand how customers feel about the brand or product by analyzing sentiment data via a BI solution.
Predictive analytics takes this a step further by identifying potential issues before they happen and recommending actions to avoid them.
Next, automation steps in to execute the recommended steps, eliminating the need for human intervention.
The Benefits of Leveraging BI and Automation
Here are three examples of the benefits of leveraging business intelligence with automation.
Accelerate Report Generation
Automation sifts through the most striking insights, enabling fast report generation and allowing business managers to respond more rapidly to difficulties or opportunities. It also helps automate actions or insight delivery based on specific data thresholds.
Democratize Data Access
Automation in BI ensures that data scientists and business analysts are not the only people within the business that can extract insights. It provides relevant information at the touch of a button to all CX professionals, enabling better decision-making without needing technical expertise.
Simplify Data Stories
BI solutions build narratives around data. By extracting, organizing, and analyzing data from various sources, automation supports BI systems in creating visualizations and pinpointing connections within the data.
Considerations to Bear in Mind
Business leaders that require quick access to information to make better revenue-generating decisions should consider the highly automated BI solutions. However, despite this massive benefit, there are potential pitfalls to overcome when automating BI.
To begin with, BI and automation work best with a connected enterprise, with departments understanding crucial areas of overlap and using touchpoint data to work together and build better experiences. Without this cross-function collaboration, an automated BI solution’s value significantly lowers.
Further, information governance and change management may face considerable hurdles due to the rapid integration of new technologies, with many business processes suffering from bottlenecks.
Final Thoughts
Due to the explosion of data and rapid digital transformation, automated BI has become an enormous trend within the CX space.
With proper preparation and adequate integration at the back-end, the two technologies can work in harmony, influencing operational decisions and enhancing CX.
Eager to learn more about the leading vendors in the CX space? If so, check out our rundown of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2022
