Big data and business intelligence, some ideas that rhyme with ROI

Big data, business intelligence, CRM approaches… these are buzz words that ignite the business world and which are often illustrated with the initiatives of web giants: Amazon, LinkedIn, Walmart, Netflix, Ebay, Foursquare…

Adviso counts many Canadian SMEs among its clients, so we wondered how to exploit all this to benefit them.

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? WHAT ARE THE LINKS WITH CRM AND BIG DATA?

Business intelligence, also called business intelligence or BI, brings together a set of activities that will make it possible to make decisions and implement actions based on data: data collection, storage ( data warehouse ) , analysis ( data mining ) and decision support.  

The implementation of a BI approach should ultimately make it possible to make decisions based on data to generate more revenue.

CRM AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The CRM approach is the part of the BI strategy that focuses on customer relations and provides a global understanding of the customer (the famous 360° customer view). It makes it possible to segment customers in order to be able to provide the most personalized answers.

BIG DATA AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The term big data refers to the phenomenon of explosion of data volumes. This explosion comes from the volume of data, but also from the complexity of the data (unstructured data) and the need to work in “almost” real time. These will not in themselves change the business intelligence approach, but rather come to enrich it insofar as we have tools capable of processing them.

AUTOMATED BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: THESE ALGORITHMS THAT GENERATE INCOME

Doing business intelligence requires technological investments to consolidate and harmonize data, qualified resources to analyze and exploit this data and the implementation of new practices within an organization. These investments are substantial but justifiable if we wondered what would be the cost of a bad decision?

However, during the last Focus 20 , a meeting dedicated to SMEs and digital, Jean-François Beliste explained that data analysis can be done by an analyst (off-line) or can be done in continuous flow thanks to algorithms (online). 

It is in this second aspect (analysis using algorithms) that we see high return on investment opportunities for SMEs.

Indeed, we are currently witnessing a democratization of the industry with the proliferation of low-cost tools (even free) that are capable of doing business intelligence on the web channel. This is an excellent opportunity to introduce your organization to business intelligence and instil a “ROI culture”.

Here is a list of solutions that allow you to do BI in an automated way:

• Advertising retargeting  : these tools make it possible to relaunch visitors to its site according to their behavior during their previous visits. Example: AdWords remarketing.

• Recommendation engines  : based on “collaborative filtering” tools, these tools make product suggestions by comparing visitor behavior. Examples: YooChoose, Ireus or LiftSuggest extensions for Magento.

• Personalization of content  : solutions that consist in offering a different experience to each visitor. Examples: Personyze, WP Greet Box or Scoped for WordPress.

• A/B and MVT tests  : these solutions allow you to find the best version of a page in order to optimize its performance. Examples: Visual Website Optimizer, Content Experiments.

The list is of course not exhaustive. We just wanted to give you some ideas of effective things to do without huge investments. The challenge will lie in the configuration of these solutions.

If you know of other tools in this line, do not hesitate!