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Marketing Reporting Tips
Using BI To Create Great Customer Experience
Many executives can easily see the benefit of using business intelligence strategies in retail or manufacturing intensive industries.However, these business performance management software techniques apply to every enterprise and industry area.Take, for example, BI in a customer service critical marketplace, such as hospitality.
Jonathon Tisch, CEO of the Loews Hotel group, has recently written a book that looks at issues within the hospitality industry that may be solvable with enterprise business intelligence.Tisch stresses that creating a great customer experience takes more than just window dressing.His book title, “Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough” aptly catches the crux of the matter.He is really saying that creating such an experience requires knowledge of the key performance indicators (KPI) that drive hospitality.KPIs are integral to any application of BI techniques and by association, any business function that has measurable indicators, can use BI techniques to enhance performance and profitability.
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Cognos Tip: How Marketing Reporting Helps You Take The Pulse Of Your Business
Cognos.com Tip: The well-informed business manager uses many sources of information to keep up with trends, opportunities and pitfalls. Some of these are financial; many are technological; while still others are operational. Few sources of news are as pervasive and timely as your marketplace and a quality marketing department.
Using your marketing department as an “early detection system” will provide you with timely information on how changing market conditions can indicate needs for new products and services. This can extend to improvements in sales strategies and corporate policy development. Carefully selecting what information is best used for this purpose is a natural for a good marketing department.
Marketing reporting is the key and BI is the solution. Even a good marketing department must deal with reams of data that can only be gathered, analyzed, and reported in today’s data-rich environment, through the judicious use of technology. For example, sudden reductions in demand for traditionally successful products or services could indicate competitor pressure, market shifts, and/or revenue trouble around the corner. In this example, the facts coupled with the marketing department’s savvy can result in meaningful answers from a good business intelligence system.
Use BI software techniques, like the executive dashboard, scorecards and reporting. They will provide management insight best suited to query systems for market news information, asking questions like: ·Opportunity: What is the profit opportunity? ·Competition: What are the competitive risks to achieving it? ·Product Direction: What is the long-term value? ·Price: What is it worth? ·Demand: How do we reach and communicate value to customers?
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Qualitative versus Quantitative Information
Marketing professionals using business intelligence techniques know well how important quantitative information is to enhancing marketing performance management.These benefits are embodied in real, hard numbers that equate various market metrics to factors such as, return on cost/investment/advertising and the like.What about those qualitative measures that drive marketing and business?Intuition, hunches, preferences and similar human perception characteristics can deliver similar levels of performance management and should be exploited. Consider whether your company is sophisticated enough to take advantage of it?
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Cognos Tip: Reporting And Analysis Software And Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Cognos.com Tip: In an article in the Web-based journal CRM2Day, Britton Manasco discussed a perspective on the customer intelligence community that demonstrates how intelligent analysis is setting trends for future economic activity. She notes that Customer Intelligence (CI) is defined as the technology of collecting, manipulating and exploiting information contained in a customer information database. This can include insights on a customer’s needs, decision-making, behavior, state of the marketplace, and trend directions. In order to effectively handle this most valuable relationship with the customer, the right information about clients is required and organized such that the information can receive proper analysis and action.
Use reporting and analysis software, like speech analytics, for this very technology-intensive business function. Some techniques, predictive dialers for example, analyze phone calls between supply chain components and then provide insights to the dashboards of senior executives and managers. CI is the macro-area of BI that includes tools like speech analytics and enables managers and executives to: · Define and measure the customer experience · Understand the experience of their customers · Identify the reasons why customers call · Maximize loyalty and retention · Gain market and competitive intelligence · Increase sales effectiveness
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Marketing Opportunities And Marketing Research Reports.
Business intelligence (BI) and the technologies that support it are broad in scope.A generalization of the discipline might characterize BI as a series of advanced information manipulation tools that rely upon:
Cogent questioning from management
Access to the entire set of data contained in diverse repositories scattered across business functions
Analysis of results of queries
Effective reporting of the information uncovered and/or analyses performed on the information
Iterative refinement of the above
Effective decision making
This LifeTip examines one aspect of this BI process – marketing analysis as it applies to decisions and opportunity identification.
Pursuing opportunities in the marketplace involves weighing possibilities, probabilities and finding comfort areas that match one’s business appropriately.The obvious opportunities have already been identified to some degree.So, realization that the quest must be geared to finding hidden or subtle items is critical.Also, experience indicates that such opportunities are frequently laced with informational uncertainty.These observations clearly demonstrate why sophisticated technological (read as, BI) tools must be employed.
How to proceed quickly comes to mind.A good start is to properly prepare the information resource query.What answers are desired will drive the search process.In marketing, some of the questions involve managing, measuring and calculating ROI (return on investment), inquiring as
