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If you have heard about Moore’s law, then you know that in the span of two years, the computer’s capacity increases in terms of memory storage and speed by a factor of two, leading to exponential growth in data generated by those devices.

Better devices will produce more data than their predecessors. I am sure that you must have heard the phrase, “Data is the new oil” hundreds of times, and, according to emc’s predictions, we should have 44 trillion gigabytes of data in 2020.

So how do we handle this colossal amount of big data for business growth?

The growth of data-driven large corporations using business intelligence and wide-scale adoption of big data across industries is the future of business.

Business intelligence is fueling a revolution in business with streamlined operations and processes. There are many ways in which you can use big data in your business and exponentially grow revenues, and I will be discussing all the major ones in this article.

Working Together with Big Data and Business Intelligence

Businesses that have BI solutions implemented have a better understanding of metrics that work. The most important feature that BI brings into the picture is a well-structured presentation of data that end-users can understand. The charts, bar graphs, and other visualization options make comprehending big data easy. Let’s see in detail how BI empowers the use of big data.

Collection and Access to Information

Analysis and visualization represent the backbone of big data. Data is of no use if you do not process it efficiently and adopt the findings in your business. There are several different BI tools, which can be used to process every piece of data in your company and also for your customers.

The first significant benefit is easy access to all kinds of information in your business. Just to give some examples of access, companies with brick and mortar stores can easily manage data, including:

• Sales
• Inventory
• Purchases
• Salaries
• Customer reviews and product feedback
• Sales of particular products
• Other data all in one place

Unlike when using other conventional methods, checking for information like the growth in revenue over the past three years is just a click away. Predicting workloads and sales in particular months is also easy as you only have to select a template in most BI tools, and you will get a detailed analysis of years of data in one go.

Another example is social media, which is the point of focus for companies all over the globe. You can run checks on the sentiments towards particular products, services, or companies by analyzing specific data sets. Managing and understanding results from various social media platforms is a daunting task but has been made easier using BI tools.

Simplifying the Decision-Making Process

Gone are the days when companies guessed and used prediction models to predict the outcome of their decisions and specific changes in product launches. You can now predict the outcome of most of your choices with high accuracy using past data.

Companies can predict the future demand and inventory requirements of their products by analyzing the past year’s sales data. The best part of the software is that everything is customizable, and you can change specific components to suit your needs. Changing the months, products, stores, inventory type, etc. is very easy.

Using Machine Learning Capabilities to Predict Buying Behaviors

This is, by far, one of the strongest and the most efficient uses of big data. Big data has changed the marketing industry for good. You can now run thousands of experiments and optimize your campaigns in endless ways. Machine learning capabilities, integrated with big data, can help you analyze trends and buying behaviors.

The time you choose to contact prospects and the platform of communications or advertising can be a game-changer for you. You can use your company and campaign data to analyze certain factors, including:

• The best times to contact your prospects
• The best times to run a particular campaign
• Determining the sentiments of the market
• Analyzing the impact of A/B testing of sales scripts
• Choosing between creatives and email newsletters for optimum performance
• Thousands of other possibilities

Improving Customer Service

The usage of chatbots is on the rise, and the data you get from these conversations can help you further improve future communications. Machine learning capabilities are enabling companies to analyze common problems being faced by customers.

These can be solved, and you can leverage chat automation powered by insights from data to improve customer service.

Analyzing the Trends and Sentiments on Social Media

As mentioned above, most companies are putting in efforts to leverage their representation and growth on social media. Social media is also one of the most significant sources of data, and it is hard to cover all the possibilities for this type of data in this post (because there are so many).

The most significant application of this data is analyzing public opinions of your company or products. Tools like Microsoft Automate and Power BI services, when combined, can help you track feedback for your company. These tools come with built-in algorithms that consider words like “good,” “awesome,” “happy,” etc. as positive sentiments and words like “horrible,” “worst,” etc. as bad sentiments.

You can also track and analyze each mention of your company or products on various social media channels and platforms.

Another application of social media data analysis is deciding times for the best performance of your company’s creatives and product launches. You can use the data to predict the best times and audience types for your campaigns. This lets you grow your prospects list and understand the market.

Competitor analysis is one of the most critical factors in your company’s growth, and you can easily access and analyze competitor data to improve processes in your company.

Improving the Operations in Your Company

The world of business was completely different when BI solutions were not prevalent, and data analysis was not common. You no longer have to make Excel sheets and then compare spreadsheets to analyze the fastest way to accomplish a task.

Big data can help you exponentially increase the efficiency of your processes. Some of the divisions which have a lot of potential for improvement using data insights are:

• Supply chain management
• Customer service and response
• Allocating employees according to time and requirements
• Price fluctuations
• Manufacturing processes and operations
• Cost of labor
• Many other divisions

Using BI tools, you can analyze every step in each department and work on improving them to increase efficiency.

I can speak about the ways to leverage big data for business intelligence for ages. There are literally thousands of opportunities and possibilities companies can utilize to outgrow their competition.

All you have to do is create a culture of data analysis and find the right sources to collect data within your business processes. The world of data analysis is evolving, and we will see business disruptions in almost every sector powered with data.