How Business Intelligence Can Help Smbs To Compete With Big Brands

By Author: Bappaditta Jana
Total Articles: 87
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In 2020, more than 70% of small businesses shut down in the U.S because of the pandemic. Most of these were forced to close due to health authority orders. However, this was not the case with big brands. They effortlessly managed to survive the long period of widespread lockdown. They were quick to adapt themselves as per the new circumstances as they have cash reserves for such emergencies. They have easy access to the latest technologies that they can leverage to overcome the crisis period to devise new ways to generate revenue. Business Intelligence is one such technology that even SMBs are adopting at a rapid rate. Many of these SMBs are taking the help of BI to compete with big brands, but how can BI help them in this endeavor? Let’s have a look.

An exemplary customer service

The stories of terrible customer service by big brands are plenty. They have so much to do because of the sheer size of their business that they often fail to offer good customer service. This is where the scope of competition lies for small businesses. With the help of business intelligence, SMBs can have valuable ...
... insights about customer behavior, their likes, and dislikes, the way they are spending now or have spent in the last few years during the same period. Business intelligence tools are brilliant in delivering these types of accurate insights. These tools have an inbuilt interactive dashboard on which they present those insights in charts, graphs, etc. All these help small businesses to offer exemplary service to their customers. No wonder offering better customer service enables them to compete with established brands in a big way. This also facilitates SMBs to give a more personalized service to their customers.

Devising effective marketing strategies

While big brands have no shortage of revenue for spending in aggressive marketing campaigns or hiring a team of marketing professionals to devise effective marketing strategies, this is not a luxury for small and medium businesses. They often have to make compromises during their marketing campaigns because of a lack of revenue. Business intelligence offers them a consolidated view of the numerous ways by which their customers interact with their business. It becomes easy for marketing professionals to devise new marketing strategies when they have all the necessary data, and business intelligence provides the same. With rare insights about the current market scenario, upcoming trends, etc, and an ability to generate quick reports, devising an innovative yet cost-effective marketing strategy becomes a reality to give tough competition to their big counterparts.

Apart from the above, business intelligence also helps in better revenue management, inventory tracking, monitoring employee performance, etc. It also helps in identifying the bottlenecks that restrict the growth of their business. Moreover, there is now an easy availability of affordable tools powered by BI, and many of these are also available for a free trial so that SMBs can have the opportunity to understand their usability before making a final call.

Bappaditta Jana is a blogger who loves to spend his free time engaging in sports or gardening. Based in Kolkata, he is currently working with EasyReports an IT firm that has developed a BI reporting tool that can easily integrate with Tally ERP and many other applications.