After being a marketing consultant for more than 5 years, I have come to the conclusion that reports are useless. Business intelligence companies are focused on providing “actionable insights” via web-based dashboards and charts, but very few times is this information used strategically.

Businesses spend thousands of dollars a year on solutions that create fancy reports and dashboards. These solutions are mainly queries about the current state of the organization like quarterly sales, the number of repeat customers, and customer satisfaction indices. Since they only provide the current state of affairs rather than predicting and alerting, the damage is already done. By the time you read the report sales are already down, customers that for some reason stopped buying from you are long gone, and dissatisfied customers already reviewed your service badly!

The Why Question
The “why” question is hardly ever answered in reports. Yes, sales are down I know, but why? Is it a service, product, distribution, demographic, economic, or inventory problem? By looking at raw counts the important answer as to why things happen can only be speculated.

Lack of Action
The lack of action in these business intelligence reporting solutions is the main problem. If data analysis can spot business opportunities, then why can’t one easily act on this information? Charts take time to decipher and a marketing strategy needs to be presented to higher executives in the hopes that something is done to improve a process. When businesses do not have an easy or automatic approach to act on the information, it becomes very hard to profitably use data as a competitive advantage.
When important information is aggregated to create KPIs, business opportunities are lost. For example, when one looks at a customer satisfaction index trend, one can easily miss that one of your most important clients was very dissatisfied with your product or service. Dig into the data and you will find your treasure, but don’t spend a lifetime because you might pay more to find it.

Small businesses lack the resources and knowledge to implement these BI tools. Therefore, they only look at accounting reports: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. Although important, accounting cannot be the resource to find profitable opportunities and ways to generate profits. Larger business are using data to their advantage, but implementation of BI solutions takes months and usage of data to their advantage trails at least 60 days from the collection of the data.

A company who is acting on information in real-time is Harrah’s Casino. According to Thomas Davenport author of “Competing on Analytics”, Harrah’s uses predictive modeling to identify current customers who are most likely to stop being customers. Their customer loyalty management system, among other things, weighs a number of variables (including demographic variables and the amount of business the customer gives Harrah’s) in order to contact and recommend hotel activities to entice these disengaged customers back to their hotels.

Relying on reports to run a business is not a competitive advantage anymore. How a company acts on data is what helps a business make more money. Fancy business intelligence tools can provide pretty charts and entertainment to some, but in the end they are just useless.

About the Author
Jaime Brugueras, CEO and Co-founder at Mineful
Jaime graduated with a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Illinois and worked as a marketing consultant for more than 5 years. As a marketing analyst, Jaime saw a gap between analytics and actual benefits to a company. He co-founded Mineful to bridge that gap and help companies take action based on analytics.

Connect with Jaime
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/marketinganalytics
Twitter: @brugueras

About Mineful
Mineful is helps companies use data to retain customers. No reports! An analytical application that takes action when it identifies patterns of disloyalty and dissatisfaction. Mineful integrates with major CRM and e-commerce platforms, uses its algorithms to detect customers at risk, and then provides the communication tools needed to entice customers to buy back from you. If customer retention is important for your organization, Mineful is right for you.

Mineful
800.848.9317
www.mineful.com
@mineful

Mineful dashboards can now be viewed on the iPad, iPhone, and other non-flash devices. Mineful users can now access their customer, satisfaction, and loyalty information anytime, anywhere on-the-go in a timely manner without compromise. There is no App to download or install. Just use the Safari browser and you can immediately spring into action.

If you are in an iPad right now, go ahead and check out one of our interactive examples. You will now be able to: view your reports in real-time, share via a simple web link, create tabs to make navigation easy, and use a wide variety of graphic styles, all in the iPad.

Analytical Dashboards have become a favored tool that is used in many organizations not only for the high visual appeal but also because they can communicate all that you want concisely. Typically, dashboards are used to demonstrate facts and trends. For example, finance dashboards can be created to monitor revenue, profit and loss and expenses. Human resources can use dashboards to keep a tap on headcount, turnover and new entrants. Marketing dashboards present key performance indicators, ROI measures, and customer satisfaction indices.

Building Your Own Dashboard Software
Most companies are now aware of the benefits of using dashboards. However, many companies seem to want to create a custom dashboard for their business requirements. Creating a dashboard in-house is digressing from the core competencies that the company has. In addition to that creating a new program or software from scratch would take up valuable time and resource that can be used productively in another area.

Installing Dashboard Programs on Your Computer
Other companies opt to install a program on a machine so that they can create dashboards. While these dashboard programs are created by experts in the field, in most cases the access of the dashboard is limited to single machines or limited users. This, in effect, restricts the number of systems that you can use the dashboard program on. And when you are presenting something to the board, you will need to ensure that the system that is being used has the dashboard software installed.

Web-Based Dashboards
Using a dashboard in the cloud is a far better solution to this issue. Not only does it allow easy access at all times and on any computer that you may choose to use, the security firewalls and protection technology provided by the company will ensure that your data is always protected and safe.

In addition to that, when you use a cloud system you can be sure that it is being supported by various servers to ensure redundancy. If there is a delay in a server’s performance, another one is standing by to allow you quick and easy access. Allowing the experts to give you access to the dashboard in the cloud option is definitely far better than breaking your head with new programs that have bugs or restricting yourself to a few systems.

New Feature! With a click of a button, now you can publish dashboards on the internet for anyone to see. Mineful allowed collaboration and sharing of dashboards within users of an account. But many times, organizations needed to make data public and have people access it easily. Now they can, in two ways.

Create a link – You can easily create a link and post that link on your site or blog. People can then click on that link and access your visual dashboards.

Embed dashboard on your site – Copy and paste code to embed a dashboard on your site. This way, people don’t leave your site and can still view your data.

Optionally choose to add a password to protect your dashboard. This can ensure that only the people you invite to see your dashboard gain access.

Go ahead and create a dashboard and impress your site visitors by publishing visual dashboards like this one.

Enjoy!

Support – How to Publish Dashboards with Mineful