In the current economic climate things are all concerned with change. Customer behavior has changed and competitors have changed their pricing and brand loyalty is no longer as important as value. Because of this we now find ourselves having to use different sets of marketing dynamics.
Below we describe how using Business Insight Reports can help us to cope more effectively with changes and also identify the five benefits to an organization that carries out these changes.
The Stages of Effective Business Insight
In order to cope with changing market dynamics there are various stages involved and these need to have their own particular Business Insight report created.
1. Using a Monitoring Dashboard report allows a business to identify changes take place through external factors.
2. The Interactive Discovery report you use will enable you to understand better what is causing the changes to occur.
3. The Detailed Planning report is what a business needs to help adapt its current practices and so come up with a marketing response that is effective.
4. Using an Operational Dashboard report allows a business to implement appropriate changes that will be necessary.
Every stage we mentioned involves various people at various levels within an organization. Some are there to deal with the strategic decisions, whilst others, the tactical decisions. Then there are of course those who will not only plan, but carry out the operations to make the changes on a day to day basis.
All the reports used will need to be in a certain style and contain relevant content that will have been specifically tailored for a certain audience.
Reports are like a Present
A Business Insight report is like giving a present as they have been created for a particular target audience. They will be packaged and then delivered to these people in a way that they clearly understand the information provided within.
Strong analytical tools like are being used to create these types of reports and drive them following information being retrieved from large marketing and/or a large transactional database. Also a delivery mechanism is needed to provide the user with remote access to their results and also will allow them to refresh or request further results using different scenarios.
The use of Excel in a report allows one access to a function that is not only powerful, but very flexible and allows you to manipulate and then display results. People are familiar with this and because it can be easily accessed it is a perfect reporting tool.
Reports must be Relevant
For one to understand what purpose the report being created has one first needs to identify the audience who it is going to be given to.
For example if using a granular detail report this is fine for planning certain communications, but won't be useful as the information will be too detailed for a senior executive. Whereas glossy dashboards are more than suitable for monitoring in the boardroom but don't contain too much information for use anywhere else within the organization.
It is important, therefore, to tailor the style and content of your report to meet the needs of the relevant audience.
Monitoring Dashboard Reports for Strategic Levels
High Level Monitoring Dashboard reports are designed to be used by a strategic audience to give them an overview not only of the organizations performance but its KPIs. It allows them to monitor their activity as well as identify changes taking place. These reports can be used to compare the behavior of customers today in relation to the same time last year, along with letting them acess their financial performance against the organizations targets. It also helps to identify changes as soon as they occur.
Key Features of a Monitoring Dashboard
The key features of a Monitoring Dashboard are as follows:
1. On a high business level it provides a summary of the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
2. It will come with a facility to allow comparison of targets and history (i.e. for last month or last year)
3. The layout should be fixed to simplify its use (for example "Dashboard")
4. There should be pictorial or graphical displays which allow for the message being conveyed to be highlighted (e.g. traffic lights, speedometer or charts etc)
5. The report will be designed to clearly make the user aware of the changes occurring
Making effective use of your business insight reports is essential to make sure you are getting as much value as possible out of them. If you follow the steps and guidelines above then this can help make sure you are getting this value.
No comments:
Post a Comment