In recent years, big data analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning have moved from a luxury affordable only for giant corporations to a business-critical capability that virtually any business can afford.

This means that more companies than ever before have access to powerful tools that can help grow their businesses, including in ways they may never have considered. Here are 10 important ways analytics can boost your business growth:

1. Decrease waste: Analytics can take data from production management, supply chain management, inventory and materials management and other tools to identify situations where companies are wasting time or resources they may never have identified otherwise.
2. Identify new customers: The pattern recognition capabilities of analytics tools are extremely powerful when it comes to identifying potential consumer or business prospects who share key similarities to a company’s existing customer base. And with machine learning, these tools get better over time at identifying factors that sales teams may never have considered before.
3. Improve customer service: Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have revolutionized customer service, but adding analytics tools takes the process even further by giving front-line and management customer service staff additional context and insights that help them make better decisions.
4. Find problems faster: AI-driven analytics tools are inhumanly good at identifying patterns. That’s a powerful capability to bring to your business when the faster you identify a problem, the easier and cheaper it is to fix. Whether it’s in product quality, competitive marketplace, employee performance, customer profitability or any one of innumerable other factors upon which your business’ success can depend, analytics can identify and quantify problems long before other tools.
5. Go beyond “What everyone knows”: One underappreciated value of artificial intelligence is that it’s not limited by preconceived notions that the humans in its office may share. Whether that’s about what customers want, what the market could bear, what features or benefits are critical, what something should cost or otherwise, AI-driven analytics frequently suggests options that never would have seen the light of day if only human experts had been consulted.
6. Get more value from existing data: Many businesses are sitting on treasure troves of data about their historic and current operations, but don’t have the ability to unlock the value in that data with their existing tools. Modern analytics tools are the key to that process, taking the data from legacy applications and databases and uncovering insights and information with relevance to the future.
7. Make better decisions: All too often, the problem with making decisions isn’t that you don’t have enough information, but rather that you have too much information and you can’t immediately tell what’s important and what isn’t. The fundamental value of analytics is that it turns data into insights, automating the process of combing through information and distilling it into the things you need to know to make the best and most informed decision you can.
8. Improve employee satisfaction: Analytics tools can automate many of the jobs that your employees hate doing the most. These are often the most repetitive, detail-oriented and “mindless” administrative jobs that can be huge drains on employee morale; tasks like repetitive data entry, invoice approvals, account reconciliation, ledger reviews and the like. Automating the drudgery of those sorts of tasks and involving your people only when a human decision is needed can dramatically improve job satisfaction among critical employees, while freeing them to do more high-value work.
9. Find, manage and keep the best employees: Analytics are starting to revolutionize human resource management, thanks to their ability to work through huge amounts of information about the people on whom your company depends. Whether it’s in vetting potential hires, identifying standout employees who may never have been properly appreciated before or uncovering problem employees before they cause real harm, AI helps HR managers be smarter and more informed about a company’s most important resource: its people.
10. Identify bad actors faster: Whether it’s fraudulent customers, misbehaving employees or vendors not living up to agreements, analytics tools automate and improve the processes designed to identify people who don’t have your company’s best interests at heart. They’ve revolutionized processes such as insurance fraud detection, waste and abuse management, and much more.

Interested in learning more about how analytics can boost your business’s growth? Contact us today to start the discussion.