Using Business Intelligence to discover new market opportunities.

Wikipedia defines BI like this;

… a business management term which refers to applications and technologies… used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about…company operations. Business intelligence systems… help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, [and] internal operations…[BI systems] can help companies… make better business decisions.

Business intelligence helps business understand their customers better, looking at their preferences, helping business adapt to their customers demand. It is used to collect data from customers usually within the marketplace. There are many ways to collect data from your customers . Company must gather data for the purpose of helping users make business decision.

The article aims to analyze business intelligence to discover new market opprtunities According to the article it is often about avoiding surprises and minimizing exposure to risk. In marketing however, the unexpected can be a good thing because it can be lead to the discovery of new customers and through them new market opportunities.

The majority of customers do not bother to register their dissatisfaction . They just walk away and find another solution. The company thus loses both that customer and an opportunity to improve its service quality. Some ways to gather data to develop new marketplace
Learn from product failures: The repair and technical assistance functions offer a variety of opportunities for product enhancement, feature risk reduction and customer reactions.
Examine value chain access points: Distributors, suppliers, salespeople, customer service representatives, and repair personnel all gain information from their interactions with customers.
Customer to customer communication: The Internet provides new opportunities for companies to learn more about consumers’ needs, values and preferences from the communications they have with each other in online discussion groups.
Invite customer feedback: In addition to eliciting and measuring explicit expressions of customer satisfaction, a company can study implicit communications from consumers that it receives in the form of inquiries, return and refund requests.
Recognize Complaints as Gifts: A few companies have developed “service recovery” programs that not only train staff to listen and respond empathetically to complaints but empower them to authorize reimbursements to correct a mistake or to resolve a customer’s problem
Customer product development: This method is very creative application for some products. Companies collect data about this product from different channels like websites, newspapers

Discovering atypical customer
Leveraging surprise for competitive advantage requires using business intelligence . For external environmental assessment, it is important to scan for signals of market change outside the known competitive arena and traditional industry boundaries. For internal strategic development, it is vital to examine the firm’s customer base to identify non-typical users with potential to become or lead the company to a new market segment. Here are some important way for understand the customers;
· Look Beyond the Usual Suspects
· Walk in the Customer’s Shoes
· Pay Attention to Customer Behavior
· Identify What Customers Need and Value
· Redefine the Competitive Arena
· Convert Problem Customers into New MarketSegments
Why doesn’t every company already know about and apply this simple concept? Barriers to the use of BI include traditional marketing and management conventions as well as psychological, organizational cultural and political factors.
· Challenge to Conventional Wisdom
· Weak, Unclear Signals
· Organizational Culture and Politics

Expanding the use of business intelligence and applying it more creatively enables companies to leverage a key asset, their customer base, to identify, explore and expand new markets at minimal cost. To continually discover new customers requires both attitudinal and behavioral changes in a company’s business intelligence function and in the way it obtains information from and about its customers.

Business intelligence is very broad topic of study. If companies would like their business to succed, it is extremely important to understand the factors of business intelligence and learn how analyse and use the data created by this methodology

References:
Using Business Intelligence to Discover New Market Opportunities
Janice Frates California State University Long Beach
Seena Sharp, Sharp Market Intelligence

Halil TAKA
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