How Chatbots Simplify Data Analytics Consumption for Decision Makers

Companies spend thousands of dollars to buy data from different data brokers, most of which is not completely harnessed or effectively utilized. This article explores how organizations can utilize chatbots for efficient data analytics.

“Information is the oil of 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” – Gartner

No matter how large or small a company is, organizations across the globe generate a massive amount of data. While businesses have quickly come to realize that there is tremendous value to be extracted from the large volume of data that is collected, they are still not harnessing the opportunities that can be derived from analyzing data properly.

With rapid evolution of big data and analyticsOpens a new window , data has become a decisive core for organizations, especially in terms of establishing competitive advantage. Analyzing data efficiently is the key to finding valuable insights into crafting growth strategies, discovering new business opportunities, determining effective employee recruitment, and retaining strategies.Leveraging troves of customer data also gives companies relevant insights into buying behaviors – information that can be used to design campaigns that are tailored to the needs of prospects, whether they are loyalty programs, upselling and cross-selling strategies, or customer retention strategies.

The verdict on data-driven analytics is out. Organizations that have leveraged it for their business processes have seen tremendous results. According to a Harvard Business Review report, a research by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson indicates that companies who harness big data and analytics have seen 5 to 6% higher productivity rates and profitability than their peers. Yet another studyOpens a new window by McKinsey confirms that companies achieve a 6% increase in profits by using data-driven analytics, which grows to 9% after five years.

Data is Being Captured but not Being Utilized

Now here’s the surprising bit: although 53% of companiesOpens a new window have successfully adopted big data analytics, only a few organizations have been able to truly harness the value of their data to its full potential. Organizations of all sizes currently collect information of their processes, operations, customers, competitors, partners and so on. However, despite all this gathered data, and all the hype surrounding big data and its applications, merely 12% of it is being analyzed for actionable intelligence today.

The scenario is slowly changing though. Data is now being leveraged for a variety of benefits – improved decision making, understanding customers at a deeper level, minimizing costs, increasing revenues, and so on. And everyone wants to join the bandwagon. With the rapid proliferation of digital media and increased adoption of emerging technologies, such as IoT, there has been a disproportionate rise in the growth of unstructured data. Data is doubling in size every two yearsOpens a new window and is expected to reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.

That is a Lot of Data

This massive volume of data itself is largely responsible for why so much of it goes unused. Integrating and understanding data across various departments and teams in an organization is also difficult. Data is generated in silos and it can be rather complicated to derive insights from unrelated data points. Analyzing data and generating practical insights requires the use of sophisticated tools which could be too expensive for a mid-sized business.

And even if one does invest in purchasing these tools, there is the challenge of hiring experts to manage the data. Usage of a business intelligence (BI) tool comes with various complications. It requires experts to select and download specific data to generate reports from. This data set is then imported into your BI tool in order to be analyzed and subsequently generate business insights. Once the results are obtained, the process is repeated several times with adjusted data selections.

This deprives organizations of the knowledge and insight into making profitable and well-informed decisions. In fact, it leaves most leaders no choice but to resort to sign off on decisions that are purely based on instinct. However, this is going to be detrimental in the long run. In the modernized and automated work environment that they operate in, organizations no more have the privilege of ignoring the importance of data analytics. This is where bots come into the picture – they help enterprises connect the dots between various data points, in order to derive profitable outcomes.

Chatbots and How They Work

Chatbots enable enterprises to make data-driven decisions with ease and efficiency. Instead of having to depend on human analysis for a report, bots can be used to quickly generate analytics responses. Employees need not endure a cumbersome process of examining multiple dashboards or jump across various applications, in order to gain meaningful insights. Bots can process even large data sets, cutting down time and increasing employee efficiency. BI tools are expensive and cumbersome to use. A bot, on the other hand, delivers all the advantages of BI tools, while also allowing easier communication between humans and big data.

Bots leverage AI technology and specific bot frameworks that translate natural language and enable employees to ‘chat’ with the bot and obtain relevant information regarding key metrics. Natural language processing (NLP) enables bots to take chat-based inputs using a conversational interface and respond with relevant information for faster and more efficient decision making. This means a bot can answer questions whenever and wherever you need information.

• During your process of interacting with a website or application, the bot can ask relevant questions proactively to further add to the knowledge base, which can then be used to deliver important insights.
• Bots can automate data look-ups as well as extract data from various business systems, such as ERP, CRM, Data Warehouses, and so on, in order to analyze and generate key insights.
• Bots can be used to send out alerts, updates, and real-time information to employees.
• The combination of an efficient bot architecture combined with the inexplicable power of big data analytics is bound to bring immense value to an organization.

Benefits of Chatting with Your Data

Following are the benefits of using a business intelligence chatbot:

• With business intelligence chatbots, one can get data and analytics within 3^rd party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack, and many more.
• One can ask natural questions like “What is my predicted sales” and the bot instantly answers via text or any multimedia format (image, graphs, pie charts, etc.).
• You don’t have to login to a BI system or switch multiple apps to access analytics and data while using a bot.
• A bot allows decision-makers to get granular business insights and metrics right within their actively used messaging application via chat.
• The bot gives a persona to a BI system and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple dashboards and filtering data.
• It features natural conversations and uses AI, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.
• It can adopt to office jargon and can also easily understands user’s intent.
• It features real-time alerts where it sends key data/ analytics updates and alerts relevant to the user and, provides them with timely updates in case there are any discrepancies in data.
• It also offers personalized alerts based on users’ department, location, hierarchy etc.
• Business intelligence bots are designed for optimal security and features User Authentication, User Authorization, Multi-Factor Authentication, One Time Authorization, and Channel Authorization.
• Seamless integration is another important benefit of BI bots. The bot can seamlessly extract data from BI and LOB systems, such as ERP, CRM, Data warehouses etc.
• It offers hassle-free and quick integration into a current BI software.
• It can also be used for making transactions with LOB systems.

When it comes to chatbots, we’ve only really scratched the surface. With the rapid evolution and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), we expect to see bigger and more astounding changes in the way enterprises operate. While several companies are contemplating how they can implement bots into their organization, it would be prudent to hit the accelerator on finding the right bots to increase the productivity of their technology stack.

While organizations are testing the waters to discover how critical data can be for future operations and decision making, we expect that bots will become a force to reckon with their efficiency in analyzing the expanding data sets. Whether it is to improve current processes, or to completely transform the way business is done, or to better understand and retain customers, bots are going to prove invaluable to ambitious organizations seeking sustainable growth.