Today’s climate puts increasing pressure on businesses to make decisions quickly. However, when dealing with disjointed, siloed systems, it’s difficult for teams to access up-to-date data, making it harder to react to changes and challenges in the market and spot opportunities on the horizon.
As technology continues to advance, businesses are switching on to the data opportunities it presents, investing in a centralised data management solution that helps teams access real-time data to empower accurate and efficient decision-making to drive agility and increased competitiveness.
Keep reading to find out more about real-time data analytics and why it’s important that your business adopts a real-time decision-making approach.
What is a real-time data analytics platform?
A real-time data analytics platform collates real-time data from across an organisation’s files and systems, making it easier for teams to view and analyse performance and evaluate key results accurately. With this system integrated across a business, it empowers informed decision-making and makes it easier for teams to respond to opportunities or challenges.
How real-time decision making can benefit your business
Create engaging, personalised customer experiences
With a real-time analytics dashboard, marketing and sales teams will be able to access the most up-to-date customer insights and performance data, helping them accurately segment their target customers and evaluate their results. With all of this information at their disposal, teams can tailor their campaigns and content to create consistent, personalised customer engagements that will improve sales conversion.
Stay ahead of the market
With ability to see the most up-to-date performance figures across the business, real-time analytics platforms give employees across the business accurate insights to empower informed, fast decision making. By adopting this approach, the company will be able to respond quickly to market trends, conditions and customer behaviours, increasing overall performance.
Enhanced operations
When it comes to managing your business operations, a view of real-time data across projects and workstreams helps to identify inefficiencies to prioritise for improvement. By leveraging these real-time insights, leaders can make data-driven decisions that will help boost operational productivity and cut costs.
Improved innovation
Whether it’s a new service to meet customer needs or an internal app to speed up efficiencies, real-time analytics offer a full picture of the business to help development teams identify patterns, opportunities in the market or customer needs that can lead to successful innovation.
Choosing the right real-time analytics platform for your business
There are many factors you need to consider when it comes to deciding on a real-time analytics platform. With growth in mind, you need to ensure the platform you choose can scale without sacrificing performance, while it also needs to be flexible and accessible to ensure each of your teams can access the insights. Most importantly, it’s best to cross-reference its integrations with the systems you currently - and plan to - use in the future to ensure you get the most out of the platform.
For this reason, we often recommend Microsoft Power BI (part of Microsoft Power Platform) to customers. Not only does the system collate and unlock real-time data across your company, but it helps visualise insights to make them easier to digest and share with other stakeholders. And since it works within the Microsoft ecosystem, it integrates with a range of internal and external, well-loved apps, including Excel, Dynamics, Salesforce and Google Analytics, making it easier to roll out across a business.