Data-driven enterprises dominate their industries. They outperform their competitors in productivity and profitability, ceasing market share, and drawing in customers from under their competitors’ noses.
As more and more companies implement the data-driven approach across their enterprises, business intelligence is less a matter of standing out from the competition, and more a matter of keeping up with it. For the past three years, investment in data and AI has been almost ubiquitous, as 99.0% of firms report investment in data and AI (PDF).
Now the question isn’t “should we invest in a business intelligence tool?” but rather “which BI tool should we invest in?”. The answer to this question depends on your business aims.
What Is a Self-Service BI Tool?
One of the stand out features of modern business intelligence tools is their usability. In the past the process of gathering and processing data would have required a team of expert information technicians and/or analysts with BI specialisations. But thanks to improvements in AI and machine learning, there are now plenty of self-service BI tools available that require minimal training, making business intelligence more accessible than ever.
Features
Common features of self-service BI tools can include:
- No special coding required to run reports
- Curating data from numerous sources
- Data modelling capabilities
- Automatic data visualisation creation
- Dashboarding and reporting
- Predictive modeling
Purpose
The main purpose of and BI tool is to enable informed decision-making based on objective statistics. Self-Service BI tools will help you:
- Extract useful data
- Identify where your investment will make the most impact
- Track your KPIs so that you can change and refine your strategy accordingly and advance towards your business goals
Symanto Analytics and BI
Though not a BI tool in the strictest sense, Symanto AI technology offers many of the same features as the self-service BI tools on our list below.
Symanto technologies offer unique and specialised business insights from the perspective of your customers.
Every second consumers are sharing their opinions about businesses and their product online through social media and review sites. This content amounts to a flood to big data rich in useful insights. But without the right tools, this data is impenetrable. Symanto technologies meet the challenge of converting this rich unstructured text data into accurate and actionable insights, giving you access to unique business intelligence data that many are still failing to exploit.
Symanto’s cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technology classifies comments by topic and assigns sentiment with greater accuracy than other text analysis software and converts this data into intuitive visualisations. Symanto then presents this information on an interactive dashboard for easy reporting.
Discover customer pain points and business opportunities based on online reviews, comments and social media posts from over 75 sites including Facebook, Google maps, Amazon, TrustRadius and Gartner. You can also feed CRM data in excel or csv form for analysis.
Symanto provides high level and granular insights into all facets of your product or business from product features, customer service, usability, price and much more.
Since Symanto mines data from publicly available sources, this enables you to run like-for-like analysis on your main competitors for industry benchmarking.
The Symanto Insights Platform consolidates several Symanto technologies into one easy-to-use self-service platform. No SQL needed, no awkward interfaces. After a brief onboarding session you’ll be able to make the most of its features and get to the grain of what your customers are saying.
Self-Service BI and Analytics Tools for 2022
Datapine
The standout feature of Datapine is its data integration capabilities. Centralising all of your data allows workers across all departments to benefit from eachother’s information, facilitating interdepartmental collaboration, and improving efficiency.
Datapine’s intuitive interface makes it easy for non-technical users to perform advanced data analysis and build interactive business dashboards.
SAS Business Intelligence
SAS’s specialty is it’s advancing predictive analysis capabilities. One of the first BI tools on the scene, SAS uses a combination of APIs offering plenty of customisation options so that you can personalise their tool to your specific business needs.
One of the most recurring criticisms of SAS is its pricing. SAS is prohibitively expensive, especially when compared to BI tools with similar functionalities.
Microstrategy
Microstrategy’s unique selling points are speed, data consolidation and dashboarding. Send out meaningful and easy-to-understand content to stakeholders within minutes. Consolidate data from your CRM, spreadsheets or cloud-based software.
Microstrategy’s usage, however, fails to impress. Users commonly criticise its unintuitive UIs and technical issues.
SAP Business Objects
Ideal for larger enterprises, SAP Business Objects is designed to be used across all departments and roles. This fully comprehensive BI Tool enables users to build their own applications and personalise dashboards with interactive data visualisations. All of these features come with a hefty price tag, and some users note that adding complex functions slows down the reports.
Get Started With Symanto
Which self-service BI tool you choose depends on your business’ aims:
If you’re looking to consolidate your existing data into one centralised platform, Datapine may be your best option.
If you’re looking for predictive modeling based on your existing data and your budget allows for it, SAS Business Intelligence is a great choice.
If, however, you’re looking for an intuitive tool to extract actionable insights from your CRM data, and customer-authored big data online, then get in touch with Symanto. Book your free personalised demo today.
