Your company collects heaps of data on a weekly basis, and business intelligence reporting helps you extract valuable insights from that data.
Your company can learn a lot about your customers, their interests, and what drives them to visit your attraction. Yet if your data is all over the place, you likely won’t get a clear picture of what’s really happening in your company.
When your data is neatly packaged and ready to view in a BI report, though, it’s easier for your business to improve the guest experience and increase revenue.
You can then share relevant insights with the rest of your team by creating a business intelligence report, which provides an in-depth analysis of particular metrics or events.
BI reports are powerful tools for providing your organization with recommendations that can positively impact revenue. Not sure how to create one? Here is our comprehensive guide to BI reporting.
What is a business intelligence report?
What can you learn from a BI report?
5 tips for presenting business intelligence reports
- 1. Define your target audience
- 2. Focus on the right KPIs
- 3. Use visual elements to display data, but keep it simple
- 4. Highlight key information
- 5. Turn the report into actionable recommendations
What is a business intelligence report?
A business intelligence report is a collection of relevant insights pulled from your company data. BI reporting as a whole helps companies identify key trends and share these findings with other members of their teams.
A report is an efficient way to make relevant information available to the rest of your organization. They typically include plenty of visual elements like charts and graphs to help the reader make sense of all the data.
For example, your attraction might generate a BI report that drills in on capacity utilization. This report provides an in-depth analysis about how specific tour listings are faring over time in terms of capacity.
Based on the findings in this report, you could make recommendations on how to improve your tour capacity — such as lowering the price for less desirable time slots to fill those gaps.
When you share this report with your sales and marketing teams, everyone will be on the same page. They’ll know that the goal is to fill the emptier tours by adjusting their pricing.
Overall, a report can package a wide range of information (customer satisfaction, booking trends, financial forecasting, etc.) into an easy-to-read document.
What can you learn from a BI report?
BI reporting makes it possible for your attraction to identify ways to increase profit, analyze customer behavior, and track your performance.
Outdoor retailer REI, for example, invested in a business intelligence platform to increase its membership rates. BI tools made it easy for the brand to track member acquisition, retention, and reactivation.
The retailer used this data to determine whether to invest more in brick-and-mortar retail or digital experiences for their members. As a result, saw greater customer satisfaction and positive associations with the brand.
Businesses can track a wide range of metrics using BI tools. The most common metrics featured in BI reports include:
- Sales revenue: There are two types of sales revenue you should be tracking. Your gross revenue is the amount of money your company brings in through sales. Net revenue, however, is your gross revenue minus your expenses.
- Customer acquisition cost: This metric takes marketing and sales costs into account to find out how much it costs you to acquire a new guest.
- Customer lifetime value: The total monetary value the average customer brings to your business.
- Customer churn: The proportion of guests that you lose in a given month or year.
- Customer effort score: Measures customer satisfaction and customer experience by asking guests how much effort it takes them to solve an issue with your company.
- Net promoter score: Measures long-term customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
- Customer satisfaction score: Measures guest satisfaction with a particular interaction or new service.
5 tips for presenting business intelligence reports
. If your report fails to offer the reader actionable steps they can take based on the information collected, they’ll likely just move on to the next task without giving the report another thought.
Here are five tips to ensure you’re presenting your BI reports in an impactful way.
1. Define your target audience
Your report should be tailored to a target audience. If you’re creating a report with recommendations on how to improve your customer service, this report should have relevant insights for your customer-facing teams.
Before creating your report, consider making a list of the team members you’ll be sending it to. Then focus on the information that would be most relevant for that target audience.
2. Focus on the right KPIs
Once you’ve defined your target audience, you’ll choose the KPIs that relate most to that department or team.
The customer service report from the example above, for instance, would likely focus on metrics like customer churn, first response rate, and social media mentions. These metrics help measure your attraction’s customer service and will therefore provide the most insight for that department.
It’s important to choose actionable metrics over vanity metrics, or factors that might look good but aren’t tied to real performance. For example, the number of followers your company has on social media could be considered a vanity metric. That’s because a large following doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher booking volume. While a large social media audience makes your company look good, it doesn’t necessarily point to actual growth for your company.
Actionable metrics, on the other hand, refer to factors that have an impact on your company’s growth and revenue. These can include metrics like customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value.
3. Use visual elements to display data, but keep it simple
Visual elements like bar graphs and line charts can tell a better story than a big block of text. Vertical bar graphs are great for general data displays, and horizontal bar graphs are best for data rankings.
It’s best to keep things simple with easy-to-understand charts and graphs, according to technology consultant Predica. For example, Predica recommends avoiding pie charts and treemaps because it makes it difficult to see the differences between pie fields that have similar values.
4. Highlight key information
BI reports have often come with a lot of information to sift through. Make it easy for your readers to understand the purpose of the report by highlighting the key takeaways. You can do so by mentioning these at the beginning of the report in a summary. You can also use visual elements to pull the readers’ eyes toward the most important metrics.
5. Turn the report into actionable recommendations
Your report should always include some kind of actionable recommendation. Once you’ve delivered all of the relevant data and takeaways to your target audience, they’ll be waiting to hear about the next step.
What should they do with these findings? You’ll answer this question at the end of the report, where you’ll highlight actionable next steps your organization can take to reach its goal.
Let’s say your customer service report shows that the guests have to repeatedly reach out to your company to get a problem resolved. One of your recommendations might be to replace the current process with a more efficient one, so that your staff can improve the time it takes to resolve an issue.
***
BI reports can be a powerful tool to improve your guest experience and drive revenue for your attraction. If they’re presented poorly, though, you likely won’t reap the benefits of BI reporting.
