By Jessica Day, Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad

In 2022, business intelligence trends are all centered around data. From cloud migration to embedded analytics, B2B software as a service (SaaS) tools, like funnel analytics and next-generation communications, enhance business intelligence and make it legible to every staff member. Here are six key trends to look out for in 2022.

1.   Self-service business intelligence

The Business Application Research Center's yearly survey has consistently ranked self-service business intelligence as a high priority for companies. One macro-trend we'll see throughout this article is the breaking down of siloes between data analytics and the employees on the ground. This is made possible by more insightful and user-friendly business intelligence tools.

In a remote-first, BYOD (bring-your-own-device) environment, it's important that powerful BI is available to staff no matter what device they're on. With business communication software, like Dialpad, running across desktop, tablet, and mobile, it's critical that self-service BI enables easy access to data in any location and on any device.

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2.   Cloud migration

The move into the cloud isn't a new trend, but with companies going remote or hybrid, it's becoming more important than ever. Dresner found that 54% of businesses say cloud is becoming critical to their business.

Reasons for moving to the cloud include reduced maintenance of on-site technology and more flexible IT infrastructure that can grow with the company. Additionally, the cloud server host takes on the cost of maintenance and much better cybersecurity than most companies could afford.

With companies settling on their remote/hybrid configurations, they're hammering out the little details like mobile device management for their team. One of the benefits of migrating from legacy management to android enterprise and other cloud services is that device management is made much simpler when it's into one centralized cloud service, which works even if the team is spread out remotely.

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3.   Data-driven decision-making

Data-driven decision-making isn't just about harvesting more data from your operations. It's also about distributing the insights from that data more evenly throughout the company in a process called "data democratization."

This partly means improving data literacy through leadership, but it also means making sure that every part of your business is touched by data collection and analytics. Even something as personal as your customer support line.

What is workforce management in a data-driven contact center? It isn't just about monitoring employee performance. Managers are better able to see the common pain points customers are having with the product or service. Better still, this data is surfaced directly to the customer service reps on the front line.

AI-enabled services like automatic transcripts, sentiment analysis, and word clouds take individual conversations and pull them into one view. This enables managers to make quick decisions about the customer service approach and respond intelligently to issues that repeatedly come up.

4.   Collaborative business intelligence

In 2022, companies are swamped with different software tools in different departments collecting different kinds of data on, often, the same customers. Collaborative business intelligence breaks down silos and collects all this data in one place.

For example, getting your sales and marketing teams to sing from the same spreadsheet would not only give them more context on key accounts. It would also enable data-driven decision-making across the sales and marketing funnel by actually rendering it as one funnel rather than a collection of different .csv files stored across email, lead generation, and CRM software.

Tools like Sisence, Looker, and Periscope Data ingest data from many sources and pull it all together in one simple, real-time dashboard. These reports provide business intelligence that is powerful enough for data scientists but simple enough for new recruits. This enables everyone to make data-driven decisions on the fly.

5.   Data storytelling

Data storytelling and visualization together are another big trend for 2022. All the data in the world is no good without context, and if your team is glued to a large spreadsheet all day, it's easy to reach information overload.

Adoption rates for business intelligence software are still low, with one survey from the Business Application Research Center (BARC) putting it as low as 15% in 2020. From your senior leadership to your front-line customer service staff, business intelligence needs to make itself relevant to users' problems and ambitions.

The software has to be easy to use, and it has to be able to present the data in a variety of context-dependent formats. For example, if you're running a data-driven contact center, you want sentiment analysis presented as an aggregated word cloud during a high-level business meeting.

But that's of little use to the customer service rep on the call, who can relate more to that same data presented as the individual profile of the customer they're talking to. The customer service rep can make data-driven decisions about how best to solve a customer's problem or how important a customer is in terms of yearly spending with you.

If the rep can see this is a key account they're speaking to, they should be able to make larger accommodations like discounts or free returns to keep them coming back.

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6.   Embedded analytics

The next generation of analytics software is going to take all of these lessons above and turn them towards richer, more context-dependent reporting. Conventionally, businesses kept the data analytics separate from the people doing the work on the ground.

With businesses having to make decisions faster than ever amidst high uncertainty, it's important that people don't have to go through the data science team to get the information they need. Embedded analytics put data right in the apps your team is using. At the moment, they're most relevant.

It's the software version of the famous Toyota Production System. Among other innovations, the automaker gave employees the freedom to stop everything and point out inefficiencies in the production line.

The only "data" they had was what was the machinery in front of their eyes. So with analytics tools like augmented analytics and embedded reporting, your team is bound to find ways to improve your business at every level.

Business intelligence in 2022

For years, business intelligence has been concerned with gathering more and more data from business operations. Now a new generation of analytics and reporting software is going to make that data more accessible and actionable for everyone in the company, bringing data-driven decision-making out of the boardroom and into everyday operations.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Day - Senior Director, Marketing Strategy, Dialpad 

Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform that takes every kind of conversation to the next level-turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns. She has written for sites such as Plutio and Supanet. Here is her LinkedIn.