Interactive chatbots solve actionable BI challenges

One of the biggest challenges faced by organisations after they have invested large sums of money into business intelligence (BI) tools is ensuring that key actionable insights end up in the hands of the people who need it to make important decisions, says Senior Business Intelligence Developer at Insight Consulting, Sean Gordon. Whether through time constraints, a need for more training or complicated user interfaces, certain important threats or opportunities often go unnoticed.

Gordon adds that modern chatbot technology can create the needed bridge between enterprise business intelligence and key members of the organisation. In other words, chatbots are a complementary tool that have time and time again proven to harness the true value of BI investments.

“We have seen first-hand the increased value generated from existing BI investments in organisations because the chatbot is placing key information onto the devices of the people in businesses who need it. It sounds simple and it is; the right information in the right hands at the right time, but the effects are often profound. The alerts generated by chatbots often drive further analyses into areas of concern or opportunity. That’s exactly what every business wants from its BI tool – increased usage and ongoing value,” claims Gordon.

Increasing BI usage requires a simple and user-friendly solution. “You need to get important information to the users as fast as possible. Integrating into standard mobile phone chat applications, the data-source agnostic Insight Bot allows real-time, natural language engagement with data from the BI environment. By mere virtue of its ease of use, it lightens the training load on organisations that are trying to get their staff to engage with insights generated by their tools,” says Gordon.

“The big drive from an industry perspective is actionable intelligence,” he says, “and this makes sense: businesses want their leaders, key executives, to interact with a single version of the truth in real-time. In practice, one often finds that under-performance is hidden in aggregated numbers. Bots can be configured to go find the situations that present an opportunity or threat and then report on them to key staff members at a granular level.”

Gordon goes on to say it is important for businesses to entrust their key staff with the responsibility of real-time insights, whether such data is sourced from BI or other core systems.

Insight Consulting says bots are increasingly being well-received because of their simple user interface, but more importantly, they support the one version of the truth ambition by extending the reach of enterprise BI.