Higinio Iglesias, CEO of ebroker, offers us his point of view on the Business Intelligence strategy.
«Marta and Lucía, two entrepreneurs from my town, worked very hard during the last two years to get their hairdresser going; They only rested on Sundays during all this time. Fortunately for them, business has started to go well and in 2015 they decided to take one more day off a week. Marta proposed to Lucía to rest on Mondays, like the rest of the hairdressers, however Lucía suggested analyzing the appointment book that they have kept since the opening.
It turned out, surprisingly, that Monday was the fourth busiest and most profitable day of the week, possibly, and among other reasons, because the rest of the hairdressers closed that day. The final DECISION was to rest on Tuesdays. «
Business Intelligence, business intelligence, is not a computer program, it is a practice, set of strategies y relevant aspects focused on administration and knowledge creation through the analysis of the existing data in the company.
An insurance mediation company, a brokerage, handles a huge amount of GENERAL INFORMATION that it enters daily into its management system with great effort and associated cost, data that, despite this, are irrelevant in themselves. But if the contextualize, categorize, condensed, we purify y we process mathematically we will transform them into MORE INFORMATION. And if that information also we compare, connect, we bring our experience y connections with other sources of information, we will have transformed that MORE INFORMATION en KNOWLEDGE.
Marta and Lucia carried out the challenge of transforming INFORMATION into KNOWLEDGE to support the taking of a BUSINESS DECISION.
There is a certain tendency to consider Business Intelligence (BI) as something complex, expensive and only available to large companies or corporations; but that is a mistake. Making decisions based on INFORMATION and KNOWLEDGE is something within reach of any organization or company, from Marta and Lucía's hairdresser to an IBEX35 company and, of course, an insurance brokerage.
It is true that the deployment of a BI strategy can complicate everything you want and, as a consequence, we could start talking about "strange" terms such as CMI, CMO, OLAP, Datawarehouse ... even reaching the term currently fashionable , BIG DATA.
But we don't have the need to get into any kind of complexity or complication. A BI strategy for a brokerage can be started by developing a small set of INDICATORS related to clients, their policies, premiums, commissions, demographics, profiles, which can be very useful in the preparation of an Operational Scorecard (CMO) that help us to have a high-level vision of some relevant aspects of our business and provide us with knowledge about the best clients (SEGMENTATION), the degree of achievement of objectives, the vision of evolution, etc.
It is true, as I said before, that BI is not a computer program, which is a practice and a set of strategies, but it is also true that technology can be a very important resource to make it operationally efficient.
I recently read the opinion of an expert in marketing and sales techniques that revolved around what business activities would be like in the future, and in that context he said that "Technology will become a powerful tool in the hands of the vendor to segment and define customer profiles, but it will not be a replacement" y he especially emphasized that “Although it seems paradoxical, the greater the use of technology in the sales area, the more valuable will be the presence of a salesperson who gives meaning and human value to operations «
I trust that these predictions will come true and that Technology is an ally of the insurance broker to support the development of business practices and strategies based on business intelligence (BI), which makes you more competitive and efficient in an increasingly complex and demanding market. In short, to help you be better professional and make better decisions as an entrepreneur.
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