Are your customers satisfied with the service you provide? Are your upsell tactics working? How's your marketing performance? If you don’t know, then you might be a candidate for business intelligence software. BI lets you slice and dice your company data to reveal what's really going on…and once you know, you can make the right decision instead of a potentially costly guess. Read more about it on eCRMGuide.com.

Business analytics used to be a very geeky endeavor practiced by hard-core IT people skilled in the arcane arts of data access, data mining, data analysis, and, of course, data warehousing. Those days are largely gone -- and so are the reams of lovely spreadsheets they spawned.

While the goals of business analytics (BA) remain the same -- to gather and interpret data to make better business decisions, optimize processes and pursue new opportunities -- the tools are now far more user-friendly, useful and plentiful than they were 10 years ago.

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