Business intelligence: putting your club’s data to work
By Srishti Singh
A club or resort generates a lot of data. And at first glance, this data may not seem significant. Tee times. Dinner orders. A couple of drinks at the bar. By themselves, these little items don't really help a club understand its membership or its operations. But if you know how to connect the dots, then you can begin to develop a whole new understanding of your club and its members.
That's where business intelligence software comes in. It can help you begin to understand your membership and what their needs are. You can find areas of dissatisfaction and address them. You can identify opportunities to increase sales and boost retention. You can even begin to predict what members will do and tailor your club and offerings specifically for them.
Here are a few components of a business intelligence dashboard package and what they can do for you and your club.
The BI dashboard: getting an invaluable view of your operation
A business intelligence dashboard is a tool that helps you get a snapshot of key performance indicators (KPIs) across your operation. This allows you to spot trends ? whether they present challenges to address or opportunities to take advantage of.
A trend or pattern may be developing, but be hidden behind all the noise of all the data that is being generated. However, by being able to visualize the data over time, you can see the trends emerge.
Better yet, a good dashboard will allow you to select the set of data visualizations so you can create a customized dashboard that lets you keep track of the information and trends that are the most important for your specific club.
Analytics: digging into the data to find powerful insights
An analytics function is a natural component of your Business Intelligence dashboard. It gives you the ability to examine different data sets together to uncover insights. For example, maybe you want to isolate a list of members who have resigned and then look at how many rounds of golf they played over the past year. Or how many of them had trouble meeting their F&B minimum over that time period. An examination like this could help you build an early detection report that you can use to address members in danger of resigning.
Smart analytics on the Business Intelligence Dashboard will allow you to drill down to an individual member to see his or her patterns. Or you can look at a group of members ? for example, by membership level ? and examine their behaviors. What services do they use the most? When do they use the facilities? And more.
You can also look at things from the operations side. Maybe you want to know what the most popular banquet entree is. Maybe you want to know which of your restaurants generates the most revenue. And what day of the week is the most popular. And what gender of your members that comes from.
Insights like this can help you make the right choices, optimize your revenue, and develop offerings that surprise and delight members.
Reports: ongoing information to keep you connected and informed
Customized reports within the Business Intelligence Dashboard can give you the ability to monitor specific sets of performance data on an ongoing basis. With a smart system, you can choose from a library of stock reports or build your own.
That customization is important. A GM needs to be able to generate a report that covers the entire business. But for heads of department and other personnel, that is not always necessary, or even desirable. Allowing key players to watch developing trends over time with an automated report tailored for them gives them the information they need.
The reporting capabilities should include:
- Access to a library of stock reports
- The ability to analyze and create visualizations
- Drill-down functionality to dig deeper into a KPI
- Seamless interface to Excel to work with formulas
- Ability to share custom reports
Business Intelligence: It's how you make your club smarter
Business intelligence is the eye in the sky that allows identification of emerging trends, optimization and tailoring of offerings, and the ability to allow key players to have confidence in their decisions.
With an intuitive dashboard, powerful analytics capabilities, and insightful reports, business intelligence tools can help your club unlock its unrealized potential. And help you realize the vision of what your club can become.
With the Northstar complete club management software solution, you have access to powerful business intelligence tools. And since the platform is built on one database, you can feed all your data from across the operation into those tools, helping you uncover the insights and identify the opportunities for you to make your club everything it can be. To learn more – request a demo, of the Northstar Technologies solution, today.