Is Your Platform Providing the Right Reports? (COUNTER)

Is Your Platform Providing the Right Reports? (COUNTER)

Organizations need to collect troves of data over a single transaction to understand market trends, analyze customer behavior, and make better-informed present and future business decisions. Organizations’ ability to easily gather this information, analyze it, interpret it, and share it with a set of users is another matter. Organizations rely on different reporting formats—static and interactive—based on their sizes and needs. Yet regardless of their requirements, business owners need to understand whether their platforms are generating the right reports for their companies. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Ability to Create Custom Reports: Are you able to create the reports you need without breaking a sweat? Static reports are standard and come with any basic platform. But as your business grows, your needs and requirements will also multiply and vary, and you will likely benefit from the ability to create customized reports. When considering options, ask yourself whether each allows you to sort, filter, and browse through data easily. It should also let you export your report in the format of your choice (PDF, PPT, CSV, or Excel).
• Discoverability: One of the main parts of data analysis is discoverability. If your static report is not able to highlight patterns, keywords, or context-based actionable insights, then you should adopt an advanced reporting format.
• Visualization: Now that the education industry has advanced, it is easy to build an interactive dashboard without needing to know how to code. Therefore, creating dashboards that focus on the metrics of your choice—revenue, investment, sales, performance, etc.—should also be a no-brainer. By dragging elements from a Web-based dashboard, you can easily create an interactive interface to analyze trends for your target audience. This type of analysis is one of the best ways to discover new marketing opportunities for your business.
• Real-Time Access: Data are valuable assets, and you should have as-needed access to this information via the Web or a mobile app. Are you able to view and export any report on any device at any time? If accessing the reports you need is an issue, then you should move to a cloud-based platform, which provides access to reports on any device at any time.
• Opportunity to Collaborate with Multiple Users: Decision making is never a stand-alone task. The cooperation of various stakeholders moves the process along. Therefore, the ability to effectively share resources between multiple users is critical. If your platform doesn’t give you the option to share the data insights collected through reports with authorized users, then it is time to make a switch.

Innovative platform solutions enable technical and nontechnical users to create custom reports that meet their needs. Advanced reports built in COUNTER provide visual data that can further help you with decision making. A user-friendly interface also lets firms create predefined ad hoc reports to fulfill a particular task. Simply collecting data is not enough. To remain competitive, business owners must leverage technology that lets them take full advantage of data insights to make better business decisions.