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Prepare the correct message - It is important that you choose content for the report based on your understanding of who your target audience is and how they will use the report provided. Get this right and you will ensure that the hard work you have put into the analysis will achieve the goals for providing commercial benefits to a business.

1) The Level of Detail - The most important part of any report is to ensure that the level of detail provided is relevant to your audience.

On a strategic level you will need to provide a high level business summary for example. It will need to be a report that looks as a business a whole and may require you to break it down into sub divisions, for example, channel, region, customer segment or product area. By doing this you are able to alert your audience to any changes that are important and taking place in the business.

Whilst at a tactical level more detail needs to be given to assist them in understanding the changes. But you still need to provide a balance that hides details which aren’t necessary and could cause misunderstanding, yet provides enough detail to give them insight. This can be achieved through a combination of summarising and prioritising the results. So for example you should focus on the top customers or products to provide a sufficient subset that shows the impact they have on top level business results.

As for operational planning this starts at a more granular level for those individual stores, product areas or customer segments and will therefore need to be provided with more detailed reports. Although you may be tempted to think like an analyst who should provide information because it is available and because the work has been carried out. Yet this could result in a report being created which has too much information that won’t be used or information that isn’t actually usable. So you need to choose the right level of detail for an audience when you are creating an effective business insight report.

2) Spin on Content - It is commonly commented that “statistics can be manipulated to support any argument”. Whilst this implies misusing statistics this principle can also be applied to ensure an effective use of reports as any given set of figures can be represented in various ways within a report.

It is vital that the content of the report be “manipulated” or “presented” in a way that is relevant so that information is delivered to the audience. There are negative connotations associated with the word “spin” but here we are not actually talking about distorting results but choosing to represent numbers which:

1. Talks the audiences language and focuses on the main issues 2. Fits the shape to the data thereby highlighting the main issues within it

The examples that follow apply to all types of reports and illustrate some of the simpler points. But these points can be easily overlooked when a report is being created. By investing time in understanding one’s audience will help in choosing the way to present the results ensuring that the hard work done in the analyst will be converted into a message not only relevant but easily understood.

Measuring your work - It is important to measure and then report on those things relevant to your audience. It may be something as simple as showing the number of customers the business has or what value they bring to it with regards to profit or revenue lines. It may also be a report that is a little more involved where you need to say count the number of “genuine visitors” to a website and so you will have to filter out the transient visitors, and so will make it more relevant to the business than if you showed all the visits.

At operational levels the volume of customers tends to be more relevant. For example the number of passengers below would be relevant with regards to in flight catering.

Similarly for those who are marketing communications they need to know the number of welcome packs required for their new customers. However, at a more strategic level the revenue or profits generated by customers will be more relevant. For example within the insurance industry although they may have an increase in customer numbers these may actually decrease their profits because the new ones happen to be high risk.