Preparing the Right Message – When choosing the content for a report it is important that you base it upon your understanding of your audience and how they intend to use the report. Getting this right will ensure that the hard work put into the analysis will help you to achieve your goals of providing commercial benefits to the 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 for example, a high level business summary will be required. It will need to look over the business as a whole and may well need to be broken down in subdivisions such as region, channel, and customer segment or product area. Doing this will help to alert the audience to any vital changes taking place within a business.

Whereas at a tactical level more detail needs to be provided to help them understand the changes. However, there needs to be a balance between the two to disguise any details which may cloud their understanding yet provide enough to reveal the insight. This you can achieve through combining summarising with prioritising the results. For example focus on the top products or customers that form a subset which impacts on businesses top level results.

Whereas operational planning will take place at a much granular level for individual stores, products (product areas), customers (customer segments). For these types of audiences you will need to offer a more detailed report. It is tempting to think like an analyst who should present the information because they have it and because the work has been done. But this may well create a report with either too much information that won’t be used or too little usable information in it. So it is crucial to choose the right level of detail for your audience when creating an effective business insight report.

2) Spin on Content – It is regularly said that „statistics can be manipulated to support any argument“. This may imply and misuse of statistics the same principle can also be applied to ensure the effective use of reports, as a set of figures can be presented in a number of ways in a report.

It is vital to „manipulate“ or present the content of a report in a way that is relevant to the audience so that the information is delivered to them. Although the word „spin“ has negative connotations, we are in fact not talking about distorting the results but simply choosing a way to represent the 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.

However when it comes providing reports on a more operational level the volume of customers to a business would be more relevant. For example with in flight catering they need to know exactly how many passengers they are likely to have.

Likewise when it comes to marketing communications a business would need to know how many welcome packs would be needed for their new customers. Whilst on a strategic level the revenue or profits that customers generate will be more relevant. For example in the insurance industry if there is an increase in customer numbers it may be associated with a decrease in their profits because the new customers are a much higher risk.