The Competitive Advantages Of Embedded Analytics

As companies maximize their use of data, every product and application they offer to end-users should offer optimized analytics as a core benefit. To create the best experience for your user base, consider capturing the valuable insights in your company’s data with embedded analytics. This capability helps you empower your users and customers with data-driven insights directly within your products and applications—providing you with an opportunity for market leadership and setting your organization apart as an innovator.

Help your end-users access untapped data

Embedded analytics helps businesses make new and existing products and services that deliver differentiated analytical experiences for customers, partners, suppliers, and vendors. These data-infused experiences enable your user base to make better, faster decisions within their existing workflows. Rich content, data, and analytics can be integrated directly within a product. This provides end-users with actionable insights to guide their decision making, improves product engagement, and deepens customer relationships.

Self-service embedded analytics platforms can fit any data maturity model, allowing your company to do something as simple as embed a dashboard, expand on services you’re already providing, or create an entirely new service or benefit. Embedded analytics is simple to customize, integrate, and deploy to help drive engagement and additional revenue. Embedding analytics directly into applications, products, and web portals can help businesses to:

1. Monetize data by transforming proprietary data into differentiated and premium products and solutions;
2. Create valuable new customer experiences by integrating analytics into applications; and
3. Drive product adoption by empowering customers with analytics directly in their workflows.

Let’s take a closer look.

1. Monetize data by transforming proprietary data into differentiated and premium products and solutions

Valuable data is regularly locked in difficult-to-access places. With embedded analytics, you can monetize this data by securely taking information and transforming it into something that adds value for a broader set of end-users.

Your company can go beyond its current services to do something new with its data. Consider benchmarking—measuring products, services, and processes against those of organizations known to be leaders in one or more aspects of their operations. With embedded analytics, you can provide end-users with data to help them compare their performance to that of similarly sized organizations. They can leverage insights from that data to drive their own key performance indicators and goals.

You can also offer an analytical extension to current services or products. These premium, luxury, or insight-driven versions can be customized to individual users’ needs and come with added capabilities such as embedded dashboards, tools to ask more questions, and the ability to export information.

2. Create valuable new customer experiences by integrating analytics into applications

Your customers are looking for ways to make better, faster, data-driven decisions to grow their businesses. But when data’s not front and center, many won’t use it in their decision making. Jumping from where data lives in dashboards to where work is done can be tedious and time-consuming. Embedded analytics connects insights and actions in the same place, which helps companies better adapt to customer needs, increase product adoption, and improve organizational outcomes.

By embedding analytics and insights into your company’s applications and products, you can empower your end-users to get the answers they need. The people who benefit from companies extending their data-driven culture beyond the walls of their organization are ultimately their stakeholders: their users, customers, partners, shareholders, and communities. There are many great examples of the importance of information transparency, whether that be a company updating its shareholders on its sustainability goals or governments sharing information with their constituents on spending or other community investments.

Customers are also interested in how these analytics services work, and where they can help them make decisions that will grow their business. Too often, “decision making” is viewed as a process that leads to sweeping, grandiose changes, but it can be as simple as trying to improve customer engagement for a singular product in a key market. Embedded analytics helps companies enable their customers to take action across the full spectrum of decision making. This includes major decisions on where to take your business in the next year and smaller, everyday decisions such as how to improve a process. Linking insights to actions across the business is key to the growth of your customers’ business. Consider how you can take data from the products they are purchasing and equip customers to understand the benefits you’re offering.

3. Drive product adoption by empowering customers with analytics directly in their workflows

Creating products that bridge the gap between where data resides and where decisions happen requires significant expertise in analytics, and building a custom analytics solution in-house requires a considerable amount of time, resources, and maintenance. By partnering with an expert in delivering analytics and insights, you can get your products to market quickly, optimize your internal resources such as budgets and product and development teams, and ensure you’re scaling confidently and securely.

Enlisting an embedded analytics partner means you won’t have to worry about trust, security, governance, or data management. Data pipelines can be fragile, and having the right tools will help. Furthermore, with a trusted partner, a company can focus on adding benefits to its products; they can focus on bringing their expertise to the data rather than painstakingly building a system from scratch.

For example, CellRebel, a company that supports mobile operators and consultancy service providers with insights to improve mobile subscribers’ experience, adopted embedded analytics to make data more accessible to its customers. They used Tableau’s Embedded Analytics to customize its CellRebel portal so customers can tap into data regarding subscriber experience, network performance, and churn.

CellRebel CEO Tibor Rathonyi said, “As a young organization, we didn’t have the time or resources to build an embedded solution in-house. Tableau, by contrast, answered all our needs, so we embedded it in our portal.” CellRebel’s adoption of Tableau’s Embedded Analytics allows customers to directly access the self-service analytics in CellRebel’s web portal. Having access to the right data at the right time will enable operators to quickly ask questions about the data, gain actionable insights, and share what they’ve learned.

“The visual analytics is helping to make our customers more ‘sticky,’ more loyal. They are continually finding unexpected insights that drive better business performance.”

A customer-focused experience

Organizations are already dealing with data chaos, and it can be challenging to cut through the “noise.” Adopting new technology to synthesize this data is a challenge in the short term, but it gives companies a competitive advantage in the long term. Furthermore, not incorporating analytics into products can result in getting left behind.

Solutions need to be fit for a customer’s unique situation. Maybe the right solution for a particular customer is a simple mobile alert; for another, it may be a dashboard or tool to analyze. With its scalability, embedded analytics can help your end-users achieve their goals.

Incorporating analytics into products often means a much better service and experience for customers. If businesses don’t stay on top of current trends, they won’t be able to adapt with agility. Consider your personal banking experience, for example. If a customer sees that a bank has an app that can show data and information regarding their spending and provide a detailed breakdown of transactions, and their current bank does not offer this service, they may switch banks.

Another benefit of embedded analytics is improving your ability to answer your end-users questions. Quite often, businesses will build custom applications to try to give information to their end-users. They will start with something simple like a pie graph or stacked bar of their sales. You might be able to provide end-users with a specific piece of data, but you can never anticipate all the questions they might ask—and several questions inevitably lead to more.

After experiencing this process multiple times, many organizations eventually realize they have built a roadmap for a specific analytics product—-not a roadmap for their core product or offering. With embedded analytics, rather than building something specific, your company can maximize the available data to get end-users the answers they need. The greater value of embedded analytics manifests when you can provide more visibility and breadth of information to end-users and stakeholders with complex cases.

LEARN MORE

For more information on embedded analytics, read a whitepaper on embedding business intelligence, see a blog post on the benefits of investing in this service, and watch a webinar, 5 Steps to Revenue.