Yellowfin have done a lot of work with software vendors over the years, helping them to embed analytics into their applications and we've learned a lot through that process.
One of the things we have learnt is that there are some recurring fundamental issues with how product managers bring analytics into their product, an approach which can prevent them from realizing the full potential of their embedded analytics.
Why your embedded analytics isn't landing
In most organizations, product managers are great at understanding their own product and customer needs for their particular domain - but they are not experts in analytics.
Most product managers come to Yellowfin for dashboards, but often they haven’t asked the right questions of their customers. Their customers may say ‘we want better reporting,’ but what does that mean? There are many considerations that go unchecked:
- What level of access to data should you provide them?
- What type of helpful tools do they need to explore metrics and extract insights?
- How much self service do they want?
If these type of key questions aren't asked, the result is that you could end up delivering a very mediocre BI solution that doesn't quite meet the needs of your customers.
The fact is your customers are likely already using enterprise analytical solutions in their own organization. That means when they talk to you about having better reporting, they've already got a baseline BI solution or feature in mind. They know what access to data they have and they know what they can do with self service BI, for example.
So when thinking about analytics, think about the experience customers are having every day in their own organizations and give them the same experience. You can’t just give them a couple of dashboards and cross your fingers that it'll do the job.
How to delight your customers with embedded analytics
Most customers have an underlying need for self service reporting. You can build out a dashboard, but it won’t be able to cover many real operational use cases. A dashboard may cover 80% of a customer’s needs, but for the other 20%, they need something very different. They want to be able to extract the data and build a report themselves.
This is amplified by how much data you’re collecting and the number of permutations of that data. For example, if you’re running an e-commerce platform like Shopify, your customers won’t be able to get real insight into the performance of all their products that are managed by your application because of the time it would take to do that.
In an enterprise setting, your customers have access to the latest and greatest analytical tools. So if you limit their access to the data and features, you're giving them an experience that’s only a very small component of what they experience internally.
If you really want to use analytics to propel your product and company forward then you should also be focused on design. Dashboards should become the primary tool by which you sell your product. You should be walking into executives and showing them the insights that you can provide them through analytics. The design should incorporate a deep understanding of domain expertise around analytics that makes sense for your product, and also be something that is incredibly appealing to people.
Why you should partner with a future-proof BI vendor
To realize the potential of your embedded analytics initiatives, you also need to think about future proofing its experience. You can’t just buy a tool that's good today. You need to know what the big trends in analytics are, like AI, machine learning and storytelling, and invest in an analytics vendor that will remain cutting edge for the foreseeable future.
To achieve this, you need to partner with a vendor that continues to innovate, can actually guide you and help you understand what your customers want and how they want it. So that you know in five years time, the solution that you embed today is still going to delight your customers the same way it did when you started.
Choosing Yellowfin for your embedded analytics
With the latest analytical tools like automated business monitoring, contextual insights and action-based dashboards, and the ability to white-label BI, learn why Yellowfin is best fit for future-proof embedded analytics.