Every CRM user is on the hunt for a more complete picture of their customers, as well as their business. It’s a challenging goal that requires analyzing customer data to fill in blank spots on the canvas and surface the insights that will drive business growth and improve customer satisfaction. With Salesforce Analytics, we are delivering key insights from CRM data at scale and turning them into actions on the world’s #1 CRM platform.

But what about data that goes beyond your CRM? That often means collecting numerous documents and spreadsheets from different transaction systems, data warehouses, and geographies. It can mean attempting to traverse data silos and always feeling like the reports on hand are out of date.

Today, Salesforce Analytics is introducing new updates for connecting data inside and outside of Salesforce, as well as smarter data prep to speed up your journey to actionable insights.

• Augment your CRM data with external data sources: Salesforce users can now connect to even more web-based data services with new connectors: Google BigQuery and, as part of our strategic partnership with Amazon, Amazon Redshift. Connectors give you an easy way to connect to external data with Salesforce CRM data in order to explore it within Salesforce Analytics. With these connectors, business leaders can ensure that all business data, including compensation, orders, accounting, shipping or inventory data, is connected to your CRM data for a more complete picture of your business.

For example — wouldn’t it be helpful to understand exactly how customers are using your products? Many products collect usage and customer feedback data. Using customer engagement data can help build great products and better serve customers. If the customer is storing this data in Google BigQuery, the company can now bring this data into Salesforce Analytics and analyze it in lenses and dashboards alongside CRM data for additional insights.

• Intelligently prepare and clean your data: With smarter data prep, users can now get Salesforce Einstein AI-powered suggestions on how to prepare, clean and combine data from diverse sources. Users see a preview of what their data should look like, and with one click, can act on automatically generated suggestions. This could mean changing different date formats across geographies to be more consistent, converting dollars to euros for a consistent currency or rounding up so that every input has the same amount of decimal points. When bringing in data via connectors or collaborating across various teams' data, smarter data prep easily blends data from all those sources to create more global dashboards, a complete view of your entire business, and a true 360-degree view of your customer. Deploying data prep into production is easy — your data is ready with a click of a button.

For example, a customer may have their CRM data in Salesforce, but accounting data in Amazon Redshift. Once the data is brought in via connector, Einstein will recommend how to fix any inconsistencies in the currencies to provide an accurate analysis. Then, by bringing all their data in Salesforce Analytics, business users can analyze it in one location rather than two, and show a full picture of how these different types of data align.

In addition, users can get analytics apps up and running faster to put those augmented datasets to use:

• Create Analytics Apps in fewer clicks: Building apps has always been easy with Salesforce Analytics, but it just got even simpler. Customers can get an app up and running instantly, and then add extra functionality as they go, such as custom fields. With simpler apps that are working in a few clicks, every business user is immediately armed with personalized trends and insights on the go.

   

Now, a service manager can set up her team on an analytics app within a day — and as the team ramps up and decides they're ready for more customization, they can add custom fields and dashboards when they're ready.

Today's workforce is increasingly data-driven, and ensuring that everyone has accessible, intelligent analytics at their fingertips makes every Salesforce user more productive. Salesforce Analytics offers complete analytics in the world’s #1 CRM platform — basic analytics, which includes reports and dashboards; insights delivered by role-specific, self-service Einstein Analytics apps and the Einstein Analytics Platform; and advanced analytics powered by AI through Einstein Discovery, automatically surfacing intelligent CRM insights and recommending actions.

With today’s news, we’re making it easier than ever for Salesforce customers to fast track their analytics journey, enabling every user to gain a more complete view of their customers without leaving the Salesforce platform.  

To learn more about trailblazing with analytics, check out these trails to learn more about Einstein Analytics and Einstein Discovery.