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A few months ago, I got to meet some trailblazing Einstein Analytics customers and partners while attending the Salesforce World Tour in London. It was a great experience, as I always enjoy hearing personal use cases and getting direct feedback from customers. This really helps us to understand their unique experiences as they work to transform their businesses.
Part of this tour included sharing the Einstein Analytics roadmap and soliciting feedback around it. In fact, we received some great input from Trailblazers that will undoubtedly help shape the product's future in a big way.
For those of you new to Einstein Analytics, it's an analytics platform that combines data sets, dashboards, and analytics apps — all within an embedded, homogeneous user experience. when it comes to using analytics especially the blended transactional, analytical and predictive experience. Knowing that adoption is one of the biggest challenges — and metrics of success — of any digital transformation, we've found that having an embedded analytics experience has helped raise overall adoption rates significantly. Here are a couple of reasons why this kind of user experience is so important today.
Customers expect analytics to be a native part of the daily business workflow. For example, when a user logs in to Salesforce and navigate to a page related to my work (ex. “Account” or “Opportunity”), they see both transactional (i.e. “a task to complete”) and analytical (i.e. “trends and historical data”) information on those pages. The important takeaway here is that transactional (the data users input on daily basis), analytical (historical and trends), and predictive data (AI) now all live in one place. This creates a single interactive and fully-integrated experience that combines all available data sources seamlessly to help users make more informed decisions and significantly increase productivity and efficiency. In other words, providing a more natural flow of information and insights enables users to work efficiently and effectively.
Why is this important? Because “adoption” is one of the most critical success metrics for any implementation program. The new tools and solutions being provided must always be easy and enjoyable to use in order for teams to make them a regular part of their daily workflow. As one Einstein Analytics customer put it: “We've also embedded analytics into our Lightning pages, and it's made jobs easier — people absolutely love it."
In the past, typical analytics implementations have been approached as “two tool” integrations. This basically means that users would have to toggle between different systems and solutions implemented to get the information they need to do their work. Today, this has changed completely. With embedded analytics implementations, all critical information sources can now be accessed in one convenient place. For example, say you want to do more than just see top-level KPI dashboards. Now, you no longer need to switch over to a separate analytics tool or other sources to “fetch” that information or update charts and graphs. It can all be done within a single embedded analytics solution. This provides immediate time-savings that allow users to make important, more informed decisions a lot faster — one of the main reasons why the natural flow of information and insights within embedded analytics platforms is becoming more and more critical for business users today.
Natural Flow of Information (daily business actions, insights and deeper analytics)
The factors propelling the adoption of analytics platforms, in general, are speed, accuracy, and simplicity. For example, analytics apps must be built and deployed in an agile manner. They must provide a complete and accurate picture of the daily flow of information needed to make business decisions easily, without a complicated UI getting in the way. Eliminating these roadblocks encourages users to login (willingly) and extract value from these products every day. Whether in the field or at the office, an embedded analytics platform puts insights and analytics at users' fingertips, which speeds up decision-making and simplifies daily workflow. Simplicity, therefore, is the single most important part of any implementation — from design and development to integration and usage — and one of the main reasons why embedded analytics platforms are far superior to other systems that essentially force users to “fetch” data and insights from non-integrated business intelligence (BI) solutions (which just adds an unnecessary layer to daily workflows).
With Einstein Analytics, analytics is natively embedded into Salesforce apps and pages, placing important data in the middle of the natural flow of information and insights. Users can see KPIs, charts, and recommendations as they go about their daily work, including things like updating opportunities, capturing campaigns, and following up on open cases. Many customers even said that implementing embedded analytics has transformed the way they work.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) already becoming a key component of many applications, it goes without saying that the most cutting-edge analytics experiences today come in the form of AI-powered prescriptive analytics. This is where Einstein Discovery from Einstein Analytics adds to the analytics narrative with actionable recommendations, right within the same business application. Not only does this equip users with predictive scores, but it also provides explanations around those scores that help users take meaningful and relevant actions on that information. This AI-powered knowledge seamlessly integrated within intelligent business apps ultimately makes daily tasks easier, faster, and efficient.
An example of applying prescriptive analytics directly while running daily business tasks
Standalone BI solutions are becoming things of the past as the inevitable shift towards embedded and fully-integrated (both native and external) systems is becoming more and more a part of our future. The goal of the analytics world today is to create simpler APIs for embedded apps that put actionable intelligence in the hands of every user. This will not only help improve adoption rates but also empower teams to drive long-term business value.
Salesforce users powered by Einstein Analytics are already experiencing (and benefitting from) this integrated analytics experience. Augmented by AI and simplified with conversational analytics, this is creating a seamless experience that's quickly being seen as table stakes across all industries.
To learn more, be sure to visit the Einstein Analytics page and join the Einstein Analytics Trailblazer Community group to ask questions, share ideas, and talk about all things analytics.
