This is a blog series about Built in Business Analytics in Cloud for Customer (aka Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or C4C). After reading this blog you should be capable to excel in preparing business analytics for your sales and service users and empower them in achieving success through clear business outcomes. Quick note: Inbuilt Analytics is mostly for operational analysis. Do not confuse it with a full-fledged BI tool, or with Data Workbench which you can use for import, update and export high volumes of data.
Lets dive into the best practices the pitfalls and how to make Business Analytics that your Business Stakeholders will love!
Why do you need to create a great Analytics’ Experience?
The purpose of any organization is to produce value, whether you want to improve peoples’ life or simple look into profit, what is common across any organization is the need to deliver value which will require you to produce the right measure of success. We are talking about organizations’ capability to reflect how their strategies succeed or fail. If we think from a customer strategy perspective, sometimes you will focus on selling more of your products, in other moments you may want to focus on reducing your costs. In any of the cases measuring the outcomes provide you an answer if you are heading in the right directions or you need to adjust it. Business insights will tell your organization how much a team, a process or even a system has contributed to your results and that is certainly the foundation for any leader and organization to make decisions.
While thinking about your business performance, you plan to have the right systems, the right talent, and the right processes. But you sometimes forget to thing about having the right data. Measuring business outcomes should never be an afterthought. If you are implementing a new system, start measuring the adoption of that system, if you are implementing a new process measure or the adherence to new processes, or the outcomes produced. Analytics will help you there and beyond you just need to define where and how to set them.
But data is a growing object, in customer experience as in any other fields data has in fact increased so dramatically that there is no organization which isn’t looking into how to turn it into meaningful and digestible piece of information which can facilitate decision making. Besides proliferation of data sources also their complex networks brought new requirements and demand of new skills and not having the capacity to deal with it can significantly compromise any business outcomes your organization my aspire. Referring to technology the capacity exists. Whether you want to drive data analysis and extrapolation, using ML/AI or even to bring together the multitude of siloed data across different system into single views, you have options to yours an intelligent enterprise and therefore unveil the intelligent business manager.
As users, being a leader supervising a team or an individual looking at your own performance you expect the tools you adopt on your daily tasks to help you navigate through the process but more importantly to show you the key performance indicators at one glance, and to help to read the data, interpret the data and even extrapolate the same data. But not all users are the same, and not all users require the same data, and even if they do, they may not need it exactly in the same format. Think of data from different roles perspectives, what data combinations and timeframes are critical for the different users, how you can use the same data to present different perspectives is all about managing analytics.
In the end is about how data can tell a story. Analytics can turn simple raw data into rich data, data, easy to read and understand, data which move you back and forth from visuals to its sources and vice versa. You may be using basic reports, dashboards, KPIs representations or a combination of these different options in a home page or in any contextual place of an application, the result is nothing less than story behind the numbers. There are many options when it comes to Analytics, the first you should consider is the one available built in your solution. Built in analytics work very well for operational reporting because it guarantees real time information to the right roles as opposed to extraction of data into other tools which access, and distribution may not be fully under control and interactivity across data and visuals may be compromised to the limited data you may have extracted. Albeit extractions to excel fall into that category do not confuse an excel export with the adoption of excel add-on. If you use built in analytics in cloud for customer an excel add on will work provide you excel files which are directly connected with Cloud for Customer, meaning they require logon, provide data updated in real time and even consult the reports you may have made available in C4C.
Now to build analytics and consume them requires a teamwork, so think about a proper governance. Who is responsible for what: who defines the requirements is not necessarily the person who creates reports or data sources etc? Having clear roles and responsibilities defined helps to avoid duplicated reports and the associated cost of maintenance, it also avoids the existence of data sources without the necessary requirements or logic which pollutes your solution and eventually impacting efficiency.
As you can see many things coming into the picture when you prepare business analytics requirements. Don’t look at the experience or try to mirror the same you used to apply in your legacy, look further, question the need of using line reporting, think if there are any better ways to provide the picture your users need. Lets make a recap and build a short list of activities you should go use to structure the building of your business analytics:
- 1st define 3-4 expected business outcomes
- 2nd determine 10-12 KPIs that will showcase the results of those business outcomes
- 3rd design how you want to tell your story, which kind of visualizations, how they come together (dashboards) and what dynamic flows you want to enable (filters and drilldowns)
- 4th identify which data you will need, where the data reside where will be displayed and obviously what accesses your audience will need.
This was just the start of your journey in C4C Business Analytics, we have prepared plenty of resources to help you along the way, follow these links to discover more and HAVE FUN!
