Why It's Time to Rethink Your Customer Analytics Experience

Data-driven companies are 19x more likely to be profitable. No wonder there’s a shortage of qualified data scientists. Demand is outpacing supply threefold. As a result, many business leaders are taking charge of their own data.

Citizen data scientists are rising up, using technology as ammunition to make sense of data. Customers are more reliant than ever on their technology partners to access more data and insights.

Baseline analytics are table stakes. It is time to turbocharge your dashboards with an engaging end-user analytics experience. The core of that experience is sharing more data discovery capabilities.

There is a lot to consider for those who are not fully on the citizen data science train yet. But even if introducing an enhanced customer analytics experience is a difficult and potentially complex undertaking, it’s an immense opportunity for your business. Informed customers are engaged customers. And an engaged customer is a happy and profitable customer.

What is Customer Analytics Experience?

Customer Analytics Experience (CAX in short) is a new perspective on the SaaS analytics feature set. It’s where UX, customer success, and end-user empowerment meet.

When customers get to discover their own insights in an easy and playful way, your SaaS product empowers them to make confident, data-driven decisions throughout their user lifecycle.

Consider CAX as the kind of Fitbit functionality for software usage. CAX makes your users more aware of their actions, informs desirable user behavior, and most importantly, makes them successful. If done right, the user productivity gain deepens engagement with your product and will position you as a trusted partner.

Building the ultimate CAX is an incremental process for SaaS service providers. Like in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you need to start with the basics. Depending on your situation, it can make sense to tackle multiple steps at once or build out your analytics stage per stage.

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Reasons to let customers explore their data

A great analytics experience makes customers smarter. Expose the data and let your customers explore it in their own way. It empowers them to make the right choices faster.

Health tracking apps share a variety of data like steps moved, calories burned, hours standing, and percentage of REM sleep. Paired with visual data summaries and reminder notifications, data sharing leads to healthy choices. It is no surprise that 73% of Fitbit users report weight loss in the first 6 months of usage.  

On the B2B front, tools like HubSpot are taking this concept a step further and providing not only data access but “mining equipment.” They know marketers love playing with their data. And that helped them boost adoption. 79% of users on their platform prefer their custom reporting over default dashboards.

Use embedded analytics to inject more analytical power into your own SaaS product, and the benefits to your business are boundless:

• More engagement. New engagement opportunities make your product sticky like bees to honey.
• Increased trust. With the freedom to explore their own data, your customers see you as a credible and dependable partner.
• Innovative brand image. Customers will perceive your product as progressive compared to the competition.
• Reduced resource strain. When your customers are fielding their own insights, it reduces the burden on internal resources. Product builders and account teams can focus on core functions and services.
• Product feedback. Observe what your users do with data and identify opportunities to improve your core product offering.
• Competitive edge. If you don’t engage users with data, someone else will.

By improving the customer analytics experience, you’ll create opportunities not only for customers but for your own business.

Customer analytics experience considerations

If you believe that sharing more data with customers is a good thing, you’ll want to set up for success.

Here are some key areas to consider before improving your customer analytics experience:

• Interaction. The ability to explore data independently. (filters, drill-downs, etc.)
• Ease of use. Provide a highly intuitive interface to avoid hours of training. (drag & drop)
• Access control. Set boundaries on which datasets can be accessed and what can be done with the data (edit existing vs. create net new reporting).
• Experience personalization: Custom UIs for role access, language, currency, geography, mobile vs. desktop access points, etc.
• Data stack integration. Provide dependable data piping to relevant data sources (data warehouse, web services, etc.) for real-time insights.

Interactive data exploration and insights mining can manifest themselves in many ways. There are a range of use cases for SaaS and cloud application providers:

• Custom analytics tool for customer success representatives to share new report pages with clients
• Varying analytics experience for platforms with administrative users and end-users
• Additional analytics and exploration features for premium pricing tiers
• Data studio capability for power users

The world is your oyster!

The future is here; it’s just distributed unevenly

We are at the dawn of citizen data science and this is an immense opportunity for SaaS and cloud application providers. Some SaaS providers like Sentiance and Selligent Marketing Cloud have enhanced their customer analytics experience and are already experiencing the benefits.

If you believe an empowered customer is a happy customer, you are ready to turn your customers into citizen data scientists.

Luzmo is here to help. Our analytics experts are ready to give you a free consultation and product tour.

The future awaits!