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The age when data was reserved for engineers and data scientists only is long gone. Nowadays, even apps such as Fitbit have dashboards that end users can access and see data that speaks to them.
Customer-facing analytics uses visualization to empower better decision-making in real time. Besides providing immense value to your customers, it can also drive expansion revenue for your business and give you a competitive advantage.
Customer-facing analytics is the presentation of analytics dashboards directly to the users of a business app. Instead of data analytics experts, any user of your product can access data visualizations with their key metrics through self-service analytics.
For example, Fitbit users can access data such as the miles they ran, time spent exercising, calories spent and more.
Typically, businesses embed analytics dashboards in their SaaS apps to provide their customers with a user-friendly way to access their key metrics.
While both types of analytics are powered by the same business intelligence tools, everything about these two types of analytics is different.
The purpose of traditional analytics is to use analytics tools to empower internal stakeholders to make better business decisions, even with different dashboard types.
Although customer-facing analytics has the same goal of better decision-making, the main difference is the way in which the data is presented. Customer-facing aims to provide a better customer experience by giving end-users insights into their app usage data, directly inside their workflows. It means they can take action quicker, without needing intermediary steps of data analysis..
The audience for user-facing analytics is the entirety (or some groups) of your end users.
Meanwhile, the audience for traditional analytics is the internal stakeholders that need to make data-driven decisions. Your managers, data team, sales team, marketing team - anyone who can benefit from great data analysis within your organization.
The data in customer-facing analytics is presented to meet customer needs. The interface is intuitive and easy to understand, the user knows how to use every functionality and read their own graphs and charts.
On the other hand, traditional BI setups have detailed reports and dashboards with real-time data.
User-facing analytics have personalized dashboards to ensure high customer satisfaction. This can be achieved with an embedded BI tool with proper multi-tenancy.
Data in traditional BI settings is not personalized. There are different segments and aggregations, but for the most part, all users see the same data models and data sets in their chosen analytics platform.
For the best user experience, the end-user can see exactly how their data is used and where it comes from. The person using the dashboard can explore their own data and determine what they want to see. Which KPIs to highlight, which ones to hide, which visualizations and cues to use, how to present and structure the visualized data and much more, from start to finish.
Traditional BI is different because the end users typically get to see and analyze the final product as a part of their analytics experience, at the very end of the data analytics workflow. The data analytics team handles data governance, modeling, cleanup and preparation, while the end users only get to see and interpret the data.
With customer-facing analytics, the end user is engaged with data in various shapes and formats. They are encouraged to explore their data and see how the SaaS product helps them solve their pain points. They can drill down into data and even create their own dashboards within their chosen embedded analytics solution.
For traditional BI users, the bulk of the workload is already done: the data has been prepared and analyzed and their main task is to analyze it and make a good business decision. The downside is that the user has no influence on the data segment that is presented, the way in which the data is visualized and more. This could lead to flawed decision-making, especially if the user working with the data has no previous analytics experience.
In self-service customer analytics, visualizations are typically very interactive. The end user can exploit the seamless integration with various data sources to explore different data dimensions, date ranges, and more.
Dashboards in traditional BI can be interactive, but for the most part, their main aim is to get someone to understand a lot of data very quickly. It’s the data analysts and scientists that can benefit from real-time analytics, not the end users.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand a dashboard in Fitbit. In other words, embedded analytics dashboards in customer-facing analytics are super easy to understand and work with.
Traditional BI dashboards are somewhat more complicated, but not to a large extent. The end users are still people that have no touchpoints with analytics, but they can rely on data engineering teams that can help them out.
The obvious answer is that it can help the end users of SaaS apps in many different use cases to understand what the product does for them. However, here are some more practical benefits of customer-facing analytics for product teams and SaaS companies.
A great example of this is a product called 24Sessions, a customer of ours. With customer facing analytics, they were able to show that their clients saved 20 minutes of their time per video, thanks to using 24Sessions compared to an in-person meeting.
The benefits of customer-facing analytics are twofold. It not only equips your end users with more data about their product experience, but it also helps your business get more revenue through better customer experience.
At Luzmo, we know that choosing an embedded analytics solution is not easy. There are many considerations to make: how easy it is to embed in your product, what the experience is like for your developers, what the end user sees… And much more.
Also at Luzmo, we know that it takes just a few days from signing up to getting a fully functional dashboard. Don’t take our word for it - sign up for a free demo with our team so we can show you how Luzmo works!
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
