Grow your business with connected analytics

You get home after a bike ride and check out your average speed, peak heart rate, VO₂ max on your Garmin. From here you decide whether you had a “good ride”, or how you can improve next time.

Or, you’re looking into your stocks, and a notification pops-up on your smartphone. You open your trading app, read the news article, study a chart, and then make a trade within the same app.

“What’s common between these two acts?”

As a user, while strategizing about your next ride or making a trade, you are intuitively (almost subconsciously) making data-driven decisions while engrossed in your area of interest. The fact that you are consuming and analyzing data fades away in the background while you focus on the task at hand.

“So why isn’t this the case when I have to make business decisions?” It’s a valid question, and a short answer to it is, embedded analytics.

What is embedded analytics?

Simply put, embedded analytics is the seamless integration of analytic content and capabilities within applications (like CRM, ERP) or portals (intranets or extranets).

According to Gartner, “Embedded analytics is a digital workplace capability where data analysis occurs within a user’s natural workflow, without the need to toggle to another application”

The goal of embedded analytics is to help users make better decisions by incorporating relevant data and analytics to solve high-value business problems and work more efficiently as these capabilities are available inside the applications they use every day. This contrasts with traditional business intelligence tools/platforms, which focus on extracting insights from data within the silo of analysis.

How to get started with embedded analytics

“What are the key considerations for embarking on an embedded analytics journey for my organization?”, “How can Infocepts help?” you may ask. Curious you! But don’t worry, you are asking the right questions. Let’s begin with the second question first.

Infocepts is a global leader of end-to-end data & analytics solutions with nearly 20 years of experience enabling customers to derive value from a variety of data-driven capabilities. Working in partnership with you, we offer reusable solutions to your data and analytic needs to deliver predictable outcomes with guaranteed ROI.

Back to the first question on key considerations – blending our experience, expertise, and a lot of thought, we have put together a list of key considerations in case you are considering about creation and sustenance of embedded analytics applications:

1. User experience (UX) and adoption

The end-users should be able to use and adopt the analytics applications, else all the time and resources spent may not lead to anything.

2. Business Value

How to capture and articulate business value to secure “buy-in” from program sponsor(s) and key stakeholders. This involves creating a business case, identifying metrics to track, and measuring performance over a period of time.

3. Ability to customize, integrate and maintain

These factors determine the effectiveness of the application and ultimately determine whether its adoption is sustainable or not.

4. Governed self-service

Users should be self-reliant to use these apps. Moreover, it’s crucial that they have confidence in the quality of the data and the right person should be able to get access to the right information.

5. Operational efficiency and automation

The analytics application should help the users to do things faster, with continuous improvement.

How we created an embedded analytics solution

We helped a well-known luxury retail customer create an embedded analytics solution within their portal, which eventually helped them realize business value.

The customer had a unique business model wherein travel partners would bring in customers to their stores situated in the choicest of travel destinations around the world as a part of their tour itinerary. These travel partners would log in to a portal provided by our customer and make registrations for the tour groups so that the store operations team could plan their visits accordingly and provide a better customer experience for the tour group within the store.

After analytics were seamlessly embedded within the login portal, travel partners were empowered to get access to key information about their sales, targets, and commissions/incentives in a single place. Here’s how it helped both parties:

Travel partners:

• • Better visibility and actionable insights based on past sales performance trends by customer demographics and product categories helped them plan and hence perform better. For example, they understood from data that people coming from Switzerland to France store may not be too keen to buy watches since they may have already bought those in their initial part of the tour itinerary. Such insights helped the travel partners to plan out, in collaboration with our customer, some tailored store visits thus maximizing sales performance.
  • Data-driven insights also empowered travel partner associates to fast-track their effectiveness, which would otherwise typically take years of experience to understand patterns.
  • Since data points were ‘embedded’ within the same portal which the partners were quite used to working with, the familiar interface meant minimal change management and training, and hence almost 100% adoption.

Our customer:

Retail stores saw a 30% uptick in channel sales due to embedded analytics. Moreover, it reduced the workload on the store operations team in managing the channel partners and their information requests. Instead of pulling one-off reports time and again, they were able to focus their time on other activities to better the business.

 

Want to learn more? Get started today with your embedded analytics journey and help build a better future for your business and users.