Companies that embed analytics with a differentiated user experience increase engagement and revenue

A new Product Led Alliances report in partnership with ThoughtSpot, the Modern Analytics Cloud company,  reveals that companies that are embedding analytics with user expectations and desired experience in mind are realizing new opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and usage, increase ROI, innovate, disrupt, and drive meaningful change in their business.

The most successful companies are building software, applications, and services that not only leverage data, but provide insights into that data as a part of their offering. As in-app data exploration becomes the new standard in the user experience (UX) of both B2B and B2C apps, users expect these applications to offer analytics to help them get value out of their data to quantify and better understand their world. While the idea of embedding analytics is not new, the value of the data they expose to end users continues to grow. Coupled with this are new analytics paradigms, where any user can explore this data on their own to find meaningful, relevant insights.

Companies know that they have valuable data to leverage. Just over half, 55% of product builders who responded to this survey revealed they already offer embedded analytics in their products, yet only 57% of those who are doing this have seen a direct impact on increased revenue. 

Despite the value of embedding analytics, it remains costly and difficult. Nearly half (47%) of respondents cite budget constraints as one of the biggest challenges stopping organizations from building an embedded analytics solution, while 39% are concerned with slow time to market. And then once it’s launched there is the challenge of maintaining the offering by keeping up with feature requests (39%).  Even if companies manage to build these systems, the research shows these projects do not attract and retain users, as the analytics either fail to provide meaningful insights relevant to the user, or are too complicated to use.

Companies can't simply embed analytics. They need to rethink the kind of UX these embedded analytics provide. The data shows more than half (53%) of respondents know analytics UX is more important than ever. At the same token, they know it needs to change. Nearly 80% cited the need for better customization tied to specific business needs, while more than half noted the need to empower users to intuitively find their own answers. 

The UX can't stop within an application or product however. Nearly two thirds of product builders surveyed called out the need to connect insights from applications into other workflows, such as segmenting audiences and pushing those into other marketing apps, to seamlessly operationalize intelligence. However, less than a third are actually doing this today.

Today’s modern data stack holds the answer to unlocking the potential of data and analytics in building stickier products and applications, if product builders prioritize the right pieces of the stack. 65% of surveyed product professionals ranked analytics as the most critical component of the modern data stack, and nearly three quarters of them, 73%, plan to heavily invest in analytics tools. 

“In designing Cortex, I wanted to create a revenue intelligence solution to give business leaders real-time insights that would enable agile decision-making based on their specific needs.I knew right off the bat that we needed to collect our customer data and integrate it into our system as quickly as possible, and wanted the ability to rapidly provide an intuitive and personalized way to interact with that information. To best serve our clients, we needed to partner with a business already established in analytics UX,” said Chris Mann, VP Product Strategy, Ledger Bennett. “ThoughtSpot Everywhere was an obvious choice to augment the Cortex tech stack. Instead of wasting time and money to build the components to visualize complex business intelligence data, we got up and running quickly with a partner already on the cutting-edge of these capabilities.”

“This research makes it clear, the rules for building great products have changed, and the right data and analytics UX is critical to building sticky, differentiated applications. Software has eaten the world, and now, too, is data. Companies that aren’t thinking about ways to make this data available to their end-users are going to leave customers and dollars on the table,” said Sumeet Arora, Chief Development Officer at ThoughtSpot.