The insider’s guide to improving customer experiences with embedded analytics

If you haven’t already heard, dashboards are dead. For more than 15 years, you’ve relied on dashboards to view and understand your business data. Unfortunately, dashboards are no longer fit for this purpose.

• They aren’t cloud native.
• They aren’t built for the modern data stack.
• They certainly don’t provide actionable insights.
• They simply create multiple versions of the truth, adding friction to the user experience and frustrating your analyst team.

Enter Live analytics. This technology layer sits directly on top of your cloud data platform (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks, Google Big Query, AWS Redshift) giving you and your users live access to all of your cloud data at the most granular level.

With this access comes the ability to easily interact with data. Live Analytics empowers app users to limitlessly search for the answers they need, ask follow-up questions, and act on insights.

What does this mean for your business?

With embedded Live Analytics, you can build the kind of product experiences that will make your customers feel like they’re living in the future.

Instead of frustrating, clunky dashboards, you can empower your customers with the information and tools to customize and analyze their own data. As a result, they get the personalized experiences they want – and your products become your best marketing opportunity.

Embedded analytics can transform customer service, increase customer loyalty, fuel engagement, and even open up new revenue streams.

This is where the real revolution starts. This is the first time in the history of this industry where—thanks to ThoughtSpot—we put our users in the driving seat. They decide where they want to go. They decide what they want to search for. They decide which areas they want to explore.

Matt LukowskiDirector of AnalyticsHarri

Sure, great customer service has always been important. But in 2022, customer-centricity is more crucial than ever.

Deloitte's 2022 Global Marketing Trends polled over 1000 C-level executives worldwide, to see what made the difference between growth and decline for today's businesses.

Their researchers found companies on the upswing had identified and responded to the top priorities of today’s consumers:

• Companies that show that they care about their customers and employees
• Brands that behave with transparency and integrity
• Digital products that deliver a seamless, human-centered experience
• Outstanding customer service paired with helpful AI-based self-service resources
• Personalized data experiences - without crossing the line into “creepy

And what do all these consumer expectations have in common? To meet them, companies need to deeply understand their customers. And to do that, they need to be creating insights from their data.

In a recent episode of The Data Chief , Ameet Shetty, the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Pilot Flying J, put it like this:

How do you differentiate yourself? Well, you do it by knowing your clients better…That's what data does, driving those insights to help us create those connections so that we aren't another commodity.

Ameet ShettyChief Data and Analytics OfficerPilot Flying J

It can be a real struggle to get the kind of insights that can help create a unique brand, personalize your customer’s experience, or offer superior customer service. To provide the experience that today’s customers have come to expect, you need to be able to put your data to work for you:

Your frontline
business users

Need data-driven insights to answer customer questions and identify opportunities to offer more customer value.

Your customers

Need engaging analytics tools that give them unique, personalized data experiences, right inside your product, app, or portal.

Here’s how ThoughtSpot Everywhere can help your business make the most of your data.

Delight your clients with valuable data insights

Embedded analytics goes beyond getting insights into the hands of your business users—it also delights customers with valuable insights, right in the app they’re already using.

CWT helps customers cope with the COVID crisis

THE RESULT

$1.5 billion

Revenue

Top 5

Highest earning travel company

100s embedded

Thoughtspot customers

CWT helps organizations of all sizes manage travel, meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibition and events. They wanted to provide their clients with personalized recommendations and insights, without adding an analytical burden to their internal team.

By integrating ThoughtSpot Everywhere into their internal platform, CWT’s customer data app, AnswerIQ, was poised to answer any client data question. With Live Analytics capability, CWT’s new amped-up app allowed their clients to explore more than three years’ worth of data with an AI-assisted search.

Once COVID-19 swept the globe, CWT layered in data from nearly 100 governments onto existing client travel data, allowing for quick responses to rapidly changing regulations. With visibility into restrictions, border closures, and health data, their customers were able to react intelligently and efficiently to potential risk.

Win customer loyalty with optimized self-service billing

Let’s start with a quick Harvard Business Review stat : across industries, eight out of ten customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. The same number say that their experience with a company is just as important as the product itself. Clearly, self-service means better customer support, and better customer support means higher customer loyalty.

BT empowers customers to answer billing questions on the fly

THE RESULT

45%

Improvement in NPS

£2M

Decreases in losses

10K+

Enterprise customers

1.1M

SMB customers

BT, one of the UK’s largest telecommunication providers, knows a thing or two about providing fast, reliable customer service. No wonder then that they used the embedded Live Analytics functionality in ThoughtSpot Everywhere to improve their customers’ billing experience.

BT’s billing portal can now offer clarity for even the most complex billing profiles. Clients can now drill down into their billing data and ask questions in natural language. And with Spot IQ, they can spot expensive anomalies in the data that they might otherwise have overlooked.

Help your customers help themselves

One more example of just how big of an impact self-service can make:

Verisk eliminates 30,000 annual report requests

THE RESULT

98K

Users

2.5K Report

Request per month

Week to minutes

Wait time for answers reduced from 1 week to minutes

Verisk, an analytics and risk investment firm, needed to scale their analytics products to meet their customer demand. Verisk was fending thousands of ad-hoc report requests each month from customers, who rely on them for analytics to make informed risk and investment decisions. The burden on their team was significant, and the wait time for answers was a sticking point for customers.

Instead of creating endless personalized views for their customers, Verisk decided to embed ThoughtSpot Everywhere into Xactware. As a result, Verisk gave their customers direct, self-serve access to the data in their databases. Embedded Live Analytics meant that Verisk’s customers could access a single source of truth, and get up-to-the-minute, down-to-the-row information. This enabled insurance claims professionals to catch errors, report on progress, and benchmark performance. And it took them mere minutes, rather than the week they’d previously had to wait.

As Deloitte’s report on global consumer trends revealed, today’s customers expect a personalized experience, whether they’re shopping online or reaching out to customer support. And certainly when they’re using a data app.

However, if you offer your customers static dashboards , you’re treating them all like carbon copies. Instead of adapting to their unique needs and expectations, your data app can only offer them a one-size-fits-all, standardized view into the data. To create a truly personalized client data experience, you need to use a modern cloud analytics solution.

Give your customers instant answers to ad hoc questions

Sometimes customers have unique requests—and the right data can help them answer those questions quickly.

Cetera reduces costs while boosting sales and operations productivity

THE RESULT

15,000 financial advisors

$2.3M+

Savings in productivity improvements

$1M+

Savings in portal development

Cetera Advisors, LLC, is an investment advisory company with the second-largest network of financial advisors in the US. To remain competitive, they need to provide their 1.6 million clients with customized insights into their assets. With their prior solution, more than 15,000 financial advisors were relying on Cetera’s IT team to build key reports. This was a massive manual lift for Cetera - and clunky for customers.

ThoughtSpot allowed Cetera to completely overhaul this process, and transform their customer portal into an easily personalized live analytics powerhouse. Today, Cetera’s clients can:

• Answer their own questions as soon as they arise;
• Create and save their own personalized views (known as Liveboards );
• Monitor trends in asset performance;
• Analyze accounts against benchmark indices;
• Get insights into their data instantly - with no waiting for Cetera’s IT team.

As a result, Cetera can offer their clients a major competitive advantage - and reduce their own costly overhead.

COVID forced businesses to respond to change more quickly than ever before.

And the need for speed won’t be temporary: technological advances, globalization, data analytics and other forces of change demand that businesses respond with increasing agility. A global survey by McKinsey found that 75% of organizations were either currently working on an agile transformation, were preparing to launch one, or were “born agile.”

Now here is this agile attitude more necessary than in product development. Organizations must be able to adapt their products to meet changing customer demands in weeks, rather than months or years.

Move fast with your data

Embedded analytics means you can move fast while still allowing the space to evaluate impact.

Hayes revamps flagship product to improve client revenue integrity

THE RESULT

1 in 8 Healthcare providers in the U.S. is audited using MDaudit

1 ,000,000,000

Rows of data

2X Faster

Time to solution with ThoughtSpot implementation

Hayes Management Consulting knew they needed to adapt their products to meet their growing customer base. As a leading management consulting agency for healthcare providers, they also knew that they needed to launch this new functionality quickly, to remain relevant in a fast-changing industry. And, with a wealth of customer data to hand, they knew they wanted to help their users to mine their own data and gain valuable insights.

ThoughtSpot Everywhere was the answer to all three of those problems. Offering incomparable speed to insight with embedded Live Analytics, out of the box capabilities like natural search and visualizations, and robust, flexible APIs that could be easily customized within Hayes’ revenue integrity software platform, ThoughtSpot was the perfect fit. What’s more, Hayes was able to double their product development speed, going from concept to launch with ThoughtSpot in just 12 weeks.

Today, their MDAudit Enterprise solution empowers customers to mine their own data and find out why claims were denied. These insights allow customers to detect risks before they become million-dollar problems, closing the loop between insight, action, and outcome.

We chose ThoughtSpot because of its performance and search, interactive visualization, the end user experience, and flexible APIs which we can customize into our own platforms.

Ritesh RameshChief Technology OfficerHayes

How about one final example for the road?

DRC gives educators real-time insights into student achievement

THE RESULT

57M+

Online tests taken annually

30K+ users

In departments of Education, local administrators, and teachers

Teachers have certainly had enough to cope with over the past few years. The Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), a national assessment developer, knew that they needed to provide their customer base of teachers, educational administrators, and state Departments of Education, with the tools that would make their jobs easier, not harder. However, their old BI tools weren’t well-suited for the job. The workflow was time-consuming and challenging, especially for educators with less technical experience.

By embedding ThoughtSpot into their analytics tools, DRC gave teachers self-service access to secure, actionable insights on student assessments and test score trends. This means that teachers can directly interact with their data, to discover which students require additional assistance. And they can do it all with just a few clicks.

The Modern Analytics Cloud’s Live Analytics technology can help your business deliver what today’s customers are looking for. By making data accessible, limitlessly searchable, and actionable, ThoughtSpot Everywhere can help you build a better relationship with your customers.

When you use ThoughtSpot Everywhere to embed Live Analytics into your data app or customer portal, you can give customers the solution they need to identify and solve their business problems. You empower them to answer their own questions, without waiting for your help. And you give them a personalized data experience.

There’s an app for that.

ThoughtSpot Everywhere ’s developer-friendly platform lets you embed engaging Live Analytics experiences directly into your data apps. Instead of offering your customers static dashboards, you can give them:

• A dynamic, engaging, and sticky consumer-grade analytics experience
• A powerful natural language search experience powered by AI so customers can ask their own data questions the way they would in a search engine
• Embedded charts and tables that highlight the key metrics they care about
• A fully personalized customer experience with your data app