We ask people to bring more graphs to meetings to increase analytics adoption. We ask our analysts to share more dashboards to hope that everyone will use them. We invite business professionals–already stretched for a time–to learn to use self-service BI software, yet another tool outside of their daily jobs. This isn’t working.
Instead of asking people for their attention, it is better to use insights from data to help them do their jobs. This is how analytics can be seamlessly integrated into every aspect of people’s lives, from their workflows to the apps they use to make decisions in the field they work in.
What does this look like in concrete terms? This CRM prompts salespeople to call primed contacts when they show interest. An executive presents a slide presentation and interacts with embedded information on the fly to answer questions. It sends KPIs directly to the smartwatches and wristbands of airline safety workers, allowing them to take immediate action. Companies will be able to increase their analytics adoption and unlock the full potential of their data through seamless integrations such as these.
Here are five examples that show how companies can – and in many cases are – use analytics today.
Information about the virtual water chill
Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other workplace chat apps have been helping people connect beyond their immediate offices for years. Gartner predicts that these apps, which are “virtual water coolers for companies” in the future, will be more critical than ever.
This is what we need. Apps for working in chat rooms are where we share information, collaborate and make decisions. It should also serve as a place to share insights from analytics. Don’t just copy and paste links from external dashboards. Keep the conversation going, and share your wisdom. Modern integrations allow chat participants to view relevant charts, insights, or other important metrics within the channels without leaving the chat.
It would be absurd to hold physical meetings and ask everyone to take a break to look at dashboards before asking them to return to the forum. This should also apply to our digital meeting spaces.
Enhance your daily productivity
Today, knowledge workers only need a handful of tools to help them in their day-to-day work. Salespeople use CRM. Finance uses ERP. The product uses ERP for program management and design tools. An email is still a standard tool for communication. Everybody still uses email.
CRM is one example. They could alert Customer Service reps in advance of accounts having product issues. Marketing leaders can quickly react to advertisements and compare them.
Each of these scenarios requires workers to look through dashboards to analyze customer data. Instead of digging through dashboards to analyze customer data, workers can extract analytics and keep users where they are needed. This will allow users to work more efficiently and improve their outcomes while doing their daily job.
Make your presentations interactive and dynamic.
Crowds of people are more likely to be presented with data using charts and tables screenshots. They are not dynamic, take hours of tedious labor, and often are out of date before they are produced. These reports don’t encourage the more profound questions that presentations are supposed to inspire.
Orion, an financial advisory firm, has a unique approach to this problem. They infuse their presentations with real-time insights from data. The company presented reports that included business trends, account changes, curious transactions, cash flow, and other unexpected questions to customers. They were able to interact with real-time data instantly and never had to reply: “We don’t currently have the data for that particular question.”
Analytics on go
Analytics can be embedded in other apps, allowing people to make decisions. However, it is also about providing analytics to workers even when they’re not at the office. Traditional companies have asked field workers to use their smartphones and tablets to log in to portals and view dashboards while on the move to adapt analytics. However, this is not how they adopt analytics.
Today’s innovative companies adopt analytics to their workers via the hardware they carry with them. Air Canada provides insights to their employees through smartwatches, smart speakers, and smart speakers. Their frontline workers work in airport terminals and tarmac to keep planes operational and passengers safe. Their job is crucial. They also require lots of data.
The Safety Analytics team at Air Canada realized that these workers would not be able to return to the office to sign in to different portals and view specific dashboards. Instead, they created apps to send important alerts, KPIs, and other information to the frontline using devices they already had. This allows them to interact easily with data, in some cases even using their voice.
The benefits have been obvious. The company detected which parts could fail and inspected the planes. Their frontline workers can protect everyone and gain insight from data without ever needing to leave the office.
Empowering your products and services
We identified where and how our internal teams work and then added analytics to those workflows. But we can’t ignore our customers, suppliers, and partners. Our products and services offer the perfect place to incorporate analytics and help us differentiate ourselves from our competitors. This doesn’t just mean giving them dashboards describing how they use our product but also actionable intelligence to help them use our products more effectively.
One example is freckle, an education software firm that makes apps and exercises for teachers and students. Initial dashboards were provided to school administrators so that they could see how students and teachers used the app. The administrator had to meet with Freckle’s account manager to go over the dashboard and look at all the data. This was slow, tedious, and inefficient.
Freckle’s innovative solution is? These insights can be integrated directly into the product. School administrators will now have real-time analytics from the app they already use. They don’t need additional technical skills to navigate selfservice dashboards. Administrators can now work with teachers and identify which exercises are most successful and which students may need more attention.
Freckle shows us that the possibilities for how analytics can be infused are limitless, because analytics should and can be infused everywhere. Finding the right place to take action is key. Then, give them the insights and data they need to continue their work.
Our entire workforce will benefit from analytics when we integrate it in this manner. They’ll be more able to take action and make decisions based on data without even knowing.
