Six Tips for Turning Customer Feedback into a Powerful Business Tool
As part of an effort to make analytics more accessible, Salesforce today at a Salesforce World Tour event launched a series of analytics applications targeted at specific roles inside organizations.
Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce Analytics Cloud, says via the introduction of Salesforce Wave applications, the company is making available customizable accelerator templates that make it simpler for business users to surface business trends without the help of a dedicated business analyst.
Through tight integrated with the Salesforce1 platform, Rosenman says data can now naturally flow from any Salesforce application to a Salesforce Wave application accessing the Salesforce Analytics cloud from any mobile device or PC.
Rather than waiting for business analysts and internal IT departments to collaborate on building applications that invoke Salesforce Analytics Cloud, Rosenman says Salesforce is trying to spur adoption of its analytics application service by providing business users with a basic set of analytics applications they can easily configure themselves.
The degree to which individual IT departments will warm up to that idea will naturally vary. On the one hand, many of them view analytics as a natural extension of the data warehouses they have spent years developing. However, if possible, others would just as soon be out of the business report writing business altogether.
Obviously, self-service applications of all types are starting to find their way into enterprise environments so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see this concept applied to analytics. In fact, much better business decisions should be made on the assumption that business executives can now have access to fairly detailed information about the state of the business at any given moment. The end result, says Rosenman, is nothing less than the movement of analytics beyond the realm of the IT ivory towers where it now tends to reside.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that business users will actually rely on analytics even if they are made more accessible. But chances are, if rivals start making better business decisions because of access to analytics, it’s only a matter of time before the organization as a whole starts clamoring for similar capabilities.
