Users of customer relationship management (CRM) applications need to be able to analyze data within the context of the application they are using. The challenge is that much of the data they really need in order to perform those analytics, such as usage reports and customer support calls, exists outside of that application.
To give users of CRM applications access to sources of Big Data while still preserving the context within which they are analyzing that data, Gainsight has released an upgrade to its namesake embedded analytics tools for CRM applications that adds support for both Hadoop and MongoDB.
Gainsight is delivered as a software as a service (SaaS) application presented within CRM applications from Salesforce.com, Oracle Sales Cloud, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SalesLogix, SAP and Siebel. Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta says the goal is to provide analytics that enable companies to drive sales renewals in what Mehta refers to as the “new subscription economy.” In pursuit of what Mehta described as a $500 billion subscription economy, Gainsight also announced it has picked up an additional $20 million in funding to drive adoption of a predictive analytics service that eliminates the need to deploy analytics software on premise.
Mehta says today most companies depend on some form of contract renewal for an ongoing service to drive their profits. Gainsight is designed to help users of CRM systems to identify those opportunities as part of focused effort to limit customer churn. The ultimate goal, says Mehta, is to apply predictive analytics in a way that allows companies to create repeatable playbooks around patterns of up selling opportunities, which Gainsight helps to identify.
The challenge, of course, is making sure the users of the CRM applications are savvy enough to apply those analytics in a way that doesn’t always require a data scientist to make sense of the data.