5 Ways Retailers Can Best Leverage Data Analytics
Building an analytics application is one thing. Designing it in such a way that business people want to regularly use it is often another matter altogether.
Salesforce today moved to address that issue by delivering implementations of the Salesforce Wave Analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for specific vertical industries, while also making it possible for IT organizations and third-party developers to customize Salesforce Wave to meet any number of specific use cases.
Ketan Karkhanis, senior vice president of product management analytics cloud at Salesforce, says that the primary issue that organizations face when it comes to employing analytics is making intelligence easily consumable by end users, enabling them to then take some form of action.
“Up until now there really hasn’t been any kind of self service capabilities when it comes to analytics,” says Karkhanis.
Salesforce itself built an implementation of Salesforce Wave for the financial services market and marketers involved in business-to-business (B2B) campaigns. It then enlisted the aid of 20 independent software vendors (ISVs) to address other vertical markets or specific use cases.
Karkhanis says all these versions of Salesforce Wave are intended to take the SaaS application well beyond Salesforce’s primary customer base of sales executives. The difference between Salesforce Wave and other applications is that now all the end users in the organization can be working off the same customer records using a Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) application that is widely used to engage with them in the first place.
