One of the best ways to leverage your data and use it to improve your business is by implementing customer-facing analytics. Why?
Customer-facing analytics lets you give your customers the ability to analyze their own data, and you're only giving them the data you've authorized them to see.
How do you implement customer-facing analytics? You either build a platform or buy one.
Build vs. Buy: Why It Matters for Implementing Your Customer-Facing Analytics Platform?
Building a customer-facing analytics platform requires time and money. Costs can pile up in labor, server fees, and maintenance.
Three Challenges in Building Your Own Customer-Facing Analytics
1. Lack of Engineering Resources
Developing analytics from scratch takes lots of resources: months of dedicated personnel time. It pulls your engineering team away from core product development and can derail your entire product roadmap.
Ask yourself this: Would your engineering team deliver more ROI if they were freed up to work on strategic initiatives for your core product rather than researching, developing, and maintaining in-house dashboards?
2. Difficulty Managing Changes to Dashboards and Reports
Building a solution means spending dev hours managing updates, change requests, and reports.
Depending on your backend, developers might have to write new data integrations and connectors that are challenging to implement and maintain. Responding to customer feedback is crucial in providing the best analytics solution, but adding or removing a single chart can take up an entire sprint.
3. Not a Core Expertise
If building a customer-facing analytics solution is not your core expertise, you can end up with a subpar platform, leading to unhappy customers, lower retention, and lost deals. All of that affects your bottom line.
What Are the Advantages of Buying a Customer-Facing Analytics Platform?
Buying is the best option if your business wants to scale and has particular reporting requirements.
Speed to Deploy
Low-code tools for customer-facing analytics are easy to set up.
Pre-built platforms save you hours of engineering time because they come with integration, security, and end-user customization features.
You don't have to add them on later.
Vedha Sayyaparaju, CTO of Zuddl, appreciates how quick and easy it was to buy a customer-facing analytics platform.
"Using Explo has been awesome! We’re able to launch new dashboards to customers with ease and not a lot of engineering hours. The turnaround time is great. I’ve had feature requests implemented in minutes :)"
Pre-Built Dashboards and Reports
With a pre-built solution, your dev teams don't have to create dashboards or reports. Instead, they have easy-to-use self-service tools that can quickly be embedded into a product.
Ultimately, self-service tools can free your dev team's bandwidth, and your customers can:
- Access and understand complex data reports without contacting IT support for help.
- Make informed business decisions based on the accurate data they can generate from the tool.
For Palash Soni, CEO of Goldcast — a San Fransisco-based company that helps B2B companies to host virtual events — having Explo build their customer-facing analytics dashboard saved months of engineering effort.
"Embedding was simple, and Explo makes it easy to silo data between customers and create custom dashboards for specific customers."
Reduced Development Complexity and Costs
Your dev team doesn't need to know the ins and outs of customer-facing analytics because the company you buy your solution from takes care of everything in the backend.
Buying reduces your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) because a software license costs only a fraction of the average developer's salary.
For Yuhan Lin, VP for Engineering at MedMe Health, buying a platform from a reputable company meant they could use their dev hours for business-critical initiatives while Explo took care of their backend.
"Explo has allowed us to funnel valuable dev resources into other business-critical initiatives while giving us the peace of mind that our customer-facing dashboards are taken care of. The Explo team has always been available to lend us a hand getting set up and has been indispensable in ensuring their platform serves our nuanced needs."
Accelerate Your Customer-Facing Analytics by Buying a Solution
If you build a customer-facing dashboard from scratch, you'll spend more money and time than projected.
You'll also end up with a "solution" that doesn’t scale without additional development cycles to meet each unique customer request.
Explo can help your developers save time by simply copying a few lines of code to embed our pre-built, white-label, interactive dashboards directly into your web portal or app.
Let us build a custom dashboard for you.
Try Explo today.
