Customer-Facing Analytics is an increasingly important component for Customer Experience (CX).
Disorganized data leaves your customers feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, implementing customer-facing analytics can help improve your CX.
Customer-facing analytics enables your customers to find and use data that matters the most to them. In turn, it allows you to learn more about your customers while establishing loyalty and reducing customer churn.
So, how do you implement customer-facing analytics so that the value improves both CX and your bottom line?
Things to Think About When Implementing Customer-Facing Analytics
When choosing an implementation method, ask yourself these questions:
- How will you collect data?
- Where will you store data so that it stays secure?
- How will you set up queries and access controls that provide customers with truly personalized insights?
- What happens when your customer base grows — from hundreds to thousands to millions?
- Can your analytics stack scale as your business grows?
- How will users access the data?
- Will you need to duplicate work to share data externally?
Customer-Centricity is Key for Implementing Customer-Facing Analytics
When it comes to embedded dashboards, your customers want:
- Personalized data insights
- Real-time data collection across multiple streams
- Easy access/log-in methods
- External data sharing
So how do you turn customer needs into reality?
Your dashboard's design, UX, front and back end, and infrastructure must work together.
Here's how:
1. Set up Queries and Access Controls
Good dashboards provide customers with usable data.
You can make your dashboards even better by setting up queries and access controls:
- Give customers access to personalized data insights
- Resolve all cross-device interactions to a single customer profile
- Enable them to attract/engage new customers
- Create personalized CX with dashboard customization
- Retain existing customers
Without the correct queries and controls, you might end up in a state of data chaos.
Collecting data from multiple sources but failing to manage it properly causes disorganization and customer confusion. In this case, it's helpful to set up a centralized data warehouse to support your customers' analytics.
2. Provide Users With Real-Time Data
Analytics is only as good as the data it’s based on.
And old, outdated data is useless.
In order to make informed decisions, your customers need info that's dynamic and up-to-date. It's crucial to decide whether this data needs to be live or updated hourly or daily; based on this, the correct data stack needs to be set up.
When selecting a data warehouse or database and constructing your data pipeline, you should know how live you need the data. Spinning up a replica database with automated data pipelines might be required if you require live data. Otherwise, an ETL solution and data warehouse may result in some lag (as little as a few minutes) but can centralize your data in just a few minutes and make it super easy to access all the correct data.
3. Offer Easy Access to Your Dashboards
When choosing an access method for your analytics dashboards, consider security, setup, and ease of use.
You can give users a few different options for logging in:
- Username and password
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- External portal
What's the best way for your clients to access data? In most cases, it's best to integrate analytics directly into your application if you have one already. Alternatively, analytics solutions can offer a separate stand-alone portal or simple share links that allow direct access to live dashboards. Email reporting is also standard for more cadenced reports.
Explo's Customer-Facing Analytics Implementation
Explo provides customer-facing analytics solutions with embedded dashboards, white-labeled web portals, email reporting, and more.
These solutions are designed for your customers to access and visualize data when they need it most.
Explo makes collecting and integrating data easy. Explo supports all relational databases and warehouses. You can connect directly to your existing databases and warehouses — without replicating data or creating new data models.
Explo Lets Users Create Their Own Data Reports
With Explo, users can conduct self-service reports:
- Filter data — according to what is most important to them
- Sort reports for easy viewing
Self-service reports save your data teams, customer service reps, and developers time.
Explo Helps Scale Your Business
Your system should be able to handle increased data volume and workload — as well as different data types. Otherwise, you risk losing valuable data.
You also need the bandwidth to handle customer needs or risk losing valuable customers. By creating live dashboards and reporting, Explo removes the need to create and send reports manually. Your clients can also access self-service analytics to pull their insights instead of inquiring from your CS team.
Explo Allows Data-Sharing Without Duplication
Traditionally, sharing data with external stakeholders requires you to duplicate your work — a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Explo has different ways of sharing data:
- Embed — Embed dashboards directly into any application
- Email — Send dashboards as an email to end customers
- Share link — Share dashboards with a simple share link
- White-Label Portal — Let users log in and securely view their own dashboards and data
With Explo, all stakeholders have access to a shared dashboard (and a single point of truth). This reduces potential errors and eliminates tedious administrative overhead.
Explo Provides Secure Authorization
Secure data storage is a must.
The need for data security may not be obvious if you're used to analytics in non-customer-facing contexts.
However, with customer-facing analytics, security must be executed at a higher level; the "public" has access to the data (which is not the case with traditional BI analytics).
Explo offers strong security — without the need for a web app. Its white-label dashboard portal lets users log in and securely view their own data.
Even better, users authenticate with a magic email link, so you don’t need to manage passwords.
Explo Empowers Customers to Customize Dashboards
Creating a one-size-fits-all dashboard for your entire user base is tough. Implementing customer-facing analytics lets you skip that whole process.
Explo Architect provides enterprise-grade embedded analytics and self-service data reporting for your customers. It's designed to satisfy pro users without overwhelming beginners.
Customers can design and customize their own dashboards, so you don't have to.
Explo Use Cases: Zuddl and MedMe Health
Use Case #1: Zuddl
Explo helped Zuddl launch a new customer-facing dashboard — without using up all their engineering team's time.
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.
Use Case #2: MedMe Health
Yuhan Lin — VP of Engineering at MedMe Health — says Explo saved a months of dev hours and resources.
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.
Takeaway
Give your customers easy access to valuable data by implementing customer-facing analytics.
The best customer-facing dashboards will include:
- Real-time data collection
- Secure data access and permissions
- Personalized data insights
- Scalable analytics tools
- Easy access options
Find out how Explo can help you build customer-facing dashboards that meet user needs.
Book a demo today.
