Self-service reporting comes in many different forms depending on the use case and type of business intelligence solution. This article will look at self-service reporting through the lens of your customer end-users and how embedded analytics makes it possible for customers to access data via dashboards that integrate directly into a SaaS application or web portal front-end.

What is self-service reporting?

Self-service reporting allows any user to build basic data analytics queries and access their results in visually friendly dashboards without writing a single line of code.

With self-service reporting capabilities, you can create reports or visual dashboards to help tell a story and draw conclusions from the data without specialized IT knowledge or coding expertise. 

Self-service reporting is a substitute for the traditional method of requesting reports from technical resources and waiting weeks for a response. Instead, users can get the information and insights they need. 

With an embedded analytics solution, self-service reporting differs from traditional in-house BI solutions, as the end-user in this scenario is your customer.

The Benefits of Having A Self Service Reporting Solutions Available In Your SaaS App

As a SaaS developer or tech entrepreneur, it's important to understand why providing self-service reporting capabilities within your application will help you long-term.

The underlying benefits of self-service for SaaS include the following:

Creates a collaborative experience for your customers

Self-service reporting provides the tools to encourage collaboration and spark discussions around innovation amongst the various business users that don’t typically have access to data in real-time. By providing ways to access and share data for your customers, your application becomes a central hub for ideation and decision-making. 

Competitive edge and accelerates a buying cycle

In your customer’s assessment of like SaaS platforms, one common requirement across RFPs and user requests comes down to data & analytic capabilities within the application. If you don’t provide a stronger self-service business intelligence offering than your competitors, then you increase the likeliness that you won’t win the business. The more your SaaS app can demonstrate the value your customers get from you or your service, the more likely you will retain them and beat out your rivals that don’t have similar capabilities. At the end of the day, it’s all about ROI for your customers but also proving that to them with data and reporting. 

Eliminates distractions and focus on your core product

Buying an embedded analytics solution that offers self-service reporting capabilities, rather than building it yourself, will speed up your time to market and eliminate maintenance and support dependencies for your engineering team. With the right solution in place, you provide your customers with an expedited path to answering their questions and eliminate data request sprawl that will distract your engineering teams from other more strategic initiatives. 

Deliver timely business value and insights

With self-service reporting capabilities, your customers can schedule reports whenever is best for them. Whether they need to create reports to fulfill ad hoc requests or they need to prepare for a monthly leadership meeting, this real-time line of sight creates timely insights that you can’t get from traditional data reporting processes. 

How can your SaaS platform implement self-service reporting capabilities? 

No matter where you are in your journey as a lead developer or entrepreneur, it's never too early or too late to explore adding self-service reporting to your SaaS platform. Here are a few ways how an embedded analytics solution can help you deliver self-service reporting capabilities in your app. 

Connect directly to your data stack

A modern embedded analytics solution will integrate with your existing databases and warehouses, unifying your customers’ data across all platforms and channels.

Create configurable reports

With a Report Builder tool your end-users can select what data is important to them, determine their own layout, and create shareable reports for easy viewing. 

Share and Embed Reports

Using a web component or iFrame, you can embed reports into your web app. Don’t have a web portal? Explo Host can help you create one in minutes.

Wrap Up

By adding self-service reporting capabilities directly into your SaaS application, you can provide your customers with data analysis, reports, and dashboards that will increase their engagement with your platform. Explo can help you add these capabilities to your offering in less than a week. See how here.