“Without big data analytics,” remarked author and consultant Geoffrey Moore “companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” If you are a Salesforce user, but you still haven’t implemented advanced analytics you may be doing your business a major disservice by missing the opportunity to better understand your customers, act on the most valuable insights, and build strategies based on predictions. Especially now with a constantly evolving Salesforce data intelligence stack, the opportunities of realising the full potential of data across processes, Salesforce clouds and apps are truly endless.
In the last year, one of our customers moved away from complex spreadsheets, disparate sources and siloed dashboards to automated data pipelines with unified visualizations thus saving 70% in staff time, accelerating transparency and decision making. Meanwhile another customer reshaped their commercial strategy, by tracking profitability differences between product families and discount promotions.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of what is becoming a core part of many businesses’ digital transformation. So let me share a few basic facts about Tableau before I dive into how VRP Consulting can unlock hidden value in your business.
Tableau is a robust, scalable, intuitive visual analytics platform that leverages valuable data insights to empower businesses and drive market disruption.
It prioritizes a data-based approach to discover untapped business value and promotes data democratization through a low-code approach. For years, Tableau has been a recognized leader in the category of Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms, and it holds the title of a nine-time winner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in that category. After the major acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce in 2019, it turned into a true powerhouse of digital transformation and became the core of the Salesforce data intelligence stack to accelerate big-data analytics.
Tableau CRM is a version of Tableau native to the Salesforce platform while Tableau allows you to store, run and visualize your data anywhere. Both solutions offer Tableau’s leading predictive analytics capabilities and can be further enhanced with Salesforce Einstein to offer AI insights and predictions.
To further clarify, Tableau is a visual analytics and data exploration platform that can be shared with both Salesforce and non-Salesforce users. It can be deployed via a Cloud or locally and processes data from a variety of sources including third-party databases, excel spreadsheets, and local databases through remote federated queries.
In contrast, Tableau CRM is a new name for the well-known Salesforce Einstein Analytics, which consolidates business intelligence with CRM data and is a Salesforce native application. Along with the new name, Tableau CRM has been enhanced with Tableau’s proprietary technology to provide enhanced data intelligence.
Combining Salesforce and Tableau has created a brand new environment to drive further innovation to impact and benefit businesses. The effects are visible in the new Salesforce spring ’21 release that delivered many valuable enhancements to make Salesforce the most comprehensive data intelligence and analytics platform on the market.
Now Customer 360 Audiences are natively connected to Tableau to leverage detailed behavioral, engagement, and transactional customer data as well as easily examine various customer dimensions of cross-channel engagement.
Another major announcement is the native integration of Einstein discovery into Tableau to discover insights, generate predictions and offer practical recommendations. Now, these predictions are easily accessible in one place through Tableau dashboards.
One powerful use case for Energy & Utilities companies is intelligent text analytics within support messages. Einstein Discovery can identify and highlight trends in support requests to uncover localized disruptions faster, analyze dispatch performance and predict support needs, guiding resource distribution. All of which raise customer satisfaction scores and increases lifetime value while reducing cost of service.
Combining AI-powered analytics through dashboard extensions (merging dashboards with predictions, explanations, recommendations), analytics (combining Einstein predictions with Tableau calculated fields), and bulk scoring through Tableau Prep, (adding a prediction step in flow and provide predictions and improvement suggestions), bring a brand new quality to the way you can view, analyze and get your data to work for you.
By implementing Tableau you can instantly start utilizing all the cutting-edge functionalities to increase the value and outcomes of your business, such as industry-specific templates, pre-built integrations, workflows and dashboards, to predictive demand planning, actionable customer segmentation, intelligent re-allocation of discounts and offers, to name a few. This way you equip your employees with practical and intuitive data to find untapped value pools to develop intelligent business strategies.
Another excellent and ubiquitous use case is for marketing teams who can access pre-built dashboards that detail top customer profiles and key actions. This accelerator is quickly enabled to provide instant access to data allowing marketers to optimize their funnels and create more personalized segments.
As you can see this new, interconnected face of the Salesforce Data Intelligence Stack which combines Tableau, built-in Einstein AI, and Industry Data Models, opens up brand new opportunities to get the most value of your data and drive your business forward.
If you are mid-market or enterprise scale, we will help you identify untapped sales and service value pools with data intelligence. We’ll connect your data no matter its source, create crucial dashboards and we can implement any custom predictive models you require. To ensure users can fully leverage the power of Tableau, we can provide enablement sessions so your users can ask better questions and access data insights.
If you are a fast growing startup or scaleup, we will help you turbocharge your capabilities with data insights from your Customer 360. You can access cloud specific dashboards and visualizations to answer key business questions and make better-informed decisions faster. By configuring Einstein discovery and predictions, we can provide your team with recommendations, next actions and insights to increase sales and service outcomes.
As the pandemic started to bite last year, we were approached by a leading US consumer goods brand Beyond Better Foods who needed data insights and recommendations to optimize their trade promotions and protect their margins. In record time they were able to introduce digital reports and forecasts noting 70% savings in staff time eliminating errors, overall saving ‘Six Figures’. This ongoing project is constantly adjusting their analytics tools to optimize their commercial strategy and bring better results. We can help you gain similarly amazing results.
Bringing Tableau to the heart of the Salesforce Data Intelligence stack puts Salesforce in a leader position of AI-powered Business Analytics. Discovering the full Customer 360° view to better unlock data insights and find answers to strategic business questions, is now available to everyone. You also can supercharge your business with powerful data and guided strategies, which we would be delighted to assist you with, helping you achieve all of your Tableau and Salesforce ambitions.
Fran Cardells
Einstein / Tableau Practice Lead and Data Architect
About the Author
Fran Cardells is the Analytics and Data Science Expert at VRP Consulting. Since joining in February 2020 he has helped clients unlock value through data-driven insights and applied machine learning. In addition to client work, he leads and trains the growing division of Tableau and Einstein experts within VRP Consulting.
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