April 24, 2019

Your IT Department Will Love These 6 Customer Intelligence BI Software Choices

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The best part of purchasing a business intelligence (BI) tool is harnessing your previously indecipherable data. But the worst part of buying a BI software is finding one that makes everyone happy.

Data specialists need connections to all their databases, finance wants granular access to account information, marketing teams need their social media stats, and sales needs a full view of customer data. Your job is to choose a BI tool that meets the needs of the whole company, not just one or two groups.

Also Read: The Best Embedded Analytics Software Options for Small, Medium, and Enterprise Businesses

But while many digital marketing and sales intelligence tools promise “Full Access To Customer Data” or “A Clear Picture of Buyer Behavior,” the reality is a little muddier than the sales pitch. In order to get a good understanding of customer behavior, you need the context of business data in addition to sales and marketing metrics — context the right BI software can give you.

When you connect your customer and business data to a good BI system, you can transform, compare, roll up, and dig down into your data in ways that unearth insights that every smarketer dreams of.

How do the major BI tools handle marketing and sales data? This article covers the major players and how they provide the entire team with access to customer intelligence metrics that will drive strategy and inform how customer-facing departments make decisions.

Plug-and-play BI for customer intelligence options

These three business intelligence tools are made for quick access to your data without requiring deep intervention from data analysts. Armed with built-in API connections to the major customer-facing business tools like customer relationship management (CRM), lead management, marketing automation, and social media apps, these options are great for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited data resources.

Domo

domo bi dashboard

Domo’s business intelligence product’s major benefit is its extensive list of native data connectors. Should you use a customer-facing tool that doesn’t have a ready-made connector in Domo, the software also provides a custom data connector tool where your team can pipe in your cloud data via API.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”domo-reviews”][/get-pricing]

Tableau

Tableau sales dashboard

Tableau is the only product on this list that provides customers with access to third-party, industry-specific benchmarking data. Choose from the full Tableau library of public data sets to better understand how your business stacks up against competitors. You can also access a vast library of templates to help you build your own dashboards and reports or to help you learn more about the tool’s capabilities.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”tableau-reviews”][/get-pricing]

Birst

birst bi revenue dashboard

Birst provides fewer direct connections than Domo or Tableau, but you can still access data directly from Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, and other customer data sources. You can also upload .csv or Excel files for quick access to data. Birst’s tool, Prepared Sources, works as an intermediate step between your raw data and the reports, so you always have control over the types of data that will be updated in your reports.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”birst-reviews”][/get-pricing]

 

[cta-two]Which BI software
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Database-driven BI for customer intelligence

These BI products are great for teams who have dedicated IT or data analyst resources who can build and maintain databases of customer information pulled from your customer data tools. These options require a bit of extra work to prepare and load the data into the BI tool, but they can also deliver valuable insight when the data is paired with your business or financial databases.

Looker

looker sales dashboard

Looker is a leading BI platform because it attempts to ease some of the burden on internal data analyst and IT resources with LookML, its proprietary SQL translator. LookML gives teams the ability to define their data in ways that make sense to the company instead of relying on the language of the data sources. Looker can manage data from any customer software app by pulling that data from your connected databases.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”looker-reviews”][/get-pricing]

Dundas

dundas sales dashboard

Dundas lets teams pull customer data from across the company into a single set of dashboards for deep analysis or high-level roll-ups. Teams can also use the what-if risk analysis tools to understand how particular customers will respond to changing conditions in the market. Combine financial, marketing, sales, and customer information to learn more about how customers spend, where they spend, and how they might act in the future.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”dundas-dashboard-dundas-data-reviews”][/get-pricing]

SAS

sas business intelligence with data mining

SAS is the only tool on this list that integrates natural language processing (NLP) from text sources into its analytics functions. NLP is key to understanding customer sentiment from social media posts and internal surveys by consolidating feedback from thousands of individual posts into actionable data. The tools in a SAS dashboard let companies view aggregated text data alongside customer purchase and behavior data for real insights.

[get-pricing category=”CRM” cta=”Get Pricing” width=”200px” url=”sas-analytics-reviews”][/get-pricing]

Simplify Your Search

TechnologyAdvice can help you find the best business intelligence software for your business needs. Whether you need plug-and-play access to lots of different data sources or you’ve got in-house data scientists who run your data systems, we can help you find the system that fits your needs.

Top Business Intelligence Software Recommendations

1 Yellowfin

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Yellowfin’s intuitive self-service BI options accelerate data discovery and allow anyone, from an experienced data analyst to a non-technical business user, to create reports in a governed way.

Learn more about Yellowfin

2 Salesforce Data Cloud

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Activate all your customer data across Salesforce applications with Data Cloud. Empower teams to engage customers, at every touchpoint, with relevant insights and contextual data in the flow of work. Connect your data with an AI CRM to empower teams to act on relevant data and insights from your existing Salesforce processes and applications.

Learn more about Salesforce Data Cloud

3 Wyn Enterprise

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Wyn Enterprise is a scalable embedded business intelligence platform without hidden costs. It provides BI reporting, interactive dashboards, alerts and notifications, localization, multitenancy, & white-labeling in any internal or commercial app. Built for self-service BI, Wyn offers limitless visual data exploration, creating a data-driven mindset for the everyday user. Wyn's scalable, server-based licensing model allows room for your business to grow without user fees or limits on data size.

Learn more about Wyn Enterprise


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