blog image

Why Embedded Analytics Beat Dashboards & Reports

Most business intelligence or analytics projects are fundamentally building the workflow below, whereby we are taking data from some source, putting it into a centralised warehouse or lake, and then making it available on reports or dashboards to aid human decision making.

Those reports or dashboards could be incredibly useful and packed with insights, but we think it is ultimately not the best destination for this information. Instead, we think there are two much better destinations for your insights:

1) Embedded In A Business Process

The optimal situation is to take the insights generated, and integrate them directly into a business process so that KPIs are improved immediately, without a human decision maker. For example:

  • If you identify that one of your call centre agents has high customer service reviews, you should automatically route high value customer calls to that agent;
  • If you identify that a machine is running hotter than usual, you should automatically reduce the machine and schedule maintenence;
  • If you identify suspicious activity on a bank account, you should automatically block the bank account until a human has investigated;
  • If you identify that a popular product is running low on stock, you should automatically place an order for new stock proactively earlier in the day.

We describe this as a kind of automated decision maker, taking care of your operational tasks and working alongside your management who are making decisions on a more strategic timeline:

Getting humans out of the loop and having these activities automated can improve customer experience and operational efficiency massively.

2) Embedded In Your Line Of Business Applications Or Employee Experience

If we cannot automatically optimise or resolve a situation, the next best choice is to get the insights off of dashboards and directly into the hands of your users and operational staff on the ground. For example:

  • For a call centre agent, integrating advice on the “next best action” such as proposing a cross-sell or up-sell directly into the agent application;
  • For maintenance staff, prioritising job schedules dynamically on a mobile app so they respond to the changing situation immediately in the field;
  • Sending SMS, Email or Push notifications directly to users mobile devices when they need to respond instantly to a situation that impacts customer experience or a key KPI;

This is a key value proposition of Timeflow, that having an identified some actionable situation, we will push that information either to a human in their preferred context (potentially a fully bespoke application such as the one below), or ideally, fully automate the resolution before a human needs to get involved.