Firms Struggle to Deliver Analytics to Customers

By Samuel Greengard | Posted 2016-11-04

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Firms Struggle to Deliver Analytics to Customers

Business efforts to deliver analytics tools to external customers largely fall short. Even when systems are in place, they don't provide the desired information.
Smarter Customers

The survey found that 26% of the organizations surveyed provide analytics to customers, while 48% would like to offer this function.
Customer Wish List

56% of customers want purpose-specific analytics embedded into products or applications, 45% desire a dedicated web portal and 37% want a report attached to email.
Top Investments

23% of the IT and business professionals surveyed cited the need to invest in customer support, 17% mentioned commercial operations, and 16% named product and competitive analysis.
What's the Focus?

67% indicated that analytics services for customers are offered in the form of commercial products, and 33% rely on internal efforts.
Top Benefits

Respondents said the areas of greatest benefit include service and analysis (23%), commercial service operations (17%) and competitive market analysis (16%).
In the Clouds

46% said they have or are building cloud-based analytics for customers; 41% said they are migrating to the cloud within a year; and 10% are not planning to use the cloud.
Major Challenges

56% of respondents said the most effective solutions were purpose-specific sets of visualizations and analytics embedded within products, websites or applications.
Getting Specific

56% of respondents said the most effective solutions were purpose-specific sets of visualizations and analytics embedded within products, websites or applications.
Portals in Play

45% prefer to provide metrics and analytical insights to external customers with a dedicated web-based portal for analyzing and exploring data.
Top Drivers

The top drivers for making investments in customer-facing analytics were to improve output, quality and performance (41%), to enhance product and service offerings (33%), and to reduce costs and increase profits (29%).
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In the digital world, all roads ultimately lead to data and analytics, which are fueling innovation and, in many cases, competitive advantage. But analytics can take many forms and encompass many different things. A recent 2016 report from Jinfonet Software—"Commercial Customers Want Analytics Too!"—points out that commercial customers increasingly seek these capabilities. The business intelligence (BI) and analytics vendor surveyed more than 400 senior IT and business professionals on their attitudes and approaches surrounding BI and analytics and found that their efforts to deliver analytics tools and features to external customers largely fall short. What's more, the research found that even when companies have systems in place for customers, they often don't provide the desired information. In many cases, this is the result of the cost to deploy the technology. The survey also offers insights into cloud-based analytics investments, what types of solutions users want and what skill sets are lacking. "Product and service owners are aware of the need to enhance offerings with data analytics and insights, but they are still struggling to deliver them," said Bing Yao, CEO of Jinfonet. Here's a look at some of the highlights.

Samuel Greengard writes about business and technology for Baseline, CIO Insight and other publications. His most recent book is The Internet of Things (MIT Press, 2015).