Creating Actionable Insights Using CRM Analytics

Mark Tossell

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781801070249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Visualisation
• Index: Computer Science

Leverage CRM Analytics to generate valuable business insights and solve business problems efficientlyKey Features• Extract, combine, transform, and visualize your data to derive business insights using CRM Analytics• Gain hands-on experience as you walk through practical dashboard use cases in CRM Analytics• Learn how to build best-in-class dashboards from a CRM Analytics thought leaderBook DescriptionCRM Analytics, formerly known as Tableau CRM and Einstein Analytics, is a powerful and versatile data analytics platform that enables organizations to extract, combine, transform, and visualize their data to create valuable business insights. Creating Actionable Insights Using CRM Analytics provides a hands-on approach to CRM Analytics implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running and productive in no time. The book provides you with detailed explanations of essential concepts to help you to gain confidence and become competent in using the CRM Analytics platform for data extraction, combination, transformation, visualization, and action. As you make progress, you'll understand what CRM Analytics is and where it provides business value. You'll also learn how to bring your data together in CRM Analytics, build datasets and lenses for data analysis, create effective analytics dashboards for visualization and consumption by end users, and build dashboard actions that take the user from data to insight to action with ease. By the end of this book, you'll be able to solve business problems using CRM Analytics and design, build, test, and deploy analytics dashboards efficiently.What you will learn• Implement and configure CRM Analytics from scratch• Build your first CRM Analytics app and embed your CRM Analytics dashboards in Salesforce to enhance user adoption• Connect Salesforce and external data with CRM Analytics and create datasets• Create a data recipe and get familiar with the recipe UI• Build a custom dashboard in CRM Analytics using the dashboard editor• Use lenses to create a CRM Analytics dashboard• Configure and implement data security and governance• Build configured record actions to automate data directly in SalesforceWho this book is forThis book is for data analysts, business analysts, BI professionals, and Salesforce users who want to explore CRM Analytics' capabilities and features. Basic knowledge of Salesforce and data analytics is assumed to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau CRM

This section will help you have a clear understanding of what TCRM is and what it is used for, and how to identify suitable business use cases. You will successfully implement and configure TCRM in preparation for the learning and development that follows.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, What Is Tableau CRM and Where Can You Use It?
• Chapter 2, Developing Your First OOTB Analytics App in TCRM

Chapter 1: What Is Tableau CRM and Where Can You Use it?

Tableau CRM (TCRM), formerly known as Einstein Analytics, is the business insights and data analytics platform that Salesforce launched in 2014. With a powerful framework to action insights directly in CRM and a variety of native connectors to ingest data from external sources, TCRM is a unique offering in the world of Business Intelligence (BI).

As you can infer from the title, this chapter will introduce you to TCRM – what it is, how it works, and what it can do. We will begin by discussing data analytics from the perspective of TCRM and investigate what makes this platform different. As there are a great many BI platforms out in the digital world, you need to understand the unique place of TCRM in the data landscape and the Salesforce ecosystem.

Once you have completed this chapter, regardless of your current understanding of TCRM, you should have a good initial grasp of the platform. Whether you are a business analyst, a Salesforce administrator, or an advanced business user, this chapter will help you succinctly communicate the essentials of TCRM to your colleagues.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• The importance of data analytics
• What is TCRM?
• What is TCRM used for?
• How can you excel at data analytics with TCRM?

The importance of data analytics

The timing of this book could not be more appropriate – consider what Gartner recently had to say about the impact of COVID-19 upon the world around us:

"From crisis to opportunity, the role of data and analytics is expanding and becoming more strategic and mission-critical…Massive disruption, crisis, and the ensuing economic downturn are forcing companies to respond to previously unimaginable demands to resource optimize, reinvent processes and rethink products, business models, and even their very purpose. Only resilient, nimble, and creative organizations will survive and thrive."

(https://www.gartner.com/en/doc/718161-top-10-trends-in-data-and-analytics-2020)

Read that again:

"…the role of data and analytics is expanding and becoming more strategic and mission-critical…"

Businesses and organizations must become excellent at data analytics. They must excel at gathering, understanding, sharing, and actioning data. The current global pandemic has caused widespread uncertainty and unrest and has left many organizations in a precarious state. Misgivings about the global economy and fear of ongoing illness, as well as the closure of international and domestic borders, have all contributed to fragile mindsets and anxious cultures. The economic downturn, digital disruption, and growing competition have created an environment where businesses and organizations cannot ignore or minimize the value of data and insights. Data analytics has become imperative.

However, in my experience, very few organizations excel at gathering, understanding, sharing, and actioning data. Even in those organizations that create and maintain functional data analytics, it is estimated that as many as 75% of users do not use them regularly. Leaders and team members, as one of our clients once put it, are "flying blind." We certainly are not lacking information today. I think that most people will agree, though, that we are suffering from information overload – we are drowning in data! Data can be both a blessing and a curse – a help and a hindrance. After years of working in the data analytics industry and speaking with many businesses and organizations, it has become apparent to me that the subject of data insights is a frustrating one for many. What should be a great boon for the organization is, in fact, a burden.

TCRM has the power to change all this – if it's well understood, correctly implemented, and rightly used.

One such example is that of our client. 18 months ago, they were drowning in data but starving for insights. UA had terabytes of information spread across multiple systems and clouds, and actionable insights were very difficult to obtain. For a data-driven organization such as UNICEF, this was a source of great frustration. However, with the expertise of their internal team, the power of TCRM, and the help of our analytics experts and Visioneer360, the situation was drastically turned around. It can be done!

The key to going from data to insight to action is data analytics.

Data, in its raw, unprocessed form, contains the ingredients of a story – ingredients that are not of much use if they're not combined into a data "recipe" to create a story.

What do I mean by a data story? A data story is when information is processed and presented in such a way that it recites a narrative about a situation and draws meaningful conclusions for the reader. There are a plethora of diverse mediums and tools by which data stories can be presented, but the result of a story is actionable insight. I often express this in my three-word mantra:

Figure 1.1 – The three-word mantra

Organizations do not lack data – they lack insights into that data, and they are largely unable to obtain the true value for their data.

Every organization has data. Some organizations have insights into their data. Very few organizations action data insights.

The challenge, then, is data analytics. This is where TCRM comes in – it has the potential to transform data, visualize insights, and enable action.

Perhaps my story will provide some context and insight here. As a self-taught Salesforce business analyst, responsible for implemen...

Table of contents

• Creating Actionable Insights Using Tableau CRM
• Contributors
• About the author
• About the reviewers
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau CRM
• Chapter 1: What Is Tableau CRM and Where Can You Use it?
• Chapter 2: Developing Your First OOTB Analytics App in TCRM
• Section 2: Building Datasets in TCRM
• Chapter 3: Connecting Your Data Sources
• Chapter 4: Building Data Recipes
• Chapter 5: Advanced ETL Using TCRM Data Prep
• Chapter 6: TCRM Lenses – Diving into Your Data One Click at a Time
• Chapter 7: Security in Tableau CRM
• Section 3: How to Build Awesome Analytics Dashboards in TCRM
• Chapter 8: Building Your First TCRM Dashboard
• Chapter 9: Advanced Dashboard Design and Build
• Chapter 10: To Code or Not to Code?
• Chapter 11: Best Practices in Dashboard Design Using TCRM
• Section 4: From Data To Insight To Action
• Chapter 12: Embedding and Actioning Your Insights
• Questions and Answers
• Other Books You May Enjoy