When there is so much data available within and outside an enterprise, it can be a challenge to make sense of it and get quick answers to critical business questions. Business leaders often spend countless hours updating spreadsheets and waiting for answers.
It has been decades since analytics tools were developed, but they are still designed for analysts, not for everyday business users. So, what is the solution?
With Einstein Analytics from Salesforce, you can gain insights from your existing data using a cloud-based business intelligence platform.
Say Hello to Einstein Analytics
Using Einstein Analytics, organizations can generate dashboards and reports directly from CRM data. Einstein isn’t just limited to Salesforce – it can be used for overall business intelligence across multiple CRMs. It provides users with insights into potential business opportunities and other areas of growth that can help organizations prosper.
Essentially, Einstein Analytics can provide insights from data stored across multiple locations to make smart decisions.
Here are a few reasons why Einstein Analytics is necessary for any organization:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered by Salesforce: Getting started with Einstein Analytics is as easy as installing a package on the Salesforce platform. With AI-powered advanced analytics, you can explore all your data quickly right within Salesforce.
- A data scientist at your service: By sifting through large amounts of data, data scientists can find important correlations and make accurate predictions. With Einstein, Salesforce admins can bring in data from different sources via datasets and make sense of it.
- Adapts to Salesforce and non-Salesforce data: Einstein Analytics supports a wide range of data sources. In order to bring in external data, you can upload a CSV file, use connectors or the Analytics API, or use the dataflow tool for Salesforce data. The dataset recipe tool can also be used for preparing data – or you can get to work using the Dataflow.
- Syncing and transformation of data is easy: With Einstein Analytics’ Data Recipes, you can load, cleanse, and transform your Salesforce data very easily. In Data Recipes, you can manipulate strings, formulas, buckets, and filters to clean and transform your data with a powerful UI.
- Analyzes and automates data quickly: The Einstein Analytics dashboard provides quick insights and helps configure the dashboard with filters, toggles, and charts. With just a few clicks, clients can visualize the right data at the right time.
- Mobile, secure, scalable, and trusted: Its intuitive point-and-click visual interface lets everyone in the organization gain immediate access to powerful data insights.
4 Einstein Analytics Components – A Glossary
The different components of Einstein Analytics are:
- App: Apps work like folders, but they can store multiple items, such as datasets, lenses, and dashboards. As with Salesforce reports and dashboards, users can share the app by their names, roles, and groups, with varying levels of access: manager, editor, and viewer.
- Dashboard: Widgets can be explored and analyzed in the dashboard. Einstein Analytics’ dashboard includes a feature called facets. With facets, widgets that use the same dataset or linked datasets are related by default.
- Lens: Einstein Analytics uses a Lens as the data source for its dashboards. Widgets on dashboards can be explored as lenses and stored in apps for later use, including My Private apps.
- Dataflow: Ideally, you should start with obtaining data for transformation, either from the Einstein Analytics dataset, Salesforce objects, or external data. A Dataflow is a chain of connected nodes for data transformation. Various functions are available for each data transformation node, such as get data, augment, compute, register, etc.
Einstein for Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics
Here’s how Einstein analytics achieves all four analytics stages:
1. Descriptive Analytics
Business intelligence usually begins with descriptive analytics. A descriptive analytics approach uses data to describe what happened in the past. Einstein supports descriptive analytics by allowing businesses to explore all the critical insights around a variable. It does so by showing which insights are the most significant and how they contribute to the outcome. A user just needs to explore the “variable” they want to assess and examine, and all the related insights will be listed based on their statistical significance. These insights are instantly visualized in the form of charts.
2. Diagnostic Analytics
It’s important to know why something happened once you know what happened. This is where diagnostic analytics comes into play. Einstein supports diagnostic analytics by allowing businesses to blow open all the significant descriptive insights. It helps investigate the variable even further by providing insight into the “drivers of outcomes,” how such drivers have played an integral role in realizing the predicted outcome, and what’s the correlation between the data patterns being visualized. The platform elaborates on the factor explanations and uses waterfall charts to better visualize the diagnostic insights.
3. Predictive Analytics
Once you understand why past events occurred, you can predict the future based on that knowledge. With predictive analytics, you can determine the probability of various outcomes by using statistics, computational modeling, and machine learning. This is precisely what Einstein Discovery accommodates by outlining a “probabilistic value of a future outcome.” Here’s how the platform seamlessly helps with predictive analytics:
- Einstein generates a prediction score for the selected variables and related factors
- It put forth suggestions for improving the outcomes
- It lists out the “favorable and unfavorable” variables – thus, providing granular insights into what contributes to the predicted outcome and what doesn’t
4. Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics enables teams to solve problems, improve performance, and jump on valuable opportunities. As mentioned above, Einstein supports the improvement of predicted outcomes. The suggestions get even better when predictions are displayed across the Salesforce platform. For example, Einstein lets businesses display predictions across Lightning Pages, CRM Analytics Recipes, CRM Analytics Dataflows, Apex, Flow Builder, Process Automation Formulas, etc.
All in all, with Einstein Analytics, you can boost revenue, reduce costs and efforts, and enable better forecasts. Interested in learning more about how Einstein can help your business stand out? Get in touch with an expert today!