How to Deliver Sticky Analytics All Your Customers Will Love

Creating sticky analytics requires more than a few dashboards. It demands an in-depth knowledge of the questions your customers need to answer and where they sit in their analytics journey. 

Embedding best-in-class analytics lets you skip years of development and provide a solution that emerging and advanced users will love from day one—and come back to for years to come. 

To dive deeper into what it takes to provide analytics that are sticky from the start and how Visier Embedded Analytics can help, we share insights from Visier’s Senior Director of Partner Pre-Sales, Cyndi Smith, and Visier’s Product Marketing Manager, Sandy Shen.

The evolution of HR: From simple reporting to strategic analytics

The form and function of HR has transformed in the past 20 years, from a focus on simple reporting in the early 2000s to a more strategic use of analytics to support business outcomes today. “People analytics in recent years has catapulted into the spotlight, and everyone is expected to play that role,” says Sandy Shen, Visier’s Product Marketing Manager. 

This increased responsibility of HR became particularly meaningful in 2020 which was “a pivotal year for many of us, but especially our HR teams,” says Cyndi Smith, Visier’s Senior Director of Partner Pre-Sales. “With the triple crisis of the global COVID pandemic, racial inequality, and financial uncertainty, HR really had to step up their game.” 

C-suite executives needed real-time updates on all aspects of the pandemic response, from remote work to absenteeism and mental well-being. “This pushed the function of people analytics to new levels of urgency and accuracy for daily operational decisions and longer-term strategic scenario planning,” says Cyndi. 

HR faces more responsibility and pressure from C-suite executives than ever before, and to answer this call, HR leaders need best-in-class analytics, and they need customer stickiness that keeps managers and HRBPs coming back to use these analytics. This presents a massive opportunity for human capital management vendors.

“Imagine how sticky your product becomes when it becomes the executive lens into the business. When the executive team of your customer begins to rely on the insights delivered to them,” says Cyndi.

What emerging and advanced users need from analytics

The comfort with analytics, customer demands, and practitioner abilities differ vastly from one end of the maturity model to the other, which means you need a product that will be easy-to-use and approachable for emerging users but still engaging and powerful enough for advanced customers. 

Emerging users sit earlier on the maturity model, and they use analytics, often in the form of manual spreadsheets, to produce ad hoc reports in support of HR. These emerging users can experience data paralysis and become overwhelmed by where to start. This isn’t the path to customer stickiness. The key, says Sandy, is “helping them overcome that paralysis [by] just keeping things simple with easy templates of our suggested best questions to get started. They can start there and then dive further once they’re more comfortable.”

Meanwhile, advanced users sit later on the maturity model and rely on up-to-date dashboards to act as a strategic business partner to the CEO. For users that are more advanced, “don’t limit their exploration,” says Sandy. “Give them that power, functionality, and filters that let them play with data and how they want to view it, and allow them to share it across their organization so that all stakeholders are informed and play their part,” says Sandy.

Visier Embedded Analytics: A user experience that leads to customer stickiness

Embedded analytics from Visier becomes a seamless part of your platform so customers don’t have to pull out data to analyze elsewhere. 

“Some of your customers may be asking for data extracts. They want to be able to manipulate the data that your software provides in an outside business intelligence (BI) platform,” says Cyndi. “What if we can keep them in your platform? We can provide those analytics right within the platform without them having to go externally and start using a different tool.”

Custom analytics content that shares your branding is just a click away for your customers, who can flip through Guidebooks that address common questions around topics like hiring, turnover, and diversity. Visier’s data journalism approach pushes beyond numbers in a chart to highlight further areas for exploration and provide context and understanding. 

“It’s not just about being able to supply the data; it’s also supplying the education around the data, so that we can take those emergent [users] to more of an advanced user,” says Cyndi. Building this confidence in your users leads to more customer stickiness, leading more advanced users to hop right into the Explore room to slice and dice data with any filters, time frames, and metrics they choose.

The power of predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is of tremendous value to organizations; to know not only what has happened but also what is likely to happen next can transform leadership, reduce turnover, and improve strategic planning. 

But this kind of analytics remains out of reach for most small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). “It requires large amounts of data to generate meaningful predictive models,” says Cyndi. And most small and medium-sized businesses don’t have a large enough data set to build a reliable, predictable model or enough resources to devote to the project. 

Visier Embedded Analytics can change this. “Visier makes it easy for our partners to become leaders of democratizing data and insight,” says Cyndi. Visier’s standardized data model solves the quantity of data problem and delivers predictive analytics to organizations that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it. 

“The value this provides to our partners is that they can differentiate from other competitors by providing predictive analytics which have been traditionally inaccessible to SMB customers,” says Cyndi.

The new era of benchmarking

It’s a question organizations of all sizes and industries are asking: How are we stacking up to our peers? On key metrics from diversity and inclusion to turnover rate, organizations want to know where they are ahead of the curve or falling short.

But existing solutions aren’t enough. “The benchmarking data that organizations typically use is based on self-reported surveys compiled once a year. The data isn’t always so great or so relevant. This typically results in incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated information,” says Cyndi. 

There’s a better way. With data confidentially compiled from 15 million employee records, Visier Benchmarks allows users to compare their organization and accomplishments or deficiencies in a wider context against others in the same industry. 

“One of the main values of measuring against a benchmark is that it allows organizations to understand if they are gaining or losing ground over time. This enables organizations to identify the largest opportunities for change in their business by comparing their people data against those of other businesses,” says Cyndi.

Why embedded analytics? 

Embedding with Visier puts you just six months away from launching sticky, best-in-class analytics that even the most novice or experienced user will love. 

“We bear all the development costs and help you bake it into your platform with your dashboard product, style, and branding,” says Sandy. “Your own customers reap all the benefits, and you don’t need to focus on building out powerful, meaningful data points.”

Visier Embedded Analytics can help you bring in more revenue, stay one step ahead of the competition, and delight your customers with proven analytics that will be sticky from the start.

Interested in learning more? Visier’s Senior Director of Partner Pre-Sales, Cyndi Smith, and Visier’s Product Marketing Manager, Sandy Shen explore what makes analytics sticky and demo Visier Embedded Analytics. Access the full recorded session here.