Engaged Users are Sticky Users
Data mastery has become the backbone of business success in today’s complex business environment. Yet data continues to proliferate amongst siloed process-specific applications that manage data in their own bubble.
Whether you work for an innovative fintech like Stripe, a customer relationship management (CRM) behemoth like Salesforce, or a financial data titan like Bloomberg, the importance of data cannot be overstated for SaaS application vendors. Data plays a vital role in understanding customer engagement, identifying trends, and making informed decisions.
However, with the increasing volumes of data generated by SaaS apps, and the increasing complexity of the business landscape, the need for a robust data platform is becoming more critical than ever.
Business Users Struggle to Access Data from Siloed Applications
Business users struggle to access the data they need across multiple applications and data sources that are siloed, disconnected, and difficult to integrate. This results in a fragmented data landscape that makes it hard to gain a comprehensive view of customer behavior, preferences, and needs.
In addition, the data may be stored in different formats, structures, and systems, which makes it challenging to standardize and analyze in a consistent and meaningful way.
Self-Service BI Tools are Not Enough for Widespread Adoption
The rapid adoption of self-service Business Intelligence (BI) tools is a testament to these needs. However, for many business teams BI tools remain too difficult to use and implement and they lack data integration and modeling skills.
Time spent extracting, merging, and marshaling data is all a big distraction from their primary function. For widespread adoption, insights need to be available in the operational tools they use without a big technical lift.
Traditional Application Backends Can’t Deliver Deeper Analytics
Business applications typically seek to improve one or more processes. You will already be presenting some operational metrics inside your application. But are you just adding to the morass of data that your users need to run their business or team?
SaaS tools can benefit business users by merging the data owned by the SaaS application with datasets from related processes and toolsets such as CRM, marketing automation, social media, and customer service data. In doing so, they can provide a unified view of customer data that is accessible, comprehensive, and actionable.
Simplify Your Customers’ Data Landscape and They Will Reward You with Loyalty
SaaS tools enable business users to gain deeper and more valuable insights and make informed decisions that drive business outcomes faster and with more confidence.
For example, a SaaS vendor that provides customer support services can merge the data managed in the application with CRM data to gain a better understanding of the customer’s needs and preferences.
This can help the vendor identify new opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, and tailor the application to better meet the customer’s needs.
Similarly, a SaaS vendor that provides a marketing automation application can merge the data managed in the application with social media data to gain insights into the customer’s engagement and sentiment.
This can help the vendor improve the marketing campaigns’ targeting, messaging, and timing, and increase the ROI.
SaaS app vendors that invest in a robust data platform can differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing their users with advanced personalization and embedded analytics.
This allows users to gain valuable insights into their data and make informed decisions to drive business success.
Your Application Stack Wasn’t Built to Deliver Deeper Insights
However, typical application data architectures simply cannot deliver these capabilities. Traditional application backends like MongoDB, CosmosDB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, Postgres, and DynamoDB can handle simple data storage and retrieval needs but are unable to handle the deeper insights and analytics that customers demand, particularly at scale.
These backends often lack the necessary features and functionalities for advanced data processing and analytics, such as complex querying, joins, aggregations, and real-time processing.
These backends also often suffer from scalability, performance, and data processing speed limitations, which can hinder the ability to generate real-time insights and deliver personalized experiences.
As a result, SaaS app vendors must look beyond traditional application backends and invest in modern data architectures that can provide the necessary capabilities to deliver the deeper insights and analytics that customers demand.
Modern Data Architectures Provide Scalable and Flexible Data Platforms
To deliver advanced personalization and embedded analytics, SaaS app vendors need to adopt modern data architectures that are designed to handle much larger volumes of data. Trying to extend document databases to meet these needs is a recipe for disaster.
Modern data architectures leverage cloud computing and big data technologies, alongside your existing data technologies, to deliver scalable and flexible data platforms that can handle large volumes of data in real time.
Yellowbrick Data Warehouse Enables Rich Analytics for SaaS Applications
As a Product Manager or Founder, you probably already have an intuition that delivering insights is something that will pay off. However, you worry about the time it will take to build features and distract your engineering team from delivering against the backlog.
You need something you can put together quickly, requires next to no administration, fits with your growth plans, minimizes impact on margins, and fits neatly into your application’s technology stack without adding security risks. Add Yellowbrick to your stack to enable rich analytics to deliver more personalized and efficient services to your customers.
A Modern Data Warehouse Architecture
A modern data warehouse, such as Yellowbrick Data Warehouse, is designed to support complex analytics and reporting, making it ideal for embedded analytics. It can handle large volumes of data, real-time feeds, and thousands of users, providing users with real-time interactive data experiences and faster insights into their business.
Unlike many other cloud data warehouse platforms, Yellowbrick does not require complex administration or optimization and scales elastically. SaaS vendors can start small and confidently prototype and deliver new high-impact features quickly without a huge engineering effort.
Many modern SaaS data warehouse platforms, such as Snowflake, introduce new security challenges as data moves into third-party-owned infrastructure. Yellowbrick also has unique workload management capabilities to drive out variability and deliver consistently snappy performance to end users. This is essential for delivering an effective user experience that keeps them engaged.
SaaS vendors should also pay special attention to opaque, consumption-only charging models which can at first seem attractive, but as you grow start to become a tax on your business model. Make sure to test any prospective solutions at your best-case scenario of future scale and make sure your platform is not going to inhibit growth and success.
At Yellowbrick we’re hyper-focused on efficiency. We’re confident our technology can both deliver performance and provide substantial economies of scale as you grow.
Analytics Features Make Your Application More Engaging and Stickier
By making better use of the data you generate and/or merging the data managed in the SaaS application with other customer data sources, SaaS vendors can delight users by providing insights that are accessible and instantly actionable. Business teams gain deeper and more valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs, and can make informed decisions that drive business outcomes.
SaaS application vendors that invest in a robust data platform and data-rich features can elevate their status from being just another process enabler in the chain to becoming the indispensable, business-critical hub of business operations.
Optimize Your SaaS App Implementation with Yellowbrick
Adopting new technology can be challenging without proper support. That’s why it’s important to work with a knowledgeable support team that can help you navigate the implementation process and ensure that your products or services are running smoothly.
Partner with Yellowbrick – together we can make this happen.
