Has your company spent a small fortune on digital transformation, only to end the day struggling to prove that it was all worth it? This is a common problem in many industries! Companies often put together new ecospheres that boast better integration or improved case handling times, only to have forgotten that they need to show the stats on their work. Often new technology doesn’t come with analytical tools, or the ones they do come up with are hard to set up and understand.
So, what’s a company to do? Usually, it’s buying a stand-alone analytics tool that only a few teammates know how to use. Though that doesn’t have to be the case with Unity’s actionable analytics dashboard, but we’ll talk more on that later!
Now that you know you need a new or better analytics tool, what should you look for? We are here to help with that! Here are the top five things you should consider when shopping around!
Does it show what you need it to?
First and foremost, an analytics set up needs to showcase what you need to see, in a way that’s understandable even to the least tech-savvy C-suite member. Consider all the different types of tools and graphs the program has to offer and how that will be leveraged by the reporting members on your team. If you’re a financial company, some of the more illustrative infographics available may not be much use to you even if they are on trend. On the other hand, if you’re focused on narrowing down your customer persona, you may need some more creative means of laying those out.
In addition to making your final report easier to understand, having tools that work specifically for your industry means there will be less of a learning curve, and you’re not paying for any extras that you’ll never need.
Does it integrate with your current ecosystem?
Sure, you could insert information manually, but who wants to do that in this day and age? A seamless integration can allow you to push and pull data from various locations. This means a more holistic view and a better representation of your company’s standings in the current area. If the specific analytics program you’re looking at doesn’t directly integrate with one of your repositories, there are ways of bridging the gap with a third-party vendor, but with so much competition in the market you shouldn’t have to compromise!
What is the deployment like?
Timeline and complexity play a huge role here. How long does it take to set up? Is it going to take your entire IT team or is it a one-person job in a day? Does it require in depth coding knowledge? And that’s just for the initial integration! For each report you can ask a dozen questions as well, centered around how long it takes, how complicated it is, and how easy human mistakes are to fix. There’s nothing worse than investing in a tool, only to find out it doesn’t fit the time restraints your team has, or actually slows down your workflows. Find out ahead of time what time projections are for the size of job you usually run and it will save you headaches in the future.
How collaborative is it?
Chances are your team has multiple streams of data, handled by multiple people, if not multiple teams. How do these all flow together into the new tool? If someone must manually collect the information and then import it, consider that in your potential workflows. However, if different factions can submit to an automated system for importing, that considerably speeds up the process and allows you to create more in a small-time frame. Additionally, by having more sources you can create a better analytics dashboard and report to give a wider view of a problem. More information equals a better picture.
Can it grow with your company?
Your company’s size is going to change one way or another. Look at the program and the model of sale to see if it can grow and change with you. Some tools sold as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model may have you just bump up to the next tier in both payment and size. Whereas other models may have you stuck at a certain work capacity until you can have a rep facilitate changes for you, if they’re even possible. Consider your past growth rates and how often you’d be creating analytical reports to determine what you’ll need in the future.
At Intellective we’re super proud of the Unity suite and the built-in actionable analytics platform that it has. In fact, it checks a lot of these boxes off, all without adding any price to an already great ECM tool. Low-code, no-code set up? Check! Full enterprise integration? Check! And so much more. We think that Unity may just be the tool for your company to not only connect your entire enterprise but allow you to act on the data from within one dashboard, and then create in-depth analytics reporting that show how well your company is doing! Take a look at our Unity page and schedule a demo for yourself!