Wave Analytics
This article provides a brief introduction and overview of the Salesforce Wave Analytics product. The Salesforce Wave product is designed for organizations that want to:
Provide enhanced dashboards, visualizations, and features such as drill-down to quickly find trends in service and sales data, thereby providing the means to avoid issues, enhance sales and services, and recognize new opportunities.
Combine data from one or more source external to Salesforce to provide a complete picture of sales and service data. For example, key information can be loaded from the accounting system to develop a 360-degree view of an account.
Allow users to service their own data visualization needs without involving IT.
Rapidly build solutions on the investment already made in Salesforce.
Figure 1 shows the steps for creating and leveraging Wave Analytics.
Figure 1 – Wave Analytics Steps
Source: Salesforce.com
Key features of Salesforce Wave Analytics include:
Allows connection to any data – external data may be loaded and joined to Salesforce data to provide a powerful and complete view of an organization’s data. External data can be loaded into Salesforce Wave objects using JSON, API’s, and Excel.
Provides powerful data visualizations and dashboards that users can explore without the need for a lengthy data warehouse project. Once these visualizations are developed, users can share them via the appropriate mechanism including apps, dashboards, and Chatter.
Self-service – end users can develop their own charts, graphs, dashboards, and other visualizations using an intuitive user interface.
Processes data in-memory to provide quick results with even large datasets.
Provides the capability to readily share insights via mobile devices, apps, dashboards, and Chatter.
Secure and scalable with the ability to leverage the security set-up from the main Salesforce implementation.
Salesforce Wave Analytics provides three applications out-of-the-box with multiple dashboards, data visualizations, and drill-down capabilities pre-built and readily configurable for use on supported devices including the complete suite of iOS products (Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad).
Sales Wave Analytics App – provides datasets and dashboards including sales overview, pipeline management, forecasting, sales leader board, and account summaries. Dashboards are also available by customer, geography, source, and product.
Service Wave Analytics App – dashboards are available that provide a complete view of key service performance indicators and other critical service customer data. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are available for management in one place including average case closing time, customer satisfaction, trending, historical benchmarks, peer benchmarks, and knowledge usage to resolve cases. Sidebar dashboards can be provided for service agents to easily access key data while performing their daily activities.
Event Monitoring Wave App – dashboards and datasets are provided so that an organization can monitor its Salesforce implementation. For example, this app provides dashboards that help identify suspicious behavior, slow page performance, and poor user adoption.
Overall, Salesforce Wave Analytics is a powerful tool that allows users to leverage their Salesforce investment to quickly and securely build dashboards and analytics to run their sales and services, and to tie this information to key data elements in external systems. The capability to readily share and distribute standard, configured, and customized dashboards and visual analytics to a variety of devices and platforms allows customers to build and operate a state-of-the-art experience without the expense and risk of a massive data warehouse and/or business intelligence implementation.