Microsoft Power BI is a tool that lets users build interactive dashboards and visualisations. It sits in the Business Intelligence category and competes against Tableau (part of Salesforce) as well as some others.
With any tool that promises the world, it’s good to understand why you might choose to use it (over other tools), what the (hidden) costs are and how to get the best out of it.
What's to like?
The benefits -
The shortcomings -
Intelligence, but not understanding
As you can see above, a tool like Power BI can give you everything at your fingertips. But it still doesn’t address a fundamental problem: data is complex, especially from multiple sources, so you need to decide what you want from it and the most effective way to structure it. We’ve worked with many, many clients that have the software but not the expertise in designing data models that deliver not only intelligence, but understanding. The solution?
Dealing with multiple data sources and messy data is our bread and butter, it's what we do every day and we simplify as much as possible throughout the process.
What you need really depends on the sophistication and/or availability of resource in your company. If you have a team of data analysts/engineers/scientists then they will no doubt have the expertise to build the solution from scratch. We’ve seen some great examples using Snowflake as this layer.
Data analysis capability:
If the team of nerds isn’t there or they’re just too tied up with BAU, then an automated central data repository can be the solution. More and more we’ve seen a Customer Data Platform becoming the answer.
UniFida is the fully featured customer data platform for insights driven marketers. Hosted in the cloud, it ingests and unifies data from all online and offline customer behaviour, including browsing, ecommerce, customer order systems, email service providers, call centres and even retail. It then uses personal identifiers to build a single customer view.
Microsoft Power BI is fully integrated into UniFida, giving marketers faster access to meaningful insights.
Get to know your customers. Learn more about UniFida
Hosted in the cloud, UniFida is the customer data platform for insight driven marketers. Proven in the UK, it is represented in Australia by White Box Analytics.
For a chat, a demo, or both, get in touch today.
Comments