The Software-as-a-Service business model has become pervasive across a great span of both the enterprise and consumer software markets. This business model relies heavily on subscription renewals and growing a base of continual/repeat customers to increase the overall lifetime value of customers.
For many businesses purchasing software that uses this model has meant lower upfront costs, less total commitment (meaning more business flexibility) and better cash flow since payments are spread out over time. However, less upfront commitment and lower upfront costs can lead to less managerial oversight. Procurement and finance departments have reacted accordingly to this oversight problem by keeping a much closer eye on application usage patterns and end-user adoption of internal tools as part of the main criteria for determining the organizational value of any given business application.
As a result, successful SaaS vendors place usage and user adoption statistics high on the list of health and success indicators of their product suites. But how can SaaS vendors improve user usage and adoption? Well, most software companies have customer success manager and account managers who work together to monitor customer happiness, usage, and adoption. Identifying accounts whose usage has decreased is a great way to identify potential non-renewals. Taking corrective action through further product education and when bringing on new clients developing proper onboarding plans can do wonders. But many products will still run into the same problem, a major usage and adoption “leak” in the form of poor application business intelligence.
“As much as 80% of Data Archive customers have recognized they no longer need a separate reporting solution because they can do so much more with ours” Mukesh Marodia, Informatica stated right after initial release.
Poor reporting and analytics capabilities can act as a major hindrance to users who want to do more with your application (and its data). Many of your customers may already be utilizing third-party BI platforms to overcome the product limitations they face when trying to use their data in your system. And in doing so, they use your product less and less while utilizing these BI platforms more and more. Moreover, if at the start of an engagement the more data-savvy users aren’t getting what they need from a BI and reporting perspective, the likelihood of them fully adopting your platform is also limited.
Embedded Analytics Increases Application User Adoption
But there’s a way to stem this large adoption and usage leak, through more advanced reporting and analytical capabilities. And the easiest way to achieve better in-app analytics is through embedded analytics. Embedded analytics can be the fastest way to enable these capabilities to your users, and can have the lowest long-term cost of ownership (when compared to the building, maintaining, and supporting these BI capabilities yourself). JReport, a leader in precision reporting, dashboarding, and analytics for embedded use cases gives you the ability to empower your new and existing users with the power of a BI suite, all white-labeled and customized to integrate seamlessly within your application. JReport was also recently given G2Crowd’s Highest User Adoption Award.
Here are a few reasons why adoption and usage go up when you’ve embedded analytics into your application:
- It provides a quicker, more convenient way for users to access vital data by delivering it to users inside your application (versus leaving your application to view data in a 3rd party BI platform).
- Data can be viewed when and where it’s needed by working within the context of your application workflows.
- Embedded analytics further enables both power users and non-technical users with the self-service reporting flexibility they require in their day to day workflows, meaning greater rates of adoption across your user groups.
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