What's Covered
We sat down with Tom Gardiner, CEO at Trevor.io, to learn more about the company's new offering: Embeddable and why it's changing the game for customer-facing analytics.
Why are we building Embeddable?
"We've been building Trevor.io for many years, and it's an excellent tool for internal self-service BI," says Gardiner. "But we've been getting a lot of interest and pull for the other side of the coin, which is customer-facing analytics."
Customers want to take the dashboards they've built in Trevor and show them to their own customers. "Just like Intercom or any other online platform, it makes a lot of sense to give additional value to your customers through analytics," says Gardiner.
Analytics have become a standard offering as part of SaaS tools, and your end users rely on these reports for myriad reasons. For example, Stripe’s reporting suite gives businesses the flexibility to report on MRR, upcoming subscription payments, failed payments, basically any metric being tracked within the platform. The ability to slice and dice that data to quickly see what’s most relevant is a huge additional benefit for users and of course, it enables Stripe to prove the value their service is providing to their business customers.
There are 3 tricky areas when it comes to building and maintaining an excellent analytics experience for your customers however:
- If you build your analytics experience from scratch, you’re looking at an extensive process involving taking significant engineering and design resource away from your core platform.
- Building from scratch also means iteration and maintenance become an additional task for your team.
- Buying and embedding a BI tool is much faster - but at the cost of having something clearly non-native plonked into your carefully curated platform.
What's different about our approach?
While taking a dashboard from a BI tool like Trevor and embedding it into a platform is a good solution, it doesn't always end up being a great solution. "The requirements when you're giving analytics to your customers are very different from internal BI," explains Gardiner.
Your customers want to see results instantly, without a steep learning curve to get value from the insights available. Typically design and product teams want to have the analytics look and feel like the rest of the platform. "Embeddable allows you to do all of that," says Gardiner. "It's a game-changer for customer-facing analytics."
While all other customer-facing analytics solutions try to convince customers to “buy instead of build”, Embeddable is a javascript SDK that lets you build your own customer-facing analytics, exactly the way you want it, but in 10% of the time:
- our SDK wraps your favourite charting libraries, as well as your own platform’s components (standard buttons and dropdowns that you already have in your product) so that you’re building an “Embeddable” that looks and feels exactly like your own platform
- you define the data models (Orders, Transactions, Schools, Campaigns, Products, etc.) that you want to make available to your customer
- and in a point-and-click interface your customer-facing teams can easily “add this chart, using data from this data model” and publish changes, in seconds, directly to your live platform.
- they only need to worry about giving your customers the analytics they want to see, and we worry about everything else:
- performance (your data is live and loads instantly)
- security (you build one dashboard, and every customer will only ever see the data they are allowed to see)
- feature requests (we know what your customers will want: exporting, sharing, scheduling, customizing, internationalisation, drill-downs, etc, so these features are all out-of-the-box features you can toggle on in a click)
- self-service (protect yourself from getting bombarded by data requests - let your customers ask their own questions, within a controlled data environment customized by you)
With Embeddable, Trevor.io is taking a customer-centric approach to analytics, allowing companies to provide their customers with valuable insights without sacrificing user experience.
What are we most excited for?
"We're excited to offer our customers a way to seamlessly integrate analytics into their own platforms, in a tenth of the time it would take to build from scratch," says Gardiner.
That wraps up our interview with Tom Gardiner, CEO at Trevor.io. We're excited to see how Embeddable will revolutionize the way companies approach customer analytics.