What is Salesforce Wave Analytics (Salesforce CRM Analytics)?
Salesforce Wave Analytics, now known as CRM Analytics, is a business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform from Salesforce that provides native analytics, visual insights and predictions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for Salesforce CRM to help businesses make better, data-driven decisions. CRM Analytics is optimized for mobile access with the CRM Analytics Mobile App and for creating data visualizations by bringing all data onto a single platform.
CRM Analytics provides organizations with an easy way to combine all their business data in different locations, such as the Salesforce CRM, ERP systems, data warehouses, log files and so on, and capture key insights from combined data. Through its point-and-click visual interface, anyone in the organization can access up-to-date, actionable, AI-powered insights, recommendations and guidance in their flow of work. These insights and recommendations can help them to answer complex business questions, predict outcomes and achieve desirable business outcomes.
CRM Analytics can also help businesses to do the following:
- Make better sense of large volumes of data through aggregated views of disparate data.
- Explore data to discover new insights and make new predictions to guide decision-making.
- Get instant visualizations that show the status of the business.
- Create dashboards based on the latest data to monitor key business metrics in real time.
- Save and share insights and dashboards in Chatter or Slack to improve collaboration and teamwork, and to take instant action from the point of insight.
- Drive greater adoption of Salesforce across the entire organization and capture higher value from the Salesforce investment.
Users can access CRM Analytics from one unified platform, so they don't need to use multiple systems and logins. Also, they can visualize the entire business and get the insights they need from both desktop browsers and mobile devices. As a mobile-friendly solution, CRM Analytics enables businesses to make data-driven decisions at any time and from anywhere.
Key features of CRM Analytics
CRM Analytics provides visual insights, AI-powered predictions and out-of-the-box user experiences, dashboards and KPIs for a wide range of industries and roles. All these insights and predictions are built directly -- or natively -- into the Salesforce CRM, enabling business users to drive greater engagement, generate better outcomes and focus better on the flow of work within the CRM.
Some of its key features include the following:
- Prebuilt intelligent apps. CRM Analytics provides out-of-the-box intelligent analytics experiences and insights built into the various Salesforce Clouds (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud).
- Customizable apps. CRM Analytics includes prebuilt applications and dashboards for every Salesforce Industry Cloud that enable users to customize analytics and AI experiences for their specific industry use cases.
- Einstein Discovery. This application uses statistical modeling and machine learning to provide users with both predictive and prescriptive insights. Thus, they can see and analyze potential outcomes and key drivers, and also get recommendations for the next best action to automate Salesforce flows and to simplify the execution of bulk actions.
- Built-in actions menu. Users can take action directly from within Salesforce at the point of insight so they don't have to leave the CRM or interrupt their existing workflows to perform necessary tasks like scheduling meetings or adding to campaigns.
- Slack collaboration. With the CRM Analytics app for Slack, users can find, share and collaborate on reports, dashboards and insights from within Slack. They can also surface aggregated predictions from Salesforce Reports into the Slack workflow to further simplify collaboration and decision-making.
- User-friendly data management tools. Tools such as Data Prep Recipes make it easier to connect to and query data from any source at any time, including structured data in Salesforce. Also, external data sources such as ERP applications, transaction systems, data warehouses and data lakes can be incorporated to generate better insights.
- Transparent, understandable AI models. CRM Analytics uses transparent AI models to eliminate the problems associated with black box AI for decision-making. These models also enable users to generate simple answers to complex business questions and determine the best actions to take for a certain issue on the basis of solid data and data-based predictions, recommendations and guidance rather than just assumptions.
- Built-in templates and third-party apps. Users can customize the templates and apps, and also set up custom-built dashboards to save time and create advanced experiences faster. CRM Analytics also offers out-of-the-box products and user experiences to minimize onboarding time and the need for product training.
In addition to all these features, CRM Analytics includes numerous security features. It also includes standards for role hierarchy, permissions and compliance. Also, individual users are restricted using certain parameters (authentication, session limits and audits) to provide better visibility and control over the user base and to prevent unauthorized users from using the application. These features also enable organizations to gain full visibility into their data and analytics, and thus help ensure proper data governance and user management.
Are Wave Analytics and Einstein Analytics the same?
Wave Analytics and Einstein Analytics are the same analytics product from Salesforce.
Wave Analytics is the original name of Salesforce's business analytics solution. It was rebranded to Einstein Analytics in June 2017, and again renamed to Tableau CRM in late 2020. With that change, all user licenses and permission sets for Einstein Analytics were also renamed to Tableau CRM.
Salesforce made this name change announcement in the Salesforce Spring '21 Release Notes. In the announcement, Salesforce specifically mentioned that Tableau CRM offers an enhanced native analytics user experience inside Salesforce CRM, while continuing to retain the AI and BI capabilities of Einstein Analytics.
Salesforce renamed Tableau CRM as CRM Analytics in 2022. The rebranding was meant to show users that CRM Analytics is a scalable, AI-powered data and analytics platform that's natively built for Salesforce. Salesforce also assured users that the platform would continue to deliver intelligent experiences built on one of the world's most popular CRM platforms and enable users to augment their Salesforce workflows with visual and predictive insights and actionable recommendations.
CRM Analytics pricing
Some editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Industry Cloud include CRM Analytics right out of the box. For other editions, businesses can add CRM Analytics to their Salesforce products at an additional cost.
Salesforce currently (as of September 2024) offers three pricing plans for CRM Analytics:
- Einstein Predictions -- $75per user, per month.
- CRM Analytics Growth -- $140per user, per month.
- CRM Analytics Plus -- $165per user, per month.
With Einstein Predictions, users can automate data discovery and get AI-enabled predictive insights. The plan provides access to Einstein Prediction Builder, an AI-powered, resource-rich business predictions tool, and Einstein Discovery, a no-code environment that helps businesses to make decisions with statistical modeling and transparent AI in Tableau.
CRM Analytics Growth is a complete analytics platform for all kinds of business data from any source. With this plan, users can access the following:
- Salesforce Sales Analytics. An analytics tool that analyzes Sales Cloud data to create intuitive visualizations for data exploration and decision-making.
- Salesforce Service Analytics. An analytics tool for Salesforce Service Cloud to help service managers and agents analyze and improve their service business using data.
- Analytics Studio. A user-friendly tool to build CRM Analytics assets that help with data exploration, data visualizations, insights-generation and decision-making.
- Data Platform. A customizable Salesforce CRM solution with multiple functionalities for streamlining lead generation, after-sales service, customer journey orchestration, process automations, collaboration and more.
Finally, the CRM Analytics Plus plan is an advanced analytics platform with built-in AI capabilities. With this plan, businesses get everything in the other two plans. Plus, they get Einstein Discovery for Reports (previously Einstein Data Insights), a business-friendly tool to analyze tabular and summary reports using AI and statistical analysis.
In addition to these three plans, Salesforce also offers CRM Analytics plans for specific industries or teams. For example, Revenue Intelligence is a purpose-built analytics and AI solution for sales teams. Similarly, Industry Cloud Intelligence is suited for sales teams who need analytics for industry-specific use cases, and Service Intelligence Supercharge provides actionable insights and AI-fueled recommendations for service businesses or departments. All three plans are priced at $250 per user, per month.
For all CRM Analytics pricing plans, users are billed annually.
A free 30-day trial for CRM Analytics is also available for users who are not ready to make the investment but want to try out its features in a real-world business setting.
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