With today's fast-evolving Salesforce product suite, we often get asked a lot of questions from current Salesforce customers about which analytics solution is right for them. Today, we'll dive into how Tableau CRM and the native Salesforce Lightning platform and reporting tools stack up and give you pointers about which one you should use when.
Salesforce Lightning reports and Salesforce Lightning dashboards have played a substantial role in operational reporting. With Salesforce reports we get insights that help us better manage our business and customer relations. You may have more recently heard about Tableau CRM or Einstein analytics and thought – what’s that all about? With this blog, we’re going to be looking at Tableau CRM (TCRM) and explore if you should consider it to accompany your lightning reports and dashboards.
Note: Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics) is not Tableau. If you’re deciding between TCRM and Tableau, check out my blog here!
Tableau CRM and reports and dashboards in Salesforce Lightning are both great tools for revealing meaningful data insights. Whether it be security, connectivity to data sources, skills, outlooks or personal preference – both tools can satisfy sweet spots in your current Salesforce environment. That said, let’s take a look at TCRM!
Tableau CRM, formerly Einstein Analytics, is the premium analytics platform bringing interactive dashboards and predictive analytics directly to your existing Salesforce deployment. With TCRM, business users can better understand customer pipelines, analyze trends/outliers, and plan next-best actions based on predictive insights and automated recommendations. Improved insights delivered directly to end-users lead to faster, informed decision-making and increased sales conversions - all powered by Tableau CRM!
What can TCRM do that Lightning reports cannot?
Let's lay things out so we can compare the two...
As a user of TCRM, here are my top 5 benefits TCRM provides (that traditional Lightning reports do not):
TCRM lets users interact with their data in real-time and allows them to save unique reporting views for their role, and place them anywhere inside your existing Salesforce instance, all while maintaining rich interactivity and applicable security protocols. This enables your users to get rich insights from your data while also allowing them to drill, explore, and discover on their own. TCRM makes getting started easy with pre-made templates that are useful and well-made. You begin by answering a few questions about your data setup and fields of interest, and then get a ready-to-use dashboard without any coding!
The ability to quickly provide users with an interactive tool is critical to adoption and impact. Traditionally, a user would see a number or trend, form a follow-up question, and then need to navigate to or create another report to answer that question. This interrupts their analysis flow and costs time. When users can interact with data responsively, drilling into key insights, it allows them to save time and produce a better analysis. Here's what TCRM looks like in action:
One of the biggest advantages to using a native tool like TCRM for your team is the ability to instantly take action on your insights. Users can do things like log calls and events, share notes, or have a conversation in Chatter, right from within the dashboard. This will then update records directly within Salesforce, and feedback into the insights! For example - in the demonstration below, there was an event logged with a date and time and that record was directly updated within that account in Salesforce.
With TCRM, you now can enable your organization with data science/artificial intelligence and machine learning, without the need to know how to code complex algorithms. With Einstein Discovery and model building, your team can tap into robust statistical testing to uncover relationships and trends that you might otherwise remain hidden. 
With their automated machine learning, you now can tap into automated artificial intelligence to tackle key use cases such as: minimizing customer churn, maximizing win rates, or minimizing times to close.
As a data scientist, one thing I really like about Einstein Discovery is the ability to see the underlying distributions and model performance of the outcomes Einstein presents, so I can better qualify how trustworthy the insight is.
Unlike Lightning, with TCRM, you can connect to data sources outside of your Salesforce instance. Whether it be from other Salesforce deployments or instances, AWS, or SQL warehouses – you can leverage TCRM’s native connectors to bring in and model datasets for your team to consume through TCRM. Additionally, you can build and schedule your workflows to update/refresh your datasets on a regular basis from inside the tool.
One thing that's immediately apparent when using Tableau CRM is how fast it can present actionable insights to both casual and power users. Tableau CRM can merge data from multiple sources to create a dataset, and then store and optimize it in your Salesforce cloud, allowing your dashboards to load and respond to interactions quickly. TCRM still maintains its ability to model, slice, and filter even on datasets with millions of records.
The decision to upgrade ultimately depends on if you have a need for the features TCRM will have in addition to your standard Salesforce reporting. Does your organization need interactive dashboards, automated machine learning, the ability to connect to a variety of data sources, and process analytics at scale? If so, TCRM may be for you!
If your organization's needs look different, there are numerous BI tools available that work in tandem with your operational reports. A common alternative to TCRM is Tableau. Check out my blog below to help navigate that decision:
Tableau or Tableau CRM? What fits your business?
You can check out more Salesforce content using the links below:
A Tableau Dashboard using Salesforce Data
How to use Tableau with Salesforce
Hopefully you're walking away with some insight into the benefits of Tableau CRM when compared to traditional Lightning reports. Thanks for reading!
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