Understanding your clients' data analytics needs is crucial as a transportation and logistics management software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. Your clients have various queries about their logistics operations that, when answered, can significantly streamline their business procedures. As a result, your clients may start requesting you to integrate analytics natively within your software to answer their frequent inquiries.
Some examples of questions your clients want to answer are:
- What's the average delivery/shipment time from pick-up to delivery point?
- If a shipment originated from a particular customer, what's the success rate of on-time deliveries?
- How often are my shipments/deliveries cancelled?
- And more…
Providing these responses directly within your software becomes critical as your business grows. Although exporting data via CSV might be sufficient in the early stages, it becomes a potential risk as you scale, with clients possibly transferring their data to more capable platforms.
Approaches to Advanced Analytics by Industry Leaders
Doordash
Doordash offers flexible dashboards that are drag-and-drop out-of-the-box for their restaurant customers. With Doordash analytics, restaurants are able to see areas for improvement in their delivery operations, a must in the food delivery space.
Flexport
According to Flexport’s product page on their own data analytics and insights product, shippers can unlock their supply chain data to make better business decisions. They can: evaluate landed costs, container utilization, and carbon emissions per shipment, or build custom reports to answer additional questions to make business improvements.
Shipbob
With Shipbob analytics, Shipbob claims via their blog that their users can answer questions like:
- How many of my orders are fulfilled on time (and what’s the breakdown of orders placed, processed, and shipped)?
- How many days does it take for my orders to be delivered?
- Which shipping methods do my customers choose most often?
- How much are my customers spending by shipping method?
- What is my average shipping cost per shipping method?
- Which states do I ship the most orders to?
- and more…
As you can see, integrating analytics directly into your platform can significantly enhance customer value and increase revenue per customer, developing these tools can be extremely costly and time-consuming, particularly as customer demands for additional features and data insights grow more complex.
So, what's the solution for SaaS businesses looking to incorporate advanced analytics without breaking the bank? Let's explore how modern embedded analytics tools come into the picture.
Leveraging Modern Embedded Analytics Tools
Today's top-of-the-line embedded analytics tools offer a variety of high-impact features from the start. These include sophisticated filtering, detailed charting, advanced mapping, automated data layers for caching, analytics tracking, API for seamless client setup and management, a drag-and-drop chart interface, and customizable styling options.
Not only do they cover a host of functionalities, but these tools also comply with standards such as SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, easing your compliance burden. In addition, many such tools offer no-code interfaces that enable non-technical team members like customer success managers (CSMs) to make modifications for users, facilitating a superior, high-touch customer interaction.
Lastly, the rise of artificial intelligence has paved the way for the most advanced embedded analytics tools to incorporate features that can expedite answering client queries. This is achieved with the assistance of natural language processing systems in-app, enabling faster, more intuitive interaction with data and analytics.
This increase in the sophistication of analytics tools is revolutionizing how businesses approach and understand their data, bringing a new level of insight and understanding to their operations.
But with a plethora of options out there, which tool offers the best combination of features and user-friendliness? Let's take a look at one such tool: Explo.
Introduction to Explo: Customer-facing Analytics
Explo, an embedded data visualization tool, provides an efficient solution for quick development of advanced analytics features in your application. With just a few lines of code, Explo allows you to offer analytics and reporting directly within your application.
Integration is simple: Connect your data warehouse, establish client-level data security and segmentation, and then enable your users to visualize their data on your platform. Explo offers an Explore product for viewing pre-configured visualizations and a Report Builder for self-service data exploration.
Quick Deployment of Advanced Reporting akin to Doordash, Flexport, and Shipbob
Explo enables you to set up advanced reporting within your platform quickly and efficiently. You can recreate an experience similar to Doordash Analytics, Flexport Analytics, or Shipbob in just a matter of minutes.
Let's walk through a quick tutorial of setting up custom reporting for logistics data using the power of Explo:
1. Connect your data warehouse: Choose from our wide range of connection offerings. This allows us to read your database and create visualizations based on real-time data.
In this example, our data warehouse consists of a Shipments table with the following columns:Shipment Source, Shipment Destination,Ship Date, Cancellation Date, Days in Transit, Shipment Method, Shipment Cost
Note: this example is geared towards shipments, but the same principles can be applied to local ordering such as food delivery. Even if this example doesn’t directly apply to your business, feel free to keep reading to get great insights about your business!
2. Create default reports: From this table, we can generate default reports, which can be customized per client. This allows your customer support managers to offer a personalized experience to their users.
Default reports provide a foundation for your clients to start thinking about their data. They can modify these reports and refine the queries to get more detailed answers.
For instance, you could set up reports to answer frequently asked questions such as:
- What is the average cost for each shipment method?
- Are any shipment methods more prone to cancellation?
- How many days does each shipment method take? Has any method gotten worse or better recently?
- How long has shipping taken over time? Can I break that down by day and week?
- Embed the visualizations in your application: Once you're satisfied with the experience, you can quickly embed it into your application with just a few lines of code.
Concluding Thoughts
Incorporating advanced reporting into your Transportation and Logistics SaaS platform is crucial for business growth. It not only improves your customers’ operations, but also allows for you to charge more for advanced features. However, creating and managing custom analytics can be a massive undertaking in terms of time, effort, and finances. Leveraging a third-party platform like Explo can help you meet your business objectives concerning analytics quickly, without significant engineering investment.
Investing in powerful analytics is not just a strategic business decision but also a commitment to your customers. Giving your customers the right insights can empower them to make data-driven decisions, ultimately improving their business efficiency and profitability.
