There has been a tremendous change in what the modern consumer expects from a B2B SaaS platform since the boom of the on-demand feature sets they interact with on B2C applications. These expectations have changed how many SaaS businesses are engaging with their customers and what capabilities they can provide to increase engagement. Among these on-demand feature sets includes, customer self-service reporting, which provides a seamless user and data analytics experience.

What is a customer self-service reporting solution?

A customer self-service reporting solution enables end-users to generate insights on data and create custom dashboards that display data, without the help of any technical personnel. 

Self-service reporting solutions enable users' interaction with data to be more accessible and helpful to business users. It allows users to filter, sort, analyze and even visualize data - without writing a single line of code. 

Most traditional BI solutions fail to provide the type of self-service reporting your customers require to have total control over their data. They often lack user friendly features, are time-intensive to set up, and require too much customization to be scalable across a diverse customer set. This is where a modern self-service reporting solution can help you and your customer’s end users, let’s explore how below.

Benefits of self-service reporting for you and your customers

Reduce demand on your Product Engineering Team 

One major benefit of providing self-service is allowing users to be more independent and reduce your customer support tickets for basic data reporting. These solutions will reduce the workload on your technical support team and allow them to focus on more important aspects of your SaaS roadmap. 

Provide customers with data when they need it, however they need it

Self-service reporting tools are always available for use and come with a plethora of features for end-users to customize the output of data. True self-service reporting tools are simple to use, which makes it easy for a non-technical end user to generate insights in real time.

Increases customer engagement with your SaaS app

As discussed, self-service reporting tools enable your customers to access data and construct reports within your app or web portal. This access enhances user engagement with your app, creating more value for your customers and helping you retain them longer term.

Should you build or buy a self-service reporting solution for your SaaS platform?

While both paths have a similar goal: to help maximize engagement and deliver a unique data analytics experience to your customers, there are two completely different paths to achieving this outcome. The two paths; build it yourself or buy and embedded directly into your application. 

Build: Dedicate engineering resources and time to DIY

Your developers are no doubt capable of building a solution in-house to help with the collection of data, filtering, and reporting that would be effective for basic self-service reporting. However, what we’ve found in conversations with many customers that elected to go this route initially, is that building is time intensive and often does scale long term. Even after the initial development is rolled out, the burden of maintaining and adhering to customer customization requests will still fall on your engineering team. Additionally, the time that your teams will spend on building these capabilities will cannibalize other feature set initiatives. 

Buy: An Embedded Analytics solution that accelerates time to market and scales across customers today, tomorrow, and beyond

An embedded analytics solution is built to take the headache out of integrating, visualizing, and sharing data with customers. It comes with all the tools to integrate and unify your customers' data into your app, while allowing them to generate real-time reports and pull up live data whenever they want. Additionally, these solutions come with enterprise-grade security and compliance features out-of-the-box that may not be reasonable for your teams to build out themselves. 

Wrap Up

Taking the burden off of your engineering teams is a significant advantage of deciding to implement an embedded analytics solution. However, the return on your investment will be the feedback from your customers, when they speak highly of your SaaS solution for giving them the liberty of generating important insights. At the end of the day, you will be providing them with an invaluable service, the ability to make informed decisions and tools to create value-driven reports themselves.

See how Explo can help remove the burden of self-service reporting for your SaaS platform. Also, check out why customers need self-service reporting!