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'CRM Analytics' Salesforce's new name for Tableau CRM
Salesforce refreshes the sales analytics package formerly known as Einstein Analytics by adding CRM-native features, a Slack app and vertical-specific integrations.
Salesforce has renamed Tableau CRM "Salesforce CRM Analytics," and along the way added new features and dashboards. Coming later this year will be vertical-specific integrations, Slack apps and a search analytics tool.
Features coming in the Summer '22 release, which will roll out to various Salesforce users in waves in June, include CRM-native tools such as a Slack integration that makes it simple to share, discuss and make decisions based on analytics visualizations; Predictions in Slack, which aggregates machine learning sales predictions from Salesforce Reports in Slack; and Search Insights, which makes dashboards and data sets potentially discoverable to a wider range of Salesforce users with natural language queries.
Salesforce CRM Analytics started out life as Einstein Analytics, which was renamed Tableau CRM in late 2020.
The renaming follows in quick succession with other products, including Salesforce Customer Data Platform. It follows precedents where other products have been renamed to reflect product functions, instead of branding of acquired companies such as Tableau or Datorama.
The rebranding makes it clear to users that Salesforce CRM Analytics are natively built for them, the company said in an email attributed to Umair Rauf, Salesforce product management vice president.
Gartner calls such prebuilt, purpose-defined machine learning analytics embedded into applications -- as opposed to off-the-shelf data modeling packages that require far more customization and code to set up and use -- "augmented analytics." Features such as Salesforce CRM Analytics give end users the keys to machine learning with low-code or no-code tools, without involving data scientists, said Gartner analyst Austin Kronz.
Such a targeted approach to machine learning can also yield usable business insights that can take a very long time to extract from a traditional machine collaboration among an organization's data experts in a Jupyter Notebook, for example, Kranz said. Those projects can take a lot of iterations to get to insights that help meet business goals.
"You can apply machine learning to anything -- the problem is, just because it's statistically relevant doesn't mean it's business relevant," Kronz said. "Einstein was meant to make machine learning accessible to consumers; I think that's where they've seen their success."
New features here, and to come
Salesforce also released other tools under the CRM Analytics umbrella coming in the Summer '22 release, including a number of revenue intelligence features for several its vertical clouds, including Financial Services Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud and Communications Cloud.
Available now is Net Zero Analytics, which takes data from a Salesforce user organization's business travel, procurement, vehicles and stationary assets -- such as buildings and machinery -- to compute its carbon footprint and dashboard the findings. It also can take waste management into account in computing a company's carbon footprint. This feature, Salesforce said, is for companies that want data to devise net-zero emissions plans and measure their progress.
Kronz said Net Zero Analytics is interesting because, in the world of cloud computing, it's hard for users to visualize the environmental impact of things they do -- because often they're switching things on and off in digital consoles. Assigning analytics to these processes could be a start toward capping and reducing emissions, and more sustainable computing. It's also in line with a larger trend going on in the cloud computing industry, where data scientists and vendors are working to make analytics work more effectively on smaller data sets to reduce time and energy expended.
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.
