Here’s the truth: your customers aren’t just data-savvy, they’re hungry for insights. But just because they can analyze a report doesn’t mean they’re going to sit around waiting for one. They’ve got questions, and they expect answers right now.
What they want is simple: Log into your product, type their question, and gain instant insights—no more switching tabs or digging through outdated reports.
Luckily, that’s exactly what customer-facing analytics delivers. It brings real-time, actionable analytics right into your product, so your customers, teams, and partners can make decisions to the point of impact.
This is the new standard—instant answers, deeper data exploration, and the ability to discover new opportunities. Ready to bring it to life? This guide will show you exactly how to make it work for your product.
Table of contents:
Customer-facing analytics gives your users the power to visualize, analyze, and act on their data, right inside your product. It’s self-serve analytics woven directly into the product experience so both customers and internal teams can find answers and make smarter decisions without waiting on a report or pinging support.
Let’s say you’re using an HR management system to oversee employee engagement and performance. HR leaders don’t want to wait for analysts to generate quarterly reports—they need instant insights to understand what’s really happening across their workforce.
With customer-facing analytics, HR leaders can log in and immediately track attrition trends, engagement scores, or performance review completion rates. They can filter by department, location, or manager to pinpoint where teams are thriving—all within the app.
This isn’t just analytics bolted on—this is insight and action baked right into your product.
SaaS (B2B platforms)
Nobody wants to dig through reports or wait for dashboards to load. If you’re building a project management tool, why not give users a clear view of team performance right inside the product? With user-facing analytics, leaders can spot roadblocks, track progress, and fine-tune workflows—all without switching tabs.
Fintech
Your users don’t want to wait for a monthly statement to know where their money’s going. They want to track investments, monitor spending, and spot trends as they happen. With analytics built right into your platform, they can gain real-time insights into their investments, keeping them in charge of their finances.
Edtech
Keeping students and teachers on the same page isn’t easy. But when your portal offers real-time feedback and performance insights, students know how they’re doing instantly, and teachers can course-correct on the fly. It’s a smarter, more engaging way to learn and teach.
Logistics
Delays in logistics don’t just slow things down—they impact your bottom line. With real-time analytics baked into your system, your customers can track shipments, analyze routes, and flag issues before they become huge problems. It’s the difference between reacting in real time and staying ahead of the curve.
Pharmaceutics
Clinical trials are high-stakes—one delay can cost millions and set research back by years. With real-time analytics embedded within your platform, they get instant visibility into enrollment, outcomes, and adverse events. This leads to faster decisions, fewer bottlenecks, and a better shot at keeping trials on track.
With traditional BI, teams are stuck in reactive mode. Let’s say you’re trying to see which departments are falling behind on deliverables. Since you can’t drill down into the data yourself, you ping an analyst, wait a few days, and finally get a static report that’s already outdated. This feels all too familiar, right?
Unfortunately, this is just scratching the surface. Here are the top challenges with traditional BI:
1. Clunky dashboards
Most traditional BI tools offer users a fixed set of prebuilt dashboards. This may work for high-level snapshots, but what about deeper data exploration? If someone has a follow-up question or needs to dive deeper into performance metrics, they’re out of luck.
2. Your data teams are exhausted
Without self-service analytics, your data and product teams are constantly swamped with ad-hoc requests. At the end of the day, your teams end up acting like a "report factory," constantly fielding data requests and slowing down product delivery.
3. Insights that are always a step behind
In many traditional BI setups, data is extracted, processed, and loaded into reports on a scheduled basis. This process may be fine for a quarterly business review, but it’s a huge blocker when teams need to react in the moment.
4. Security risks keep piling on
Granular access control and transparency are a must, especially in regulated industries like fintech and public institutions. However, traditional BI tools often make row-level access complex and brittle. Add AI-powered features into the mix, and these analytics solutions can quickly become a black box.
5. Adoption stalls before it starts
Traditional BI tools are packed with advanced features that are out of reach for most business users. The steep learning curve means only the data experts get all the value. And those dashboards? Clunky, unintuitive, and lacking the drill-downs needed to really get to the answers.
What your users need is a consumer-grade experience with interactive, self-service exploration capabilities—not just canned reports and dashboards.
When it comes to adding customer-facing analytics into your product, you have two paths: building it in-house or buying an off-the-shelf solution. Both have their perks, but the right choice depends on how quickly you need to move and how much control you want over the final product.
Building customer-facing analytics
If you choose to build it yourself, you’re doing everything by yourself—design, integration, and custom features. This route gives you full developmental control, but it’s a big investment in time and resources.
Pros
Complete control over the roadmap: You have the freedom to develop analytics that align perfectly with your unique business goals. From the features that matter most to how the interface feels, you can adapt and scale as your product grows.
Better alignment with your existing tech stack: A custom solution can be designed to work smoothly with your current infrastructure, optimizing performance.
Customized branding: You have complete control over the design, so you can create a seamless, branded experience that feels like it’s made just for your users.
Cons
Significant development costs: Building your own analytics solution comes with significant development overheads. You’ll need a dedicated team of developers and designers. Beyond this, there’s also the challenge of managing a complex ecosystem.
Ongoing maintenance and updates: Your team will need to manage updates, fix bugs, and maintain compatibility with evolving technology. This is a continuous burden on your internal resources.
Longer time to market: Building an analytics solution can take months or even years, potentially delaying other product features and go-to-market timelines.
Buying a customer-facing analytics product
Buying an analytics solution means skipping the heavy lifting and leveraging a pre-built tool from a trusted BI vendor. These third-party platforms are designed to integrate easily into your product, so you can get up and running quickly without having to reinvent the wheel.
Pros
Faster implementation: Pre-built analytics solutions can be integrated into your product quickly, which means you can offer insights to your customers faster, reducing time to market.
Reduced maintenance burden: With third-party providers taking care of routine maintenance, security updates, and patches, your internal teams can focus on more strategic projects.
Access to proven expertise: Pre-built analytics products come with best practices from top experts, giving you a solid solution straight away—no trial and error required.
Cons
Limited customization: Third-party tools often offer a lot of customization options, but they might not let you dive as deeply into things like UI design or data pipelines to perfectly match your business needs. However, with an embedded analytics solution like ThoughtSpot, you get complete control—down to the last pixel and query.
Ongoing licensing costs: Using a third-party solution means paying recurring licensing or subscription fees, which can increase as your user base or data volume grows.Yet, it is still lesser than building an entire product from the ground up.
Reliance on a third-party vendor: Depending on an external provider means you're tied to their product roadmap. If the vendor doesn't keep up with your business needs, it can create risks down the road.
The ‘build vs buy’ decision really comes down to balancing your goals with your timeline. If you need customer-facing analytics up and running fast, going with a pre-built solution makes sense. It also allows you to focus on what you do best—improving your core product—while the experts take care of the analytics.
Customer-facing analytics tackles traditional BI problems head-on by giving users instant insights right inside the product. It’s like flipping the script from ‘we’ll get back to you’ to ‘here’s your answer’, here’s how:
A personalized experience
Forget static dashboard tools with their outdated interfaces. Today’s users demand interactive, personalized data experiences that are baked into products they already use and love. With user-facing analytics, you can perfectly embed such an experience.
For example, embedding an AI Analyst like ThoughtSpot’s Spotter into your app lets users get real-time, conversational insights, empowering them to ask follow-up questions, dig deeper into specific metrics, and find answers without ever leaving your product.
The result? A product that doesn’t just offer analytics but decisions—faster, smarter, and at scale.
Cloud warehouse maturity
Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, and Redshift have made your data faster, fresher, and more scalable than ever before. But if your users can’t access that live data within your product, what’s even the point?
By offering tight integration with your cloud data warehouse, customer-facing analytics allow your users to interact with live data directly inside your product. They can explore trends, drill into specifics, and take immediate action—all without waiting on IT or data teams. No more relying on scheduled refreshes. Just fresh, actionable insights when they need it most.
Automated insights
Data exploration isn’t just for analysts anymore, it should be built into the experience of every user, in every workflow.
By embedding trusted AI-powered analytics inside your product, you can deliver automated insights directly inside your product, putting decision-making power in the hands of business users, analysts, and developers alike. Now, users can instantly access relevant data, gain automated insights, spot trends, and receive actionable recommendations—all on their own. This AI-native experience accelerates decision-making and drives innovation, all without relying on external support.
See how embedding ThoughtSpot inside your app empowers every user with conversational AI, natural language search, and infinite drill-downs:
Competitive advantage
Customer-facing analytics isn’t just an add-on; it’s a strategic differentiator. When offered as a premium service, it creates new revenue streams, strengthens customer retention, and keeps users coming back for more personalized, high-impact insights.
Just look at Act-On as an example. After embedding ThoughtSpot, they elevated their user experience and saw a 60% increase in report usage.
That’s competitive advantage in action: a product that delivers instant answers, aligns with users’ workflows, and becomes an indispensable part of their daily operations.
Every company today is racing to capitalize on the GenAI wave and make user experiences more intuitive. If you're also aiming for that competitive edge, now’s the time to jump in.
With ThoughtSpot Embedded, you embed AI-powered analytics into your web application directly without overwhelming your development team. Here’s how it helps you deliver AI-powered, data-driven experiences to your users, partners, and customers:
Empower everyone to search for insights the way they want: With Spotter, our AI Analyst, conversational analytics is integrated into every workflow of your platform. This means business users can ask questions, find insights, and ask follow-up questions without losing context. This improved user experience, in turn, increases data fluency and adoption.
Embed powerful analytics with a few lines of code: Combine the power of your modern data stack with ThoughtSpot’s low-code SDKs. This integration allows you to scale deployment and manage operations end-to-end.
Lowers total cost of ownership: With ThoughtSpot, you won’t need a whole team of IT experts to constantly update and maintain your dashboards. Thanks to its AI-first intelligence, users can dive into the data themselves, cutting down on all the back-and-forth for custom reports. It scales with your business, not the other way around.
Bring AI-powered customer analytics to your product
The future of analytics isn’t about flooding users with more data—it’s about delivering relevant, timely, and actionable insights right where decisions happen. Traditional BI tools might help analyze the data, but that’s only part of the equation. To drive real impact, analytics must be embedded into everyday workflows—intuitive, contextual, and ready for action.
That’s where ThoughtSpot Embedded really stands out. With just a few lines of code, you can bring AI-powered analytics directly into your product, giving users instant access to insights while empowering your developers to deliver with confidence.
See how ThoughtSpot gives your product the analytics edge it needs—get started with a free demo today!
