Upcoming Einstein Analytics features you should be pumped about

Einstein Analytics(EA) has led the business world’s analytics since the acquisition of Tableau. Tableau has made the official statement of combining with Salesforce Einstein Analytics arm, and this new offering will be known as “Tableau CRM”. EA has always provided actionable insights into the native CRM user experience as well as offered best-in-class CRM integration. But it doesn’t end here Salesforce always leaves its users amazed and excited with new features that add to ease and convenience. This year Salesforce continues to follow the same trend by adding some attractive capabilities to Einstein Analytics through its Winter ‘21 release. Let’s take a deeper dive into everything that we can see as Einstein Analytics goes to the next level.

Einstein Discovery:

‘Fast Start’ Templates & ‘Scheduled Model Refresh’

If you’re unsure of exactly how you should start using Einstein Discovery, Winter ‘21 simplifies that for you. Whenever you start with a new story, you can choose one of the new Einstein Discovery ‘fast start templates’. Einstein Discovery then builds the training dataset while accommodating best practices. This will create the iteration of an Einstein Discovery story. Even more, with ‘Scheduled Model Refresh’ features, you can easily automate some of the manual steps required to update your Einstein Discovery Predictive models. It helps set the frequency of retraining your Einstein Discovery deployed model retraining. You’ll get a refreshed story in the form of a new story version as well as a newly deployed model version.

Analytics Data Integration:

Sync Out for Snowflake

Realizing Customer 360’s true potential, Salesforce partnered with Snowflake earlier this year. That means, if your business uses Snowflake, EA can help you to unlock and operationalize insights on all the data that lives in the ‘business-user’ workflow. But the most exciting of all, is the Einstein Analytics ‘Direct’ for Snowflake that will be generally available with Winter ‘21. The Winter ‘21 release now lets you run explorations on your data in the Snowflake Data Platform without the grunt work and redundant storage of loading the data into Salesforce.  You can now, unlock your Salesforce data with the new Snowflake connectors and write your Salesforce objects directly with SyncOut for Snowflake. You could also use the Output Connector for Snowflake to write any output for a recipe. Bringing data into EA is the best means for deeper integration of data, but with Snowflake Direct, user can also expect to see several other advantages like:

• Data residency & redundancy needs: It’s common for businesses to have data residency requirements for some of their data. In situations like those, the user can continue keeping that data in the warehouse, while using EA Direct to operationalize that data for the users.
• Live insights: From here on, every time you open a dashboard or lens powered by one or more Snowflake Direct queries, it goes straight to Snowflake. That’s how users can experience the near real-time refreshes or fast-changing data. This can be a real good alternative when your EA data flows take a while to run.
• Low-frequency of access: Although certain data  like invoice order details tend to be less frequently accessed, you’d like business users to have access on demand. This is where EA Direct can be of great help. 
• High-volume data: Do you have a high-volume of data in Snowflake running into billions of rows? You’re now saved from all the trouble of waiting to archive & load data and arranging storage capacity that you’d otherwise need. EA direct now allows you to just query the data instead. 
• Clutter-free data pipelines for EA: You can minimize the number of data flows to run by offloading to EA Direct wherever possible. Meanwhile, you can ensure that your critical data flows are acquiring the necessary resources.
• Fast start with prototype: Sidestep the need for data sync or recipes for Direct queries. With just a quick setup, you can start incorporating insights from Snowflake into your dashboards. You can also collaboratively prototype it with business-users. 

Analytics Pre-Built Apps: 

Performance Insights on Revenue and Wealth Management Analytics

The release is set to bring with it the ‘Revenue Operations Analytics’ app that should allow the sales teams to get their hands on the much-needed performance insights for building stronger pipelines, generating more revenue, and improving forecast accuracy. The app delivers forecasting analytics with better user experience, better pipeline visibility, and easier deal inspection & forecasting with the use of predictive analytics. This will ultimately enrich insights into sales performance. To improve the sales further, users will also be able to predict and alleviate client churn and forecast the likelihood of growing account assets with the Wealth Management Analytics dashboard and Einstein Discovery stories.

Analytics App-Building: 

Table-Column Control, Customized One-Click Actions, and Live Connections to Snowflake

A long awaited upgrade, users should finally be able to freeze table columns and collapse grouped columns. This means you finally won’t be limited to just having a compare table’s group columns locked in place. Also, you can get a quick view of data rolled up to parent fields in grouped columns with the ‘expand and ‘collapse layout’ option for compare tables. To further simplify and enable greater flexibility for app-building, the release will bring the new ‘Actions’ menu to the explorer to set how one-click actions behave on a table’s dataset fields in lenses and dashboards. You can choose to view all available one-click actions when you click ‘records’ in any column. 

Analytics for Everyone:

Watchlist and Dynamic Lens Subscription

Users will now be able to track metrics across multiple dashboards and monitor changes over time with ‘Watchlist’, generally available in your Salesforce org. This means you won’t have to hunt and load pages of the charts, tables, metrics that you routinely consult. Instead, you could choose to receive everything as scheduled email updates by simply subscribing to lenses and dashboard widgets. 

SAQL New-arrivals:

Support for Custom Fiscal Year & Multi-Value Field Conversion to Strings

Salesforce is taking steps to further expand SAQL functionality to cover custom fiscal year support (generally available now in Einstein Analytics), multi-valued field-to-string conversions functionality, and other additional math, string, and date functions  trigonometry and ASCII conversion functions in SAQL queries. 

The best Einstein Analytics yet

Einstein Analytics has brought business-users closer than ever to insights as data-driven decisions permeate, and in many cases, become processes. But the best performance only comes with regular planned updates and reducing legacy – and that can be hard to follow through. Luckily, with us around, expert help is always at hand. Get help for post-release updates, detect and resolve anomalies and sources of incompatibility , and find out what enhancements make sense for your systems & processes