What is Interactive Analytics?

Businesses are collecting more data than ever, but if you don’t know how to effectively interpret it, data is just facts and statistics. The value in data doesn’t come from collecting it, but in how you make it actionable to drive business strategy. In order to make better-informed decisions, your business needs to be able to effectively analyze data, and that data needs to be comprehensible for as many decision-makers as possible. 

Interactive analytics is a way to make real-time data more intelligible for non-technical users through the use of tools that visualize and crunch the data, enabling users to quickly and easily run complex queries and interpret them to gain the valuable insights that factor into critical business decisions. 

Why is interactive analytics important?

When data is accessible, it enables employees of an organization to explore that data effectively and help their organizations take the best path forward. Visualization helps you understand the story your data is telling--visual language improves problem-solving effectiveness by 19% and combining visual information and actions with written information makes it 70% more memorable. As an extension of utilizing real-time data, interactive analytics helps users iterate quickly, easily, and with confidence--resulting in more nimble decision-making and business optimization in areas such as product development and customer success. 

What are the benefits of interactive analytics?

Interactive data visualization has a number of benefits when utilized by companies:

• Timely decisions: By making data interactive and processing it through dynamic visualizations, you make it easier to digest. This in turn can reduce the time required for critical insights and enables timelier decisions. 
• Unveiling trends: Visualizing data can make it easier to identify patterns or unexpected behavior that may have otherwise remained hidden if that data was left unrendered. 
• User-friendly: Interactive analytics makes parsing through data more intuitive, which can take some of the fear and hesitation out of becoming comfortable with data analysis. By presenting data in a way that’s easier to engage with and learn from, users are less reliant on outside teams or companies to find meaningful takeaways that can be put into action. 

What using interactive analytics looks like for different business roles

Through interactive analytics, you can utilize real-time reports that can help you understand your workforce’s performance. For example, you could use it to visualize scheduling data of upcoming time off and compare it to staffing levels to fill holes in the schedule. 

Another example is customer success. You could use interactive analytics to identify trends and variables in customer churn and use that data in an attempt to target specific customers in an effort to retain them. 

Interactive analytics makes interpreting data easier 

Interactive analytics makes businesses less reliant on outside analysts by making data easier to understand for non-technical users, enabling them to run complex queries through stored data in a fast, intuitive, and visual way. Making data more accessible to a larger pool of employees means your business can gain more actionable insights faster. 

Scuba Analytics offers the tools to get your business there. We can help you freely and iteratively explore your data to understand the why behind the what, to discover unexpected patterns that can inspire new ideas, and discover emergent behaviors and trends. See how Scuba does interactive analytics here.