How white-label business intelligence gives companies a competitive advantage

As competition within the business world becomes more fraught than ever—particularly in the SaaS market—it’s vital for businesses to define their unique selling points and to gain every possible advantage over their competitors.

Over the last decade, business intelligence (BI) has been transformative for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Defined by Gartner as the “applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to—and analysis of—information to improve and optimize decisions and performance,” business intelligence has revolutionized the way that businesses make decisions.

In essence, business intelligence allows data to be aggregated and analyzed to determine the best decision for a company—whether in operations, marketing, sales, or any other aspect of business.

As such, it’s also become commonplace for SaaS businesses to incorporate business intelligence features as part of their core offering, either by building a business intelligence tool in-house or by working with a third-party business intelligence provider.

However, both of these BI-supplying methods have serious drawbacks: building a tool in-house takes up a huge amount of time and resources, while partnering with a BI provider may leave you with a business intelligence feature that looks and feels like it was ‘Frankensteined’ onto a product and is devoid of the company’s branding.

As an answer to these problems, white-label business intelligence was developed.

What is white-label business intelligence?

White-label business intelligence is a branch of embedded analytics in which a business intelligence tool is able to be seamlessly integrated within a pre-existing system or product.

More than this, the feature is able to be customized according to a company’s branding, including adding their logo and colors, as well as customizing the function and style of the product.

The result is that, although a third-party provider has been used to provide the business intelligence tool, the end-user isn’t able to tell by simply looking at or using the feature.

There are a number of reasons why this is beneficial for businesses, but here are just the top 5 ways white-label business intelligence gives businesses a competitive advantage.

Enhances brand identity and awareness

By being able to provide a comprehensively-branded experience across every component associated with your company, including your business intelligence tool, white-label business intelligence helps to cement a company’s brand identity in the minds of customers and stakeholders.

Traditional business intelligence tools allow businesses to use data to make the best decisions for their business and can provide a comprehensive overview of company performance.

However, while doing this, customers, stakeholders, and investors aren’t absorbing the company’s branding, with the business intelligence tool obviously being supplied by a third-party provider.

So, when they think back to the stellar business intelligence feature they used, they may not automatically associate it with the company that provided it to them.

They may even forget the branding of a company altogether since it wasn’t imbued across enough components of its offering to reinforce it in customers’ memories.

When using white-label business intelligence tools, however, companies can permeate the BI feature with their own branding, customizing the look, feel, and function of the tool to match the rest of their branding.

As a result, customers, investors, and stakeholders are left with a strong impression of the company’s brand identity and can more easily recognize—and, more importantly, recall—that brand in the future.

Done well, cultivating strong brand awareness and recognition can even result in ‘top-of-mind awareness,’ in which people think of a certain brand first when they think about a particular type of product or service.

Any necessary fixes to the software are made rapidly

One of the key benefits of white-label business intelligence, in comparison to building a branded business intelligence tool in-house, is that if something goes wrong, it’s not on you.

While this could be viewed as a disadvantage, with the reasoning that you don’t have as much control over the tool, in most cases it actually works in the favor of businesses.

This is because white-label business intelligence providers specialize in providing and maintaining the efficacy of their tools. So, ensuring the white-label business intelligence they provide is working properly is their top priority, meaning fixes are typically achieved quickly.

This also means that businesses can avoid wasting time and resources fixing a business intelligence tool built in-house, which could affect the quality of service they can provide to customers in other areas.

This could even lead to missed deadlines and unsatisfied customers, as the time businesses have to spend fixing their BI tool depletes the time available to spend on more profitable work.

However, to ensure your business acquires this benefit, you should carefully review testimonials relating to customer service and software fixes online to make sure the white-label business intelligence provider you use has a good reputation for achieving fixes quickly.

Skyrockets trust in your company’s capabilities

By imbuing a business intelligence tool with your company’s branding—and being able to customize the interface to match the feel and function of the rest of your offering—companies can conceal third-party involvement.

This conveys the perception that the advanced business intelligence features a company offers are made by themselves. This inspires trust not only in a company’s tech capabilities, but in the competency and skills that comprise the company as a whole.

Inspiring faith in your company’s competency is important for a multitude of reasons.

For one, prospective customers will be more likely to purchase a product or use their service. These customers are more likely to return to make further purchases if they fully trust a business’s tech capabilities.

More than ever, customers are concerned with security, and if they have a perception of a company’s all-round competency, they’re naturally more likely to trust that their security is just as stellar.

By conveying a reputation of tech savviness with white-label business intelligence, the subsequent faith in a business’ ability to provide equally high quality data security will encourage sales.

More than just your customers, other stakeholders and potential investors in a company are more likely to be impressed by and invest in a company if that company seems smart and competent.

Since white-label business intelligence helps improve investors’ confidence in a company, companies are more likely to secure investments that will enable their business to grow ahead of their competition.

Better quality product

The principal way in which businesses can stand out among their competitors is by having a superior product, and there are two main reasons why white-label business intelligence facilitates the development of higher quality products.

Firstly, by opting to collaborate with a white-label business intelligence provider—instead of building a business intelligence tool in-house—it frees up the time of businesses’ software engineers. This means more time can be spent developing, maintaining, and improving the core product/service.

Secondly, if the business intelligence feature is offered to customers as part of a product or package, then using a white-label business intelligence tool can improve the experience of using the feature for clients, compared to using traditional BI.

This is because high quality white-label business intelligence tools can be customized with more than just a company logo and colors.

Additionally, the complete aesthetic, feel, and function of the tool can be customized to match the rest of a product, making it simpler for end-users to navigate as a whole.

Lastly, a number of white-label business intelligence tools also allow for further customization in the form of ‘sub-branding’, whereby the tool can be customized according to the specific end user.

Essentially, this means that multiple versions of the business intelligence feature can be created to suit particular end-users.

By tailoring the experience to different types of users, white-label business intelligence personalizes the BI experience to meet individuals’ specific needs, improving their experience using the tool and making customers feel uniquely valued in the process.

Able to scale quickly

In the world of business, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. This makes being able to scale quickly essential to businesses’s success.

If a business builds a branded business intelligence solution in-house, it can cause problems when the company starts to grow.

After all, the BI tool will need to be continuously adapted and upscaled to cope with increasing numbers of users, and ramping up security will become a necessity as businesses work with bigger, more valuable clients.

Or, businesses can work with a white-label business business intelligence provider instead.

White label business intelligence tools are designed to enable easy scaling, with the white label BI providers already having the software and hardware to facilitate this, since they work with many companies of different sizes, all with different needs.

What’s more, white-label business intelligence companies usually offer a range of different subscriptions so that businesses only need to purchase what they need, keeping costs low until their needs evolve.

And, as a business’s needs grow, it’s easy to upgrade their subscription according to what their needs have become.