What to consider when choosing a white-label business intelligence tool
Business intelligence (BI) enables businesses to optimize decision-making through the analysis of data—collected from a variety of different sources, such as CRMs, sensors, softwares and more—to improve business functions from marketing to operations.
In such a competitive market, businesses can no longer expect to make decisions based on guesswork. Business intelligence eliminates these unknowns through advanced analysis and visualizations, enabling business leaders to make the best data-driven decisions for their organization.
However, a common criticism of many business intelligence tools is that they don’t integrate as seamlessly with business systems as many companies would like. Instead, users usually have to navigate away from their workflow to use the business intelligence solution and the user experience doesn’t look or feel like the company’s own UI.
White-label business intelligence tools provide a solution to combat this criticism.
What is white-label business intelligence?
As a branch of embedded analytics, white label business intelligence comprises BI solutions that are able to be customized with a business’ branding and replicate its look, feel, and function.
As a result, the end-user shouldn’t be unable to tell that a third-party business intelligence provider has been used to supply the BI solution.
There are a myriad of benefits of white-label business intelligence tools: they can help with branding, increase your clients’ trust in your tech capabilities and improve the efficiency of workflows in your company.
Not to mention, they’re typically more cost-effective and less time-consuming than building your own BI tool in-house, which would offer the same benefits as a white-label business intelligence solution.
However, the extent to which a white-label business intelligence tool can provide these benefits largely depends on the provider you choose. Knowing what to look for is essential to ensuring that you get the most from your white-label business intelligence tool, without overspending.
With that being said, here are seven things to consider when choosing white-label business intelligence tool for your business.
1. Ability to integrate
You might be thinking: how can I tell if a solution integrates well into our systems without first using the tool?
Well, a good indicator of how well you’ll be able to embed a white-label business intelligence solution within your systems is if it’s built for the purpose of embedding.
If the BI provider you’re considering only developed an embedded analytics/white-label functionality after building the main BI solution, then it’s likely that it won’t integrate as well as a solution that was designed to be integrated with business’ systems and workflows from the initial concept.
In addition, you should be looking for solutions that support chart and visualization embedding and can integrate with all the apps and softwares you use.
Another important component of not just a white-label business intelligence tool, but any business intelligence solution is that it’s compatible with your data sources. These may include cloud storage systems or on-premises databases.
By being able to integrate your data sources, the end-user has access to the full picture of performance provided by the data, without missing key insights as a result of poor integration.
2. Customizability
A cornerstone of white-label business intelligence tools is their ability to be molded to reflect the branding and feel of your business.
However, a number of so-called white-label business intelligence solutions only offer the bare minimum in terms of customizability. With these solutions, you may only be able to add your logo and change the colors to match those of your company, but little else.
However, a white-label business intelligence solution worthy of its name will allow you to add your logo, change the colors, change chart aesthetics, and provide a host of other options for you to make your business intelligence tool yours.
In fact, some of the best white-label business intelligence tools will allow you to customize the entire interface with your CSS stylesheets and even present the option to create custom themes, which the look of the entire business intelligence solution will take on, helping to permeate the white-label business intelligence tool with your branding.
3. Security
Since white-label business intelligence solutions integrate with your own systems, their security becomes your security.
As such, it’s crucial that you find a white-label business intelligence provider with stellar security—to protect your data, your business, and your clients. You should make sure that whatever white-label business intelligence provider you use is compatible with your system security model.
Cloud-based white-label business intelligence providers—as opposed to on-premises BI solutions—generally provide greater security than your in-house servers.
Moreover, another security feature you may want to prioritize is the ability to customize access for different users, providing different levels of access depending on who’s using the white-label business intelligence tool.
4. Scalability
A critical—yet often undervalued—factor that should influence your choice of white label business intelligence provider is how the solution will react to your business scaling up or down.
For example, as your business grows, is your chosen BI tool going to be able to cope with the increase in data or users?
Does the solution offer a pricing framework in which you pay for what you use when you need it, or are you forced to pay for the full solution with all its features straight away? Can you easily add modules as you scale without skyrocketing the price?
Being able to upscale—and downscale—easily and affordably is important so you don’t need to change the white-label business intelligence provider you use as your business grows and aren’t left with a huge, unexpected bill as your business intelligence needs change.
5. Features
Rather than providing white-labeling functionality, whichever white-label business intelligence provider you choose also has to offer the best business intelligence features for your business.
Such features include:
- Real-time (or close to) data visualizations to derive the most recent, relevant insights from your data
- A range of different chart types, including bar, pie, grids, geospatial and more
- Automated workflows, to reduce time spent sorting and aggregating data
- Drill down functionality and dashboard linking, which enables the linking of one dashboard to another URL, allowing for greater detail into data to be seen
- Extensive data filter capabilities that allow you to answer specific queries, including advanced time filters and dynamic time fields, which allow data within specific time frames to be searched for and/or compared to current data.
- Predictive analytics, which enables smart decisions to be made by using data to predict future outcomes
6. Ease of use
Part of the draw of using a white-label business intelligence solution—as opposed to building a BI tool in-house—is the fact that it frees up your resources and allows your software engineers to work on other important tasks.
With that being said, the white-label business intelligence tool you choose should be intuitive and easy to use—which you can check via the reviews of other users.
If your chosen white label business intelligence provider offers learning materials to its customers to facilitate the implementation process, that’s also a plus.
7. Pricing
When choosing a white-label business intelligence provider, something you should research thoroughly before committing is the pricing of the solution, both upfront and recurring costs.
Many providers of white-label business intelligence don’t offer full transparency on their pricing, meaning you could end up paying additional costs for things you weren’t made aware of in the beginning.
Moreover, as briefly discussed earlier, some companies start racking up the prices as you begin to scale your business.
As such, opting for a white-label business intelligence provider that has a transparent pricing plan and provides a contract for your company that details the costs of scaling clearly is a good idea to ensure you aren’t ripped off.
Similarly, you should make sure that any contract you sign doesn’t lock you into a long-term commitment that could hinder your company in the future.
