The Best of Both Worlds: The Benefits of CRMA and Tableau Together

It used to be that when you went to a restaurant, you would order a meal with a single protein. You would either get a steak or you would get seafood. Then people got hip to being able to not just do one or the other, but both. Thus, surf-and-turf was born.

This either-or thinking isn’t just in the culinary world. It is present in the business world too. For instance, many companies opt to use Customer Relation Management Analytics (CRMA) or Tableau. It is easy to see why. The two platforms overlap in a variety of ways. But, just like a juicy lobster tail and a perfectly cooked ribeye, the two are better together. 

The Menu

The main difference between Tableau and CRMA is that anybody can use Tableau whereas CRMA is strictly for Salesforce users. So, you may be inclined to think that one or the other will do the trick, and they might. But there are some key benefits of having both, most notably you get the best of both platforms simultaneously. 

CRMA injects more granular detail into Salesforce. This level of insight allows the user to better understand the full picture. Syncing with external data allows you to know what happened and why it happened. Einstein Predictions allow you to understand what may happen as well as what to do about it. All this is embedded in your Salesforce workflow and becomes actionable.

Further, CRMA has myriad templates to craft just about any query for Salesforce users. 

Meanwhile, Tableau offers business-wide visualization of your data and analytics. This is available to any user and deployable from anywhere. Using Tableau can augment your sales and support teams, to name a few.

A Perfect Pairing

Although CRMA and Tableau can perform many of the same tasks, it doesn’t mean they perform each task equally. When you use them in tandem, you can use each of them for what they do well. A tool that is capable of performing a task doesn’t mean it is ideally suited to that task. You could, for instance, use a paring knife to julienne carrots and a chef’s knife to peel the carrots, but if you have both, why not make the best use of each?

Both platforms can embed analytics on dashboards, and both can offer analytics across your company. But it is better to use CRMA for the former and Tableau for the latter. Using both softwares allows you to leverage the best tool for flexible and scalable analysis—CRMA within Salesforce and Tableau externally — giving you wall-to-wall actionable capabilities.

The Sommelier

As with anything that has lots of sophistication, deploying both CRMA and Tableau to make the best use of both software’s capabilities requires attention to detail. An experienced partner can help set up permissions, clean and consolidate your data, handle bulk file uploads and more.

You simply tell a partner your business challenge, and a partner figures out the data set that will drive the behavior that will solve that challenge. A partner can scale out predictions to all corners of your company and create multiple datasets driving different results and predictions.

Both CRMA and Tableau are useful solutions. Each has its function, and they can be used separately or together. A partner can guide you to the best option as to how to invest in your data, driving the results you want how you want them. 

Let a partner act as your sommelier, guiding you to the right combination to delight your palate—that perfect surf-and-turf. Let our experienced team show you the benefits of CRMA and Tableau together.