What makes white-label business intelligence different from traditional BI?

Over the last decade, business intelligence (BI) has transformed the way that businesses make decisions, using all the available data about a company to derive insights into business performance.

These insights are typically displayed in visualizations that are interpreted and used to make the best decisions for a business, to boost performance in everything from marketing to sales, operations, and employee performance.
 

 

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence, defined by Gartner as “the applications, infrastructure, tools, and best practices that enable access to–-and analysis of–-information to improve and optimize decisions and performance,” enables businesses to make the most out of data, allowing it to be transformed into decisions that guide action within a company.

Today, more data is produced than ever before, including big data–-large datasets which are continuously gathered and, as a result, unable to be analyzed using traditional methods of data analysis.

Business intelligence tools enable all data relevant to a business to be gathered from an array of different sources, including CRMs, sensors, software, databases, and more, and aggregated into a singular location. From here, the data can be analyzed for trends and patterns.

Using business intelligence tools such as dashboards, findings from data can be displayed in visualizations such as charts and graphs, from which users can interpret easy-to-digest insights.

These visualizations typically show the performance of a particular aspect of the company–or an overview of the overall performance of the business.

This allows individuals such as managers and C-suite executives to make data-driven decisions based on these insights, eliminating guesswork from the decision-making process.
 

What is white-label business intelligence?

A common gripe with traditional business intelligence tools is that they aren’t cohesive with the branding of the company employing the tool. Often, users have to navigate away from their workflow to a third-party analytics provider in order to use the BI tool, presenting a user experience that is entirely different to the rest of the product/system.

In response to this, white-label business intelligence was born, resulting in business intelligence solutions that could be customized to match the branding and experience provided by the rest of a business’s system or product.
 

How does white-label business intelligence differ from traditional BI?

There are a few critical differences between regular business intelligence tools and white-label business intelligence tools.

Many of these differences reflect the benefits of building your own business intelligence tool in-house–without the extra resources and effort required to actually do so.

With that being said, here are the top five major benefits of white-label business intelligence:

It can be embedded within systems/products

When using a traditional business intelligence tool, users will typically have to navigate away from their workflow and onto a third-party platform or software in order to use the BI tool.

With white-label business intelligence, the business intelligence feature can be embedded within a business’s systems or within products that companies offer to their customers.

This gives the appearance that the feature is a part of the core product system–rather than an external tool working independently of the product and supplied by an external provider.

It can be imbued with a company’s branding

The primary benefit of employing white-label business intelligence compared to a traditional BI tool is that you can customize the tool to reflect the branding of your company, including adding your company logo and changing the colors of the tool.

However, the best white-label business intelligence tools can be customized well beyond this basic level, allowing you to create custom themes that will guide the aesthetic of the BI feature. Some white-label business intelligence providers even allow you to upload your company’s CSS stylesheets, enabling you to instantly transform the appearance of the white-label BI tool to match your brand’s aesthetic.

Being able to permeate your business intelligence tool with your company’s branding is essential for a number of reasons:

1. It promotes trust

When using a traditional business intelligence tool–where the end-user (oftentimes, a customer or client of your business) navigates away to a tool clearly developed by a third-party provider–it can decrease trust in your business’ abilities and competency, especially with regards to tech.

This is because, when it’s obvious you’re using a third-party BI provider, it suggests you don’t have the tech capabilities in-house to develop your own tool.

On the other hand, using a white-label business intelligence tool enables you to reap the competitive benefits of using a tool built in-house–without directing a huge amount of time and resources into building your own BI tool from the ground up.

2. It enhances brand memorability

The more components of your business’s offering that are customized with its branding, the more your customers are exposed to the brand, improving brand recognition and awareness–as well as associating your brand with stellar business intelligence (even if your business didn’t develop the BI tool itself).

Cultivating a memorable brand is crucial so that customers who’ve become familiar with your brand can recall it when they want to make a purchase or use your product. Similarly, it’s important for customers who use your product to be able to recall your brand–in order to be able to recommend it to others.
 

3. It can generate top-of-mind awareness

Successful branding cultivates a cohesive, consistent, and memorable brand identity that pervades the experience and products offered by your business.

When your brand does this better than its competitors–and offers the highest quality product or service–it can generate what’s referred to as ‘top-of-mind awareness’.

Top-of-mind awareness goes a step beyond recognizability and brand awareness. It establishes your business as the first brand that people think of when they recall a particular type of product or service, establishing your business as the representative for that particular niche.

This means that your brand will be a customer’s first port of call when they need that particular product.

The user interface can be customized

In addition to being able to add basic aesthetic branding elements–such as your company logo or brand colors–to the white-label business intelligence tool, stellar white-label business intelligence providers usually present the option to customize the user interface to better match the function of the rest of your product or system.

Because white-label business intelligence can be customized in this way, it’s easier for end-users to navigate, as the feel and function of the business intelligence feature will match that of the rest of your product, making it easier to use.

It allows third-party involvement to be masked

As a result of being able to be customized with a company’s branding–-and the fact that the BI tool can be embedded seamlessly into systems or products–-white-label business intelligence can conceal third-party involvement–and appear as though it was built completely in-house.

This is a benefit that white-label business intelligence has over traditional BI tools because-–in addition to looking and feeling like the rest of a product, making it feel more comfortable to use-–it says good things about the tech capabilities of your company, suggesting to customers that your business was able to build a stellar business intelligence feature without external help.

In essence, businesses can reap the reputational benefits of building a business intelligence tool in-house–without having to spend a vast amount of time and resources to do so.

It can be tailored for specific end-users

A number of white-label business intelligence providers offer ‘sub-branding’ in addition to the more rudimentary branding capabilities. This allows businesses to customize dashboards and reporting features according to who’s looking at/using them.

This enables businesses to customize the appearance and function to make the tool best suited to each type of end-user, making it easier and more efficient to use.

White-label business intelligence can be customized to best suit the needs of a particular type of user, resulting in a personalized experience that makes the end-user feel as though their needs as an individual are being catered to.