Veeva Offers Cross-Stack Customer Insights
Veeva Systems earlier this week announced Veeva CRM MyInsights, a new cloud-based data visualization capability producing tailored insights within Veeva CRM.
MyInsights lets users of tablets or other mobile devices access, analyze and visualize information in real time.
It includes fixed reporting for sales and activity data (formerly known as “Insights”) and a new, customizable HTML5/JavaScript framework.
Twenty companies have signed for Veeva’s MyInsights Certification Program, which provides prebuilt dashboards and custom data visualizations.
The growing library of Veeva CRM MyInsights dashboards includes order management, accounts, territories, KOL (key opinion leader) profiles and account planning.
“Veeva offers CRM for the pharmaceutical industry, which is highly regulated,” noted Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research.
“You have to keep meticulous records,” he told CRM Buyer.
“The analytic part of it makes perfect sense to me, since the software captures so much data that it should be pretty easy to figure out your next actions based on the rules of engagement and the data you collected about a particular individual,” Pombriant explained. “It’s a good move.”
What MyInsights Users Can Do
Field teams typically access data in separate tools, then aggregate and analyze it. Veeva CRM Insights makes the right insights — in the context of their daily planning and execution — accessible on a tablet or mobile device.
For example, a MyInsights pre-call planning dashboard brings together all the relevant data needed for the call.
Customer data is updated in real time and it is always available in MyInsights without the need for manual syncing or extraction, Veeva said.
“Most analytic solutions provide the ability to aggregate outside data,” noted R. “Ray” Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“As we enter a world of access vs. ownership, this capability is table stakes,” he told CRM Buyer.
Veeva offers clinical, regulatory, quaity, medical and commercial solutions.
Its more than 500 customers range from the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms to emerging biotechs.
Veeva is “one of the top players” in the pharmaceutical and life sciences vertical market, Wang said.
Looking at MyInsights
Veeva “was a pioneer both in delivering apps on the Salesforce platform and providing cloud solutions for life sciences, which has remained its focus,” observed Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.
It’s not clear how much MyInsights is driven or supported by Salesforce’s
Einstein AI, she told CRM Buyer, but “all the leading vendors in this space are investing in data visualizing, embedded, analytics, and areas like AI and machine learning to help users make more data-driven decisions.”
Veeva has “focused both its core CRM investment and the development of complementary apps such as Veeva Vault on the life sciences,” and that’s one of its strengths, Wettemann remarked.
The MyInsights Impact
Self-service business intelligence and reporting is “one of the top three requests of analytical users in every Constellation Research survey,” Wang observed. “This is a very much on-demand feature that Veeva customers have been asking for.”
Many organizations use Tablu or Qlik to get that business intelligence and reporting, he pointed out, but “what Veeva’s doing allows folks to not have to worry about another integration, and enables self-service cloud analytics.”
The MyInsights Need
CRM continues to be a very competitive market, Nucleus Research’s CRM Value Matrix 1H 2017 suggests.
“To stay ahead of the competition, Veeva will need to make predictive and prescriptive analytical insights — not just the ability to visualize and understand data — more part of its story,” Wettemann suggested.
Veeva may lose the advantage of being able to leverage Salesforce’s cloud platform capabilities, she said, because “Quintiles’ recent announcement means, in theory, that Veeva is no longer the only game in town delivering on the Salesforce platform and reaping those benefits.”
Quintiles last month signed a five-year contract
to use Salesforce’s platform for CRM and other functions.
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.