The Tableau for CRM Partner Summit was February 9-10th — a two-day summit that focused on upcoming releases for Tableau CRM and highlighted the roadmap as well. As a Salesforce partner, the Atrium team uses this summit to help our consultants stay up to date on the future of Tableau CRM. We apply this knowledge to what we know of our customers’ needs and roadmaps to help build better systems of intelligence for them. Here is a roundup of some key highlights from the event.
Tyler Pollard on Tooltips
The Spring ‘21 release of Tableau CRM brings us the capability to use custom text and charts in the tooltips for number widgets. Dashboard users may now hover over a KPI to uncover its definition or access an important link. Additionally, businesses can use the feature to expose the trends and categorical breakdowns of a certain KPI without cluttering a user’s view. The enhanced tooltips allow Tableau CRM users to create dashboards that are more interactive and more dynamic than ever before.
Katie Toyoshima on Components
At the beginning of Day 1, Tableau CRM demonstrated the functionalities of their new components. Components have all of the same widgets and capabilities that we’ve come to know and love in dashboards, but they also make changes and delivery of dashboards easier by leveraging the ability to make universal edits on a component that’s being used across multiple dashboards. Just like dashboards, components allow for 20 separate tabs, but by using them, Tableau CRM users will have the ability to reduce the number of tabs in their dashboards or even condense linked dashboards into one consolidated dashboard.
Gabbi Forsythe on Data Prep
Recipes, Dataflow Builder, and Dataset Builder are three separate ways to prepare data in Tableau CRM. In future releases, these tools will be replaced with Data Prep, AKA the “Swiss army knife” of data preparation. Building off much of the existing functionality of recipes, Data Prep brings new and improved windowing functions and data joins, allowing users to rollup data at different levels of granularity.
Data Prep will allow for the ability to annotate nodes, as well as providing improved data preview options, adding clarity and insight into the data preparation process. Additionally, the ability to upgrade dataflows to the next-generation Data Prep will ease adoption for customers currently using dataflows.
Connectors
Salesforce is enabling customers more connectivity options in future releases with more connections to external systems. These include a Sync Out connector for Snowflake and output connectors for both external Salesforce orgs and Tableau’s Hyper data engine. The Sync Out connector will give Tableau for CRM customers the ability to write data directly from Salesforce objects to Snowflake tables on a scheduled basis. This eliminates the need for expensive and complex middleware, allowing customers to build their data warehouse faster.
A Focus on Enabling Data Agility
Salesforce continues to invest and grow Tableau CRM. As presented, the focus has shifted simply from visualizations into enabling better integration with external data sources. This commitment to sharing data enables customers to expand and enhance their data agility, which is critical for success when it comes to analytics and machine learning.
Next, watch our on-demand webinar 5 Steps to Get You Started with Your Tableau CRM Journey.
