3 Sneaky Questions to Ask About Support Levels when Picking a Whitelabel or OEM Business Intelligence Vendor

Your customers won’t get the most out of your application if they’re unable to view and analyze the valuable data you collect. That’s why many SaaS companies or agencies will decide whether to build their own reporting tool or implement an embedded reporting tool. Often, companies find it’s more cost-effective to OEM or Whitelabel an embedded reporting solution. However, there are a few red flags to look for when determining which vendor to partner with for your embedded reporting solution, and one of them is vendor support. Business Intelligence vendors will work to woo you and promise the moon when they’re endeavoring to win you as a customer, but what happens once the contract ink has dried? Will you still be feeling the love and getting the support that you need?

Asking the Right Questions

Unfortunately, you’ll never fully know how much support you’ll be receiving until you actually need the support. However, there are a few questions you can ask potential embedded reporting vendors to get an idea of whether you’ll receive best-in-class support or be left to fend for yourself:

1. What type of support will you supply and do smaller organizations have access to that support? Many vendors will operate with a pay-to-play scale of supporting, providing the most support to the highest dollar value clients and relegating smaller clients to the basic customer service team. If you’re a smaller business, you’ll end up getting the short end of the support stick.
2. What influence will you have in development? When you have a request, you need to know who will provide the solution and how you will receive your answers. Will you have access to an actual customer service agent or will you be limited to an email inquiry? It’s always better to have the option to speak to a real person versus (or at least chat online with one) than sending off an email into the bypass that can be SaaS support inboxes.
3. Do your SLA’s align with our SLA’s? BI and embedded reporting relationships should operate as partnerships, because your BI vendor’s levels of service and support ultimately fall back on you in the eyes of your customers. This is why you must ensure that your vendor’s SLA’s align with your SLA’s, or you could be setting yourself up for headache and financial penalties down the road.

Yurbi’s Take on Vendor Support

Thankfully at Yurbi, we don’t engage in the pay-to-play vendor support game with our embedded reporting solutions. We believe in being true partners with our customers and we want them to be successful, and business intelligence often requires more support than simple troubleshooting. When it comes to OEM solutions specifically, there are small but important details that must be addressed that can eat up a lot of time. Technical details require developers to speak with developers, especially with user provisioning, security setup, branding, and automating actions via scripts or API’s. We also want to make sure our customers are getting the most out of Yurbi’s embedded reporting, which means questions such as “How do I make this report?” or “What’s the best way to convey this data in a scenario?” are still important questions that we’re happy to answer. So, when you’re searching for an embedded reporting solution, make sure you ask the right questions to determine whether you’ll receive the support you need when you run into issues or have questions. Want to know the other challenges that accompany embedded reporting? Check out our whitepaper, Top 5 Challenges of Embedded Reporting.