Create CRM Analytics Apps

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Understand the iterative lifecycle of a prebuilt CRM Analytics app.
Create CRM Analytics prebuilt apps.
Understand how to use the configuration wizard to create apps.
Reschedule the app to refresh its data at a time outside normal business hours.

The App Lifecycle

Now that you have your special CRM Analytics enabled Developer Edition org, you can configure and create a prebuilt CRM Analytics app. In this case, you use Sales Analytics, but the same principles and techniques apply to the other prebuilt CRM Analytics apps.

Your worldwide sales manager, Laura Garza, is anxious to get the app. She needs to prepare for a big meeting with her boss, the CEO of DTC Electronics. The CEO is meeting with Laura and her team for a celebratory lunch for exceeding their targets last quarter. But first, Laura wants to see how the current quarter looks. And you’re happy to help because now it’s time for the fun part—creating a CRM Analytics app.

The process of creating an app is easy. Prebuilt apps usually include a handy configuration wizard. Some, like the Sales Analytics app, come with a one-click basic option. This option creates an app using the default answers to the wizard questions–the settings most likely to give the answers you need, especially if you have a standard Salesforce implementation.

When you use the wizard, you answer questions about your data. Your answers tell CRM Analytics how to present data in the dashboards it creates for your app. You can also create apps with different settings until you get one that works just the way you want—without expensive developer or data scientist resources.

To realize the full benefits of an app, most people go through a process like this:

Create the app using the default answers in the wizard or, where available, the basic option to see what it looks like. Some apps require you to answer questions where defaults haven’t been pre-selected.
Check out the app and notice possible improvements.
Create the app again, choosing answers to the wizard questions more deliberately. With Sales Analytics and other apps with a basic option, select the custom option to use the wizard.
Show the app around, get ideas for how it could be improved, and then use the wizard to create another version of the app.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the app is just right.
Dig into the app. You quickly notice you can change dashboards by selecting different filter options. You can personalize dashboards with a few routine data security customizations using CRM Analytics platform functionality. You can also augment dashboards by adding actions or changing label names and colors.

After creating a few CRM Analytics apps, you learn how to quickly home in on the results you want. With that in mind, it’s time to jump in and create your first app.

Create Your First App

Sales Analytics includes a basic creation option—recommended for first-time users. You use that here as it makes app creation fast and easy. If you want, start your timer and see just how fast it goes.

Be sure to select Sales Analytics and not another template. Otherwise, you may not be able to create an app.

In your Developer Edition org, open CRM Analytics. From the App Launcher ( ), find and select Analytics Studio. Make a mental note of this step: Throughout CRM Analytics modules, you have to navigate to CRM Analytics and CRM Analytics apps; this is how to do it on the desktop.

The first time you open Analytics Studio, the Welcome screen appears, offering resources to help you get started. You can dismiss it now and open it again anytime from the Help menu. Click the question mark in the upper right to open the menu.

Click the question mark to open the Analytics Studio Help menu

Then select Welcome to CRM Analytics.

On the CRM Analytics home page, click the Create button and select App.

The app button in the create option dropdown

You see that there are lots of templates to choose from. Remember to come back later and browse through them to see all the apps you can create—many will help your business. For now, type Sales Analytics in the search and select the template.
Click Continue. This opens the app’s preview page, which gives you an idea of what you can expect to see in the app you create. Scroll through it to see what the finished app contains, including preview images of all its dashboards.
Click Continue. This runs a compatibility check to ensure your org has all the data to create the app. Your special Developer Edition org has all the right data. (When you create Sales Analytics in your organization’s org, you might see messages from this check with instructions on how to fix any issues.) Click Looks good, next, and move ahead.
You see two options: Basic, which creates the app using the default settings, and Custom, which lets you choose settings. Select Basic as you’re creating your first app to see how it goes. Later in this unit, you see how to create the app using the Custom option and the configuration wizard.
Click Looks good, next, and give your app a name. Call it “My First Analytics App”. Don't worry about the select log level option for the moment. Simply click Create and let the magic begin. This starts another check, this time in the background. Your Developer Edition org passes the check with flying colors and starts creating the app, which can take a few minutes. (Remember that in your organization’s org you might see messages along with information about how to fix any issues.)

How easy was that? Just a few clicks, and the Sales Analytics goes to work. CRM Analytics also makes it easy to revise configuration settings: the next time you create an app, it gives you the option to use the settings from an existing app to populate the wizard answers.

When the app completes creation, you receive an email.

Optional: Refresh CRM Analytics Data with the Trailhead Data Manager

While CRM Analytics creates your app, now’s the perfect time to meet the Trailhead Data Manager (not to be confused with the Data Manager feature of CRM Analytics), a tool built specifically for Trailhead. Why? In real life, your organization’s org is a bustling, ever-changing world. Your Developer Edition org is a fantastic playground, but it's pretty static: just a couple of users, no real activity, and data that grows staler with each passing day. The Trailhead Data Manager tool helps keep your data fresh and feel a little more like a real business.

If any of the dashboards are missing data, you may need to refresh your data. Your org comes loaded with data—opportunities, accounts, activities, and so on. This step wipes old data and creates a fresh set of up-to-date data, with dates relative to today. Sales Analytics looks at relative date ranges, such as “this quarter” or “last month,” so your dashboards might be empty without running this step. Run this step anytime you've been away from Trailhead for a while.

Be sure CRM Analytics finishes creating your app and you can see dashboards before running the Trailhead Data Manager.

Here’s what to do:

From App Launcher, open Analytics Studio.
On the For You panel, you can see your Analytics assets—app, dashboards, datasets, and lenses.
Click My First Analytics App—the app you just started to create. If your app is still being created, it isn't ready for the Trailhead Data Manager. Wait a few minutes and refresh your browser until the window contains dashboards and datasets. Now, you’re ready to run the Trailhead Data Manager.

Also, you only need to use the Trailhead Data Manager in Trailhead. You don’t have to use it to set up Sales Analytics in your organization’s org.

Make sure you’re in Analytics Studio. From the App Launcher in the upper right, select Trailhead Data Manager. If you don’t see it right away, scroll down a bit.

Trailhead Data Manager in the App Launcher dropdown from the upper right of Analytic Studio

Select the Trailhead Data Manager tab and click Refresh DTC Data.

The Refresh DTC Data option

When you run this step, you delete and restore the data with fresh dates. Other than the new dates, the records stay the same. However, if you manually change a record, that change is overridden.

Schedule Your App to Refresh

Great work! With the app complete, you now look at how to sync the data and refresh your app's datasets by scheduling your app to refresh. When you've created an app, the data assets used by that app must be refreshed to provide the most up-to-date insights for everyone who uses the app.

Here’s what to do:

Go to Setup and in the Quick Find box, enter App Install History, then select App Install History.
Find the My First Analytics App.
To the right of the app, click. This menu lets you immediately refresh your app or schedule a daily refresh.
To schedule your app refresh, click Schedule. This opens the Schedule App window. In your organization’s org, you schedule the app to run outside normal business hours when nobody is working.
Select the time of day and days of the week to run the app refresh and click Save.

Your App Is Ready

You have your first CRM Analytics app. Now you can see what all the excitement is about.

Go back to Analytics Studio by opening it from the App Launcher ( ).
Look for My First Analytics App in the For You section. Click the app, and you’re taken to a page showing all the app’s assets, including dashboards, lenses, and datasets. Remember this page: If you and your team want to customize your experience, you typically start here.
Click Run App at the upper right, and the app’s home dashboard displays, where you can see top-level KPIs. Scroll down to see a list and descriptions of all the other dashboards.

My first Wave app

You can learn more about Sales Analytics dashboards in the Sales Analytics module. For now, take a quick look at one of the dashboards.

Scroll to find the Team Benchmark dashboard, and click to open it.
As its name suggests, the dashboard shows the sales team's performance over a given period. To see how dashboards work, change the Time Period filter at the top right from This Quarter to Current Fiscal Year.

Team Benchmark dashboard with Time Period menu

If the dashboards in your Developer Edition org look a little different from the images in this Trailhead, don’t worry. There can be discrepancies in data from one org instance to the next.

At a glance, you can see how much business each team member has created for the period. This dashboard is a great example of charts and filtered data tables that give immediate insights into your data. From here, you can quickly drill in for more detail. Or, click the home button App home button in the upper left to return to the home page. Laura’s going to love it.

Your app’s just been born, and you’re already seeing a lot. Imagine what can happen as you get further into its lifecycle by going through the app creation process again, this time customizing the app by answering the wizard questions.

It’s a Wizard, But It’s Not Magic

You created your first app using the basic option and the standard app settings. When you create an app—whether it’s Sales Analytics or another—you can use the custom option to choose the app settings.

To see how this works in the Sales Analytics app:

Go to Analytics Studio, click Create, and select App.
Select Sales Analytics, click Continue, and then click Continue again.
Select Create a brand new app and click Continue. After the compatibility check runs, click Looks good, next.
Select Custom and click Looks good, next to open the wizard’s first page.
Take a short trip through the wizard by clicking Looks good, next (or Back, if you want) on the next few screens. When you reach the screen where you can name your app, close it by clicking the X in the upper right corner. Don’t create another app just yet.

It might look complicated the first time through, but following these simple rules makes using a wizard easy.

Read through the questions before you answer any of them. Slowing down and getting a good idea of what information you need to provide is helpful. Look at the menus containing possible answers and explanations, too. The wizard lets you move forward and backward through the questions.
When in doubt, go with the defaults. As apps are intended to deliver value right away, the preselected answers to the questions should result in a useful app. With some apps, all the questions don’t have preselected answers. In those cases, CRM Analytics reminds you to make a selection.
The wizard only lets you fine-tune your analytics experience. Wizard settings let you change certain parts of dashboards, such as filters and the fields apps use to calculate KPIs. But you can’t control the layout or most app content: most app elements are predetermined to give you a useful experience right out of the box.
You can only choose a field once. The wizard asks you to select fields from standard Salesforce objects, and you can choose a field on each object only once. This includes standard Salesforce fields and any custom fields you’ve set up on an object.
Only some answers make sense given the question’s context. While wizard questions may let you choose from many fields, only some work for your app. For example, sorting accounts by Photo URL simply doesn’t make sense.

Until you get the hang of them, go slowly. At first, change an answer or two. Then, you can see exactly what each change does.

Congratulations

You’ve accomplished a lot.

You’ve seen how easy creating a prebuilt CRM Analytics app is. Along the way, you’ve seen a couple of prebuilt dashboards and how they show you the state of your business with visual summaries created with minimal setup on your part. You’ve also seen how to schedule your app to keep the data fresh. And you’ve learned about the configuration wizard.

Even though there’s more to learn, now you know enough to create any prebuilt CRM Analytics app and experiment further yourself. As you can see, it goes fast, and if you make mistakes, you can quickly recover.

In the next unit, you take care of some admin tasks and share your app.

Resources