This is a guest post by Preet Jassi from Alexa Smart Properties.
Alexa Smart Properties (ASP) is powered by a set of technologies that property owners, property managers, and third-party solution providers can use to deploy and manage Alexa-enabled devices at scale. Alexa can simplify tasks like playing music, controlling lights, or communicating with on-site staff. Our team got its start by building products for hospitality and residential properties, but we have since expanded our products to serve senior living and healthcare properties.
With Alexa now available in hotels, hospitals, senior living homes, and other facilities, we hear stories from our customers every day about how much they love Alexa. Everything from helping veterans with visual impairments gain access to information, to enabling a senior living home resident who had fallen and sustained an injury to immediately alert staff. It’s a great feeling when you can say, “The product I work on every day makes a difference in people’s lives!”
Our team builds the software that leading hospitality, healthcare, and senior living facilities use to manage Alexa devices in their properties. We partner directly with organizations that manage their own properties as well as third-party solution providers to provide comprehensive strategy and deployment support for Alexa devices and skills, making sure that they are ready for end-user customers. Our primary goal is to create value for properties through improved customer satisfaction, cost savings, and incremental revenue. We wanted a way to measure that impact in a fast, efficient, easily accessible way from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.
After we had established what capabilities we needed to close our analytics gap, we got in touch with the Amazon QuickSight team to help. In this post, we discuss our requirements and why Amazon QuickSight Embedded was the right fit for what we needed.
Telling the ROI story with data
As a business-to-business-to-consumer product, our team serves the needs of two customers: the end-users who enjoy Alexa-enabled devices at the properties, and the property managers or solution providers that manage the Alexa deployment. We needed to prove to the latter group of customers that deploying Alexa would not only help them delight their customers, but save money as well.
We had the data necessary to tell that ROI story, but we needed an analytics solution that would allow us to provide insights that can be communicated to leadership.
These were our requirements:
- Embeddable dashboards – We wanted to embed analytics into our Alexa Smart Properties management console, used by both enterprise customers and solution providers. With QuickSight, dashboards are embedded for aggregated Alexa usage analytics.
- Easy access to insights – We wanted a tool that was accessible to all of our customers, whether they had a technical background or not. QuickSight provides a beautiful, user-friendly user interface (UI) that our customers can use to interpret their data and analytics.
- Customizable and rich visuals – Our customers needed to be able to dive deep. QuickSight allows you to drill down into the data to easily create and change whatever visuals you need. Our customers love the look of the visuals and how easy it is to share them with their customers.
Analytics drive engagement
With QuickSight, we can now show detailed device usage information, including quantity and frequency, with insights that connect the dots between that engagement and cost savings. For example, property managers can look at total dialog counts to determine that their guests are using Alexa often, which validates their investment.
The following screenshots show an example of the dashboard our solution providers can access, which they can use to send reports to staff at the properties they serve.
The following screenshots show an example of the Communications tab, which shows how properties use communications features to save costs (both in terms of time and equipment). Customers save time and money on protective equipment by using Alexa’s remote communication features, which enable caretakers to virtually check in on patients instead of visiting a property in person. These metrics help our customers calculate the cost savings from using Alexa.
In the last year, the Analytics page in our management console has had over 20,000 page views from customers who are accessing the data and insights there to understand the impact Alexa has had on their businesses.
Insights validate investment
With QuickSight embedded dashboards, our direct-property customers and solution providers now have an easy-to-understand visual representation of how Alexa is making a difference for the guests and patients at each property. Embedded dashboards simplify the viewing, analyzing, and insight gathering for key usage metrics that help both enterprise property owners and solution providers connect the dots between Alexa’s use and money saved. Because we use Amazon Redshift to house our data, QuickSight’s seamless integration made it a fantastic choice.
Going forward, we plan to expand and improve upon the analytics foundation we’ve built with QuickSight by providing programmatic access to data—for example, a CSV file that can be sent to a customer’s Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket—as well as adding more data to our dashboards, thereby creating new opportunities for deeper insights.
To learn more about how you can embed customized data visuals, interactive dashboards, and natural language querying into any application, visit Amazon QuickSight Embedded.
About the Author
Preet Jassi is a Principal Product Manager Technical with Alexa Smart Properties. Preet fell in love with technology in Grade 5 where he built his first website for his elementary school. Prior to completing his MBA at Cornell, Preet was a UI Team Lead with over 6 years of experience as a software engineer post BSc. Preet’s passion is combining his love of technology (specifically analytics and artificial intelligence), with design, and business strategy to build products that customers love, spending time with family, and keeping active. He currently manages the Developer Experience for Alexa Smart Properties focusing on making it quick and easy to deploy Alexa devices in properties and he loves hearing quotes from end customers on how Alexa has changed their lives.
