ThoughtSpot Reviews

I use ThoughtSpot as one of the visualization tools. I mainly create some live boards and provide access to the data sources and worksheets to users so they can create their own analyses and answers as required.

The tool is user-friendly for the end users. It is primarily a search-based tool. Users do not need a technical background to work directly on the dataset. 

Its compatibility with most databases, including the latest from FlexMovely and Redshift, allows users to create joins and worksheets easily. ThoughtSpot is fast, even with one to ten terabytes of data.

I use ThoughtSpot for our BI internal use cases at Zoomin software. I mainly developed models for go-to-market, HR, product teams, and customer success.

The main core of ThoughtSpot is to create models, connect data pipelines, and create business models and dashboards on top of them. I often use connections to external systems like syncing information with Salesforce or exporting data to spreadsheets. I started to review the AI capabilities of ThoughtSpot but terminated my work with it due to our company's acquisition by Salesforce.

I have been using ThoughtSpot for various purposes. In the past, I used it for contract management with a healthcare company and workforce management to ensure proper staffing for call centers based on product changes. 

Currently, I'm using it for business and sales, working with Salesforce data, and managing our clients. It's primarily for internal operations.

ThoughtSpot excels in being self-service oriented, allowing users who aren't developers to easily create their own reports and visualizations, making it very intuitive. The alerting system and security enablement for both internal and external customers are very good. The self-service analytics capabilities are unrivaled, making it a top-notch solution. It has greatly improved time savings and business sales by facilitating targeted marketing approaches.

The solution is used primarily for three things. One is for internal operations such as operational reporting, and business intelligence. The second is self-service BI, where people can create their own reports and do their own analytics. The third is we completely whitelist the product and serve it to our customers. We embed it into our other applications, so it looks like a Verisk application and we even have our customers doing self-service analytics, as well.

The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box. Of course, there's data modeling needed, and things like that, but I can throw it at a set, and I can get up and running in a matter of hours. If a new group comes to me and says, "Hey, I've heard about ThoughtSpot. I have some data and I want to be able to do some analytics, do some profiling, do some BI against it." In a couple of hours, I connect to their source and I just do it. Now for a production product, we have to model and perform it over time, but at least I can get people up and running extremely fast with a tool that's intuitive and easy to use.

To help the business with the latest metrics, KPIs, and important insights, we source our data from various data sources into one golden source. Then we push the data to ThoughtSpot and create worksheets and visualize the data in ThoughtSpot in such a way that it is easy for the business to consume. So they see the metrics that they want to seeto drive insights out of the data to make meaningful insights. 

In addition, our business users and sales representatives who are not exactly technical people use ThoughtSpot to easily move around and help themselves with the data available through simple queries. They can also create a small pin board to extract data in an Excel format that they can then use for their PowerPoint presentations or other purposes. With just a simple query they can find out things like what the revenue earned by a certain client for this month was or what the highest-selling product for this period of time was.

ThoughtSpot is like a beautiful melding of Google's search engine and Pinterest's pin feature. It is very easy to go to the ThoughtSpot search bar and then search by not only a field name, but also by a data element. For example, I can say what was the highest revenue earning client this month or which product that I sold brought in the highest revenue? These simple searches are very valuable. You can then pin those searches to your pin board and then create a pin board of your most important KPIs that you'll be visiting very often.

Those features are very useful for our end users. 

I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins. 

Additionally, when I add a pin, it goes to the bottom of the screen and I have to drag it all the way to where I want it. So I would like to have a little more flexibility in that. I would also like to have a larger color pallet. A simplistic look is important to me.

I would be happy to see automatic emails for when volume falls below a certain threshold. Right now, I'm sending those out by hand. This would be a wonderful feature to have and I think they are rolling it out in the next version.

We want to allow various product teams to do self-service analytics with product utilization data showing what users are doing with the products.

We invested much effort into providing a feature in a product that the user said they needed in a particular region. When the product owner checked the usage of that feature in ThoughtSpot, they found that the customers had not even adopted the version of the product with that feature in it. 

With that knowledge, they could work with those customers to understand what was happening. Maybe they didn't know the feature they requested was in the product, or was there another reason they did not adopt the feature? It allowed the product owner to follow up with the customer on product adoption.