Customer engagement emerged as the dominant theme in the analytics discussion last week after Google Inc. unveiled a new business intelligence suite designed to help organizations gain a better understanding of their customers. The main highlight of the bundle is a dashboarding tool that makes it possible to visualize the massive amounts of demographics and advertising data a brand collects as part of its marketing efforts.

Reports created using the service will also be able to incorporate metrics from the DoubleClick Audience Center, another one of the new offerings introduced as part of Google Analytics 360. It’s a system that lets organizations pool customer data from the web, market intelligence providers and their own infrastructure to assemble a profile of every potential buyer. The information can then be fed into Google’s ad delivery algorithms to align promotions more closely with the interests of the target audience.

Zendesk Inc. believes that providing organizations with a deeper insight into their customers’ behavior has the potential to make an equally big impact on technical support operations. To put its theory to the test, the vendor last week launched a new widget that enables help desk representatives to check which knowledge articles a user had viewed before filing a complaint. The functionality reduces the amount of time that an agent takes to fully understand the issue at hand and thereby speeds up the troubleshooting process.

The kind of context that Zendesk and Google are providing for their customers can come useful in other areas as well, but not every organization is able to collect the vast data volumes needed to piece together a full picture of their operations. One of the main obstacles standing in the way is the fact that the third party information sources needed for the task have a tendency of changing over time, which requires painstakingly adapting the aggregation workflow.

StreamSets Inc. hopes to ease the task for users of its data collection tool with new automated pipelining functionality that it rolled out last week to reduce the amount of manual tinkering involved in the process. An analyst can now have the software deal with changes to the structure of the data being ingested by itself using procedures inputted in advance. It’s also possible to configure policies for handling anomalous information that the system on the receiving end of the pipeline might have a hard time processing.

Image via Geralt