Drive better strategic decisions with analytics for customer insights
The Big Picture:
A Fortune 50 technology company saw a compelling opportunity to use existing enterprise data to answer key strategic questions about its customers, products, geography, and sales channels. It recognized that areas of the business were underperforming but lacked the proper insights to make changes to address the performance issues.
The company wanted to better understand how business performance compared to plans, budgets, and the previous year; where it should smartly allocate marketing resources; and how it could identify areas of improvement to drive performance consistently across businesses, products, channels, customer groups, and marketing.
Transformative Solution:
To address the opportunity, the company built a centralized, consolidated analytical data mart and provided users with analytical dashboards for analysis and decision-making.
The solution integrated many sources of structured enterprise information, including data on customers, products, billing, campaigns, usage, and promotions, as well as unstructured sources such as net promoter scores (NPS), panel surveys, and competition research.
Through an ETL engine, data hygiene, and quality process, the company loaded the data into a centralized, consolidated analytic data mart, using a sophisticated star-schema model. A suite of powerful, intuitive dashboards was placed on top of this consolidated data, providing views and analysis to various decision-makers, including self-service solutions using Tableau, analytical dashboards built on a “why-what-how” framework, and an executive dashboard that would provide key summaries and automated alerts. Using the solution, the company forecasted performance at granular levels, established alerts, and assessed risk to strategic goals and drivers to mitigate, using advanced analytics.
The project was completed in roughly a year’s time, starting with conceptualization and planning phases, data mart development, and the roll out of the various dashboards and tools.
The Change:
The company realized several key benefits:
- Gained ‘one source of truth’ resulting in an 80% reduction in the cost and complexities of decision-making
- Reduced time for strategic “ad hoc” analyses from 13 days to 3 days
- Identified true drivers of customer satisfaction to improve customer experiences
- Established consistent KPIs and definitions across business groups
- Provided standardized and proactive reporting back to senior executives across multiple teams, transforming time-to-market on decision-making