Tag: Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Buzzwords = Nosebleed

http://www.analyticbridge.com/profiles/blogs/kill-the-buzzwords-the-real-meaning-behind-popular-bi-terms

In the Philippines, “Nosebleed” is the common response for having to deal with a challenging problem, whether it be speaking a lot of English or trying to understand a complicated business problem.

When I read the attached article, it made me think of the number of times I get the Nosebleed response when I talk about analytics terminology.

In any talk I give on analytics, I make sure to always start with a definition and then build up a glossary of terms and definitions to make sure everyone is on the same page. I also like to show the audience that things aren’t usually as difficult as they seem, they just need to get past the nosebleed inducing buzzwords.

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Big Data is kinda scary because it sounds complicated and expensive.

Data Visualization is very broad and difficult to visualize if you aren’t familiar with the concept.

Data Scientist sounds like someone who doesn’t even exist in the Philippines yet.

But when you take a minute to step back and see that big data just means the data universe in your business that you are already using every day, that data visualization is charts and maps and graphs, and that a data scientist is really just the data guy you already have, then its not so nosebleed inducing.

Once you have the baseline to start from then you can go back and show the complexity of each buzzword without losing the audience.

If you or your business is suffering from nosebleed because the buzzwords in your analytics solutions sound too expensive and too complicated, then give me a shout out. I can help simplify it for you.

Being A Great Analyst > Attribute #2: Visualize Your Data

Most people learn by seeing something… that’s definitely true when it comes to using data. They not only learn more, but data visualization also a quicker sharing of information and also enhances communication.

Here’s an example. My management team was discussing how to enhance our coaching efforts with the team and since each of my direct reports has a different area of responsibility; production, quality and schedule adherence, they were having trouble agreeing on which analysts needed the most coaching. They each produced reports that were stand alone documents that would be shared via email or dropbox.

So I suggested we build a simple business dashboard. A business dashboard looks something like this:

It’s a simple collection of visuals built on top of a data file.

I created a simple Google docs spreadsheet and shared it. Each of the key performance indicators used to evaluate employee success was given a column and I put each employee a row. I then had each of my directs input the relevant data points and quickly we had a rudimentary business dashboard and I now I have a much more in synch management team.

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Simple analytics solutions like this are at the fingertips of any business. You just need to know when, where, and how best to implement them. Something so simple as a place to share data is so often overlooked by even the most successful businesses.

Analytics Culture – The key to using analytics in a business is like a secret sauce. It is a unique combination of analytics talent, technology and technique that are brought together to enrich and empower an organization. A successful analytics culture is not easy to create, but DMAIPH can show you how. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can build a strategic plan to turn your company into analytics driven success story.

Analytics Tool for Sales #3 – Customer Insights

143The third area that most business people undervalue in importance is gathering actionable insights from their customers. Aside from general conversations and dealing with irate or upset customers, how much knowledge are you actually gleaning from them. Do you survey them? Do you have a loyalty program? Do you do AB testing before making changes? These are just a few ways to build up data points you can use to gauge customer satisfaction, understand customer pain points and unearth new niches to exploit.

This is one of the things that Wells Fargo does exceptionally well. During my time with the bank, I was involved with a number of surveys and focus groups to give us some soft data to go with mountains of hard data we culled from internal and external sources. Far too often decisions are made without really listening to the customer… think about the misfires Nextflix had a few years ago. It could have easily been avoided with better intelligence on customer sentiment and a better understanding of what they value. Netflix antagonized their extremely loyal customer based and then made matter worse by mishandling customer feedback.

Beyond just conducting the survey, there are many sure fire ways to construct the survey to assure you get actionable data from the exercise. Just asking questions will only get you so far. You need to be able to construct the questions to give you useful answers that you can use to drive decision-making.

With free survey tools like Surveymonekey, and the ability to easily gather data online via social media, there is really no excuse for a company to have blind spots with their customer base. If you need help setting up, delivering and/or analyzing a customer survey, DMAI has extensive experience with this business intelligence tool.

Analytics Tool for Sales #2 – Competitor Landscape

IMG_1833Another blind spot for a lot of business leaders is knowing their competition. Most have some sense of where they stack up on price and know what the competition offers, but few put any real data and analysis behind it. They make a lot of business decisions based on personal observations and historical knowledge. Very few mystery shop or put together a competitor landscape.

Per Wikipedia, competitiveness pertains to the ability and performance of a firm, sub-sector or country to sell and supply goods and services in a given market, in relation to the ability and performance of other firms, sub-sectors or countries in the same market. You take data points on the various aspects of products and services and you visualize them to see where you rank. Based on your ranking and the variances between competitors you can have a more focused business strategy and make more data-driven decisions.

Competitive data can be gathered off the internet, by phone and in person mystery shopping and surveying your own customers. Its a very powerful piece of information to know what your own customers are buying from your competition and why. When I was at Wells Fargo, I build a competitive landscape of all the primary money transfers business and monthly updated the management team with our rankings and trends. We would often use this information to adjust pricing and launch new marketing initiatives.

Do you know who your competitors are, where they are better than you and how you stack up in your own customers minds? DMAI offers a suite of business intelligence solutions to small and medium sized business including building and maintaining a competitor landscape for your business.

13 Months in the Philippines- Lesson 4 – August 2012 – Mother Nature Strikes

IMG_1011Manila, Metro Manila, Philippines

In late July, 2012, the Philippines was pounded by several typhoons and monsoon rains. There was one period where it rained hard for four days straight non-stop. Before the storms, I was in full swing… setting up speaking engagements, attending job fairs, conducting trainings, and shopping for clients, but then the storms came and everything ground to a halt. At the time, after three months of non-stop working, it seemed like a nice respite.

For those of you who have never been in Manila during a flood, its pretty hard to describe with out it sounding dramatic. In short, the city floods almost every year for a number of reasons. The people are just used to it. Walking in water up to your waste and dealing with school and business closures… its now big thing to most residents of Manila. But for me it was a pretty overwhelming experience. After coming back from a field trip on the 3rd day of the heavy rains, my son was stranded at his school. And I was powerless to do much. We walked a couple of miles from Makati to Manila in heavy downpours to get to his school. There were no taxis or public transit, so we had quite an adventure getting back from Manila to Makati.

Anyway, because of the floods, I did have to cancel once training class. It was a full class of 15 and had a lot of people with call center experience. It would have been a very fun class.

After the floods, things changed pretty significantly and pretty rapidly. More on that in the next blog post. But August was kind of a lost month. I didn’t conduct any other trainings that month due to scheduling issues and for the first time I started to wonder if my plans were going to work.

As an analyst, this is where I had to do a better job looking at and listening to the data. We weren’t making a lot of money on the public trainings and we had only placed 3 of our initial 30+ trainees directly. The business model was not working as it was intended to. Our ROI was not good for job fairs, we were not getting clients to sign up with us directly and I hadn’t quite figured out the marketing yet. So based on all the info, a change in course had to be made. So by the end of August BPO Elite moved in an entirely new direction.

Analytics Tool > SuveryMonkey > http://www.surveymonkey.com

Analytics Concept > Customer Insights > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_insight

YouTube Video > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS_IkObdTc0&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business. 

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 3 – July 2012 – Growing the Business


Taguig City, Metro Manila, Philippines

So after two months of putting the pieces together, it was time to start aggressively growing the business. With an office in Fort Bonafacio, two hard working employees, some amazing trainees and a clear plan of attack we set out to train and place as many analysts as possible. Based on the trainings we had done in May and June, the Intro to Analytics class was rock solid. We were attracting more and more candidates for the class, we had some clients offering us ad-hoc analytics work and we places three analysts with our first key business partner. SO how did we get there?

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When I talk to people about business strategy, the first thing I ask is what kind of data are they using? How are the accessing it and how do they refresh and measure it? You need to know the competition, you need to know the demographics of your clients and your market and you have to have customer insight data. Here is who we got it.

Who trains people to be analysts? Not really anyone externally to their own company. To date, I still believe we were the first analytics training program in Manila. So we were competing with other training programs and hiring processes. So we went to job fairs and we published online. We tracked recruiting expenses and determined ROI. A couple of our trainees did some in-depth competitor analysis to know who was hiring analysts, what their duties where and how much they were getting paid.

We also got really good at understanding the best candidates for our program. IT and CompSci grads from the mid-tier college and universities. We started targeting them directly via LinkedIn and at job fairs. We put together a candidate database and started using Bullhorn’s free tool.

And we gather a lot of client satisfaction data. We surveyed our trainees using Survey Monkey, we asked them to write LinkedIn testimonials and we set up a Facebook group to network. We asked our clients for feedback and posted highlights on the web site, the Facebook page and the LinkedIn.

We were rocking and rolling! And than Mother Nature started being a problem.

Analytics Tool > Wikipedia > http://www.wikipedia.org

Analytics Concept > Demographic Profile > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_profile

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aHtHl-jcAs&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business.