Challenge
TRANSLATING DATA INTO A COMPELLING VISUAL STORY
“We want an easy way to translate customer engagement data into a compelling story.” That’s the request we got from one of our clients’ Marketing Communications department. While the MarCom team had grown quite proficient at collecting vast amounts of relevant data, more often than not they found themselves struggling against time to transform these data into a clear story that informs and convinces stakeholders.
The request was not just initiated by the need to provide the Board of Directors with a monthly update on the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns. It was mostly driven by a vision that it should be apparent to anybody within the organization to see how customers engage with the company brand, as a means to help inspire customer focused innovation.
Approach
GUIDING AND COACHING INTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS WITH ELOQUENT VISUALIZATIONS
Just like so many of the challenges that clients entrust to us, this project required us to work with people in different roles. Since we expected this project to impact the client’s entire organization, it was vital to clearly understand their short-term needs as well as their long-term goals in terms of brand awareness. That’s why we initially established an intense cooperation with the MarCom team. In addition to organising a number of workshops to help us design a fit for purpose solution, we worked closely with all major stakeholders to coach them during and after implementation. This modus operandi was explicitly requested by our client’s management, as they recognized that people largely benefit from expert guidance if a shift is needed to new ways of working.
Technically, we used Tableau Online (an analytics cloud platform) to build a number of dashboards that connect to the customer engagement data that are available through various channels. With these dashboards, we delivered a set of interactive “wow” visualizations that tell the story of how customers engage with our client’s brand – and how this evolves over time. As these visualizations needed to be spread throughout the entire organization, visualization widgets were embedded into the portals that employees are using daily.
Impact
BOOSTING BRAND AWARENESS PROGRAMS’ VISIBILITY
The “wow” visualizations that we delivered have provided our client’s MarCom team with the means to voice brand awareness programs towards both the company’s Board of Directors and our client’s employees, largely boosting visibility of these programs.
But the reliable stream of actionable information on brand engagement that is delivered with the visualization dashboards, enables the team to go beyond mere storytelling. Especially as these visualizations are so easily accessible (in any of our client’s offices), they often spark intense interactions between people involved in different marketing campaigns – triggering many new and innovative ideas.