Success story

Advantage Group: Improving user experience with a Tableau embedded solution

By Kit Germeroth

Advantage Group is a market research and insights company that helps their business customers stay competitive by providing critical reports on performance and improvement opportunities as compared to their competitors. Their clients span across more than 40 countries. They rely on these reports to keep pace with customer demands and create strategies to respond to changing market interests. The reports are also utilized as industry scorecards. Customers with a global presence can monitor national or regional market performance.  

Keyrus worked with Advantage to build an analytics platform and replace their outdated PowerPoint and Excel reporting. This involved a rebrand and revamp of their two core products. 

Challenge

Before the analytics initiative, Advantage invested a lot of manual effort in preparing PowerPoint presentation reports that could take weeks to prepare due to data quality errors, manual errors, and tedious work. Producing the reports was a long and inefficient process with many redundant and lengthy data checks. The iterative PowerPoint slides also repeated the same information with a change in just one attribute. 

Advantage wanted to focus more effort on actual analytics and less on these data checks. They wanted to provide a better client experience by delivering an interactive Tableau dashboard with user interface and user experience in mind. 

In addition to delivering actual analytics, Advantage wanted to standardize on their outbound deliverables to their customers. Over the past decade, each country began developing their own PowerPoint deliverable which could stray from their core product(s). This led to lack of awareness of what was being delivered to end customers. Standardizing their product in Tableau allowed them to manage the customer product more efficiently while monitoring usage and activity.

Solution

The project began with a four-week discovery and planning process. Our team needed to innovate and modernize old-school data products, standardize the products across 40+ markets around the world, and design the solution hand-in-hand with the client while using best practices. 

Based on the project plan, we designed, built, and deployed a Tableau embedded solution on top of the pre-aggregated results database. This implementation took a static PowerPoint product that was approximately 800 slides on average and created an interactive, 15 dashboard Tableau workbook. End users in 40+ markets around the world can identify and assess business performance through a series of storytelling dashboards.

We also created a change management plan involving stakeholder analyses, sponsorship roadmaps, and communication plans both internally and externally. 

Certain employees were designated to equip and mobilize their teams, create excitement about the new solution, train and support colleagues, and reinforce new processes and behaviors. We also needed to make sure to organize all communication about the new solution. Advantage needed to send the right messages at the right time, through the right channel, and from the right sender. 

We set up a one stop place for all internal stakeholders to get the latest information, and we made sure everyone understood the changes that the project would bring. We worked with the client to create opportunities for two-way communication like Q&A sessions and feedback sessions. 

Once the solution was ready for deployment, we performed a controlled roll out with identified users before extending a wider roll out to new countries, industries, and sponsors. 

We completed the process with Train the Trainer sessions to transfer Keyrus knowledge to Advantage’s super users. 

Results

With the new Tableau solution, end users can identify and assess business performance through a series of storytelling dashboards. Users can interact with data on dynamic charts and improve business relationships through more intuitive action planning. They now have one central location to visualize all of their data. There are 3,000 daily sessions of more than 1,000 users interacting with on-demand data, and it saves more than 40 weeks per year of manual effort.

Internally, Advantage accelerated their delivery and data validation processes and can easily cross-analyze data over different dimensions.