BACKGROUND
Please describe your company.
I work for a holding company owned by a major American pharmacy chain. Our company was formed recently and has operations in 25 countries.
What are your role and responsibilities?
I am responsible for the part of our operations that focuses on B2B [business-to-business] sales. We have approximately 22 products and services that our B2B sales and account management team is responsible for. We work on getting new customers, expanding our reach to current customers, renewing our customers and, in general, managing those customer relationships.
We work with Medicare and Medicaid state and federal entities that allow customers to fill prescriptions or use services within their plans that we offer. We also work with employers directly because many of them are self-insured.
These types of users use an insurance company to adjudicate their claims, but they’re really the ones that are financially at risk, so we work with them on ways to lower their cost by utilizing some of the products and services that we offer.
My title is director of automation and data assurance. I’m part of the insights and analytics organization. We are responsible for the automation, the tools, and the processes that our teams use. But, we’re also concerned with how the company looks at the client.
So, we look at both the information we’re sharing with our customers as well as the information our account management teams need in order to manage their territories.
OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE
What was your goal in working with GoodData?
Our goal was primarily to help our account management staff do better, to help them understand where their opportunities are. For example, we could go to GoodData and say, “Look, in Chicago we have a 60 percent market share. But, when we go to Arizona we only have a 20 percent share. So what’s going on in Arizona? How can we position ourselves in Arizona to increase market share?”
We need to be aware of the areas where we’re not getting the market share we would like so we can work with local markets and teams. We can also work with area employers to increase how much their customers, clients and patients utilize Walgreens.
SOLUTION
How long has your organization used GoodData software and is it used by a large number of users?
I would say we probably have about 300 people who are consuming reports and dashboards from GoodData in various work groups. We have been working with GoodData for about a year and began deploying the results of their work around January 2014.
The first element we rolled out to the account teams was standard pipeline reporting. Then, we started providing a more visual way of looking at what their customers are actually doing. We have also been working with third-party data to look at what our customer base looks like to the rest of the world, and we have been releasing that information since last fall. We’ve also started taking those various reports and sharing them with the finance teams and the business leaders of the different groups that we interact with.
What was your process for selecting GoodData with which to work?
We are integrated with Salesforce, so it was important that we had links to that platform as well. GoodData provided exactly the capacity that we needed.
That was extremely important because a lot of the information, how we manage the customers, and how we determine who is a potential customer is being managed in Salesforce. Integration with Salesforce was a major component of our selection process.
The other component was the fact that we have a lot of complex data and need to automate data capturing processes. I have a very strong technical team that we partner with IT [information technology] on areas that we can’t do ourselves. Even in our Salesforce instance, I would say that 99 percent of what we do is managed within my team and only if we really need to change code, are we managing it through our IT partners. We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to manage that process as much as possible ourselves.
We’re a cost center and we’re also focusing on the retail business and the pharmacy business, and we wanted access to third-party data. We wanted access to data that we’re getting from the individual purchasing and licensing owners because we don’t get any of that data internally.
There’s a lot of internal things going on within our structure, but we wanted to have a way to bring in all of that internal and external data and put it back into the hands of our teams in a way that they could consume it in a much easier fashion than multiple spreadsheets about the same client that they support.
Can you give a sense of the size of the annual investment in dollar terms?
We’ve spent slightly more than $200,000 working with GoodData.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Have you noticed an impact in your organization since using GoodData?
It’s really hard to answer that because we’re pioneering new information for the entire huge corporation. In the past, there was nothing that our people were getting that was actually helping them to identify where they could grow the business or how they could make an impact. What we wanted to provide them was information that would give them greater visibility into something they could actually use to create a strategic account plan and to help them understand where their sales opportunities were.
Five years ago, we consolidate operations and decided to have one account management team responsible for promoting all of these products and services within our customer base. It has been an evolution getting them set up and organized, establishing those processes and relationships that are essential for consistency.
Our highest priority was to provide new ways for sales managers to look at their business and find new opportunities, as well as to find new ways to communicate back to the business unit about those opportunities. We are doing something new and innovative that my company has never tried. It’s been exciting.
We started from nothing and created something really cool. We’re getting to the point where people are beginning to act proactively, beginning to plan where they can find opportunities to increase our bottom line and provide more value for our customers.
Is there anything that you would suggest that GoodData could do to improve or some features you would like to see added?
I’ve had lots of conversations with GoodData leaders, there are two areas they need to focus on. First, they need to make the whole platform more user friendly, and GoodData has been working on this steadily. I want my team to be able to do the majority of the work themselves without help from the IT team. We now rely for support both on our IT group and on GoodData. We are hiring someone so we can do more of those technical components ourselves, which is really where we want to be.
We want to be able to own that portion of it but we also want it to be easier than it is today. We’re too iterative at this point in time; we have to be able to move quickly. Any way we can make that process easier is definitely something we want to do.
Second, there are some relatively minor issues that need to be attended to, simple things like keeping the same color consistency across everything. I think there’s a few little improvements like that, and we’ve talked those issues over with GoodData.
I like the direction GoodData is going. We’re filling in some of the gaps as a team while, at the same time, making it easier for each business unit to use the tool. Once we’ve done that, we can begin thinking about innovative things other companies aren’t even talking about now.
We ask you to rate GoodData on a scale of one to five, with five being the top score. What would you give them for quality of features?
Four.
For ease of use?
Four.
For support?
Five.
For the overall score?
Four and a half.
How likely are you to refer GoodData to a colleague?
Four and a half.
