LatentView Analytics

Can you provide a brief description of your company?

I work for a very large and famous software firm.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m an operations manager for analytics, which basically means that I manage all the tightening and tracking details related to the marketing team’s efforts to promote more online services. These services include Bing and MSN.

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address with the work with LatentView Analytics?

They did a lot of work for us. They mainly supported the analyst team that did reporting. We are a small team. LatentView Analytics created all their dashboards, and brought all the data sources together.

There are a lot of data sources and pieces of data. We must analyze it, find the insights, and look through all the different issues. We often have a lot of different campaigns running at once, so there was a lot of complexity to it.

Can you tell me about the scope of their work?

It was mainly around delivering reporting. For campaigns that were just launched, they would have to do daily, weekly, monthly reports for others.

Their job was to pull together all the data from the sources, manage them, and troubleshoot the different data areas. They provided insights to report to the full-time analyst, and then they would work out the presentation layer.

I would work with them closely in the beginning stages of each campaign, and make sure that we designed the sites or the advertising to track all the different things that we need to report on for that campaign.

Do you know which analytics platforms they were using for that work?

There were a lot of different data sources. Sometimes, we would have data reporting to our internal system called Cosmos. Some of the data went to Bing properties. It was all in the big data warehouse. We also tracked Internet search data and email. We also used Microsoft Excel for some things as well.

What was your process for selecting to work with LatentView Analytics in the first place?

They have actually been with us for some time, so I don’t know the process for hiring. I have always found them to be very eager to do the work and very thorough. They really went into depth, tried to take care of every detail, and worked with me closely on every issue.

They were really good at taking care of their scope, making sure the data quality was good at recording issues. They were able to explain all of their data findings to stakeholders.

Is that work still ongoing?

Yes.

Can you give us a sense of the size of that initiative in either a dollar figure or personnel work hours?

They had about five people in our location dedicated to doing all the different aspects. We’d have ongoing campaigns for the Bing Awards, and we’d have ongoing things for the concept of setting their default search engine as well as homepage.

They were involved in the latest Windows campaign where we were trying to promote the Smart Search feature within Windows.

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement after their work?

I personally don’t. I know the scale of the data, and the scale of the number of campaigns they always run, were large and successful. It takes a lot of labor to analyze all the data and bring it together. LatentView Analytics has played a vital role in making sure we have accurate data.

What’s really unique or special about them compared to other vendors?

Their technical expertise is unique. They understand data, and work hard to follow the best practices. They try to automate it, and make it better by increasing speed. They also have a good attitude.

Looking back on their work, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or maybe you would do differently?

I think they sometimes drew resources to try to go beyond the expectations. I don’t know how far they got in that regard. It could be better for them to focus on building solutions that could be scaled for lots of different things versus just dealing with our specific campaigns. I think they could bring more to the table if they wanted to expand in that area, not just being experts on data issues but providing scaled solutions. That could enhance their value even more.

Could you describe your company?

We are a $4-billion company that operates in billing supplies and equipment, mostly the mailing business. 80% of our revenue originates from mailing. Around 70% of revenue is derived from the Americas.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I'm the Director of a central supporting and analytics group on the marketing side. 

What were the business challenges that you were attempting to address when initiating this project with LatentView?

We're in the mailing business. Our revenues are down 4 percent the way we are. We are always looking for ways to cut our costs. They were able to get skilled analysts to do the kind of work that we wanted yet couldn't conduct in-house.

They also help us on the quality side. They’ve been able to automate a lot of our reporting. Our data is typically disorganized and dirty. By dirty I mean we're using multiple systems. We have a very disaggregated business, so it’s difficult to stitch together the data sources. LatentView Analytics has been able to come in and help us generate effective data reports. They're extremely proficient in that.

We’ve been able to bring in data visualization tools like Tableau to up the ante on the way executives consume that reporting.

Could you describe the work that LatentView Analytics has done for your company?

We have an ongoing relationship with them. They’re not really projects. We use them as a staff augmentation source. We have analysts join when we have the funding. Analytics and reporting requests come through my group, and then we source them to LatentView.

Could you identify the technologies used?

They use SAS and SQL. On the visualization side, they use Tableau.

What was your process for selecting LatentView as your solution partner? 

We’ve never outsourced before. This was very much an experiment into that area. 

We didn’t want to make a huge investment and we wanted to begin cautiously. We an enormous amount of resources in the beginning. And we didn't want to use a small organization because we knew they'd be interacting with sensitive data. On the other hand, we didn’t want to go with a large, full-service provider like Accenture or TCS, because then we would be too small. We needed to find the right balance. We examined various pure analytics firms and LatentView impressed us the most. 

Could you give us a sense of the size of the initiative in monetary terms or personnel hours?

We currently have eleven consultants on staff from LatentView. I suspect our reliance on them will continue to grow as we require increased analytical capabilities. 

Could you share any statistics or metrics that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work delivered?

We've witnessed immediate savings from the ten business units in our company that use LatentView analysts. On rote analytical side, we’ve begun to initiate projects for customer segmentation. This is the first time we have two different business units coming to us with segmentation questions. We’ll probably see the fruits of that next year sometime when the analytics helps save on costs.

How do you think Latentview Analytics has performed thus far?

They’ve been quite good. They’re very eager to help. They’re a young company. They’re very hungry. They know that we could potentially be a substantial account for them.

Is there anything you would consider unique or special about Latentview Analytics compared to other vendors you've worked with in the past?

I receive a lot of flexibility from them. They have never put shadow resources on my team and they dedicate extra resources and senior analysts to important projects, without billing extra. They understand how their clients solve problems. Overall, we’ve been happy with them. If we had to make a decision now about changing vendors, we wouldn’t.

Are there any areas that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

I wish they were more consultative with their communication; this is a problem with the outsourcing model in general. The questions they formulate are fairly vague in scope and poorly defined. I’ve not seen that kind of up-front consultative work. The ability to say no to clients or change the question or would add more value. I think this could improve in the future since most of their analysts are young and learning. This could be a struggle for our side though.