Blueocean Market Intelligence transforms its data analytics and visualisation strategy using Tableau

Blueocean Market Intelligence is a global analytics and insights provider and part of the Cross-Tab group of companies (Cross-Tab Marketing Services, Informate Mobile Intelligence, and Borderless Access Panels). The Cross-Tab group includes more than 800 professionals serving the world’s largest companies from offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Dubai and India.

Towards becoming a robust data intensive analytics hub
As a global analytics and insights provider, Blueocean’s value proposition spans marketing intelligence, big data analytics, and digital solutions.

One of Blueocean’s business offerings is the ‘Innovation Board’, where the company builds intellectual property (IP) in the form of proprietary frameworks and technology platforms, formulated around data analytical tools.

“We are an analytics hub for global organizations looking for meaningful insights on their customers to enable data-driven decision making,” says Anees Merchant, Senior Vice President, Blueocean Market Intelligence.

Analytics for better customer insights in retail
A majority of retailers generate their highest profits during key seasonal and time-bound shopping events such as Black Friday, Christmas and back-to-school. There is a need to make the most of these opportunities by driving increased footfall, site traffic, conversions and acquisitions during these critical selling seasons. In order to do so, retailers require comprehensive, timely, and actionable intelligence.

Blueocean knew it could meet this need—with help from the right analytics solution.

“Getting such customer insight requires synthesis of multiple data streams using highly effective data analytics tools. Therefore it becomes very critical for us to choose the right analytical tool that can harness a holistic view of data and generate powerful insights for our customers,” he adds.

Towards this end, Blueocean was looking for an analytical software to form the foundation of its marketing technology analytics solution.

At the same time, the company wanted a tool that could be easily understood and used by its team of visualization and data experts to derive insights for customers.

Practising the science of data analytics
Blueocean had been using Tableau 7 in a few of its IP solutions, and had selected Corporate Renaissance Group (CRG) as a partner to help deploy the tool. During the deployment stage, CRG was able to share industry best practices and co-partner on pilots, allowing Blueocean to get a better perspective on how to make the most of Tableau.

Blueocean subsequently upgraded to a newer version, Tableau 8.1, and as the company continued to work with Tableau, it began to realize that this would, in fact, be the best choice for its new event-based retail intelligence solution, Retail Intelligence on Demand. It therefore decided to take advantage of Tableau 8.1’s rich functionalities to deliver greater value to clients.

The solution received great traction from customers for its ability to provide timely and accurate data that allowed customers to evaluate and respond to competitive tactics and consumer behaviour.

Ensuring a 360 degrees approach to visualisation and analytics
At an overall level, Blueocean uses Tableau to synthesise data from multiple formats such as transactional, research, social media and other behavioural data sources such as SAP databases, Adobe digital analytics, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, other social media channels, CRM and ERP systems, etc. ; working on a cloud based environment to store and process that data.

The company builds data visualizations in Tableau Desktop and then publishes its analyses to Tableau Server to share insights and support collaboration.

The quantum of data is ever-increasing and on an average, Blueocean works on more than a million data points on a monthly basis using Tableau. This has helped Blueocean Market Intelligence effectively democratise data internally as well as to its clients.

“True intelligence comes from a well-grounded, triangulated view of data that’s sitting in silos across our customer organization. The ability of Tableau to integrate into different scenarios and bring out the best insight in such a simplistic but powerful manner helps us deliver greater value to clients.” says Anees Merchant, Blueocean Market Intelligence.

The company was also able to drastically reduce the time to market for the ‘Retail Intelligence on Demand’ solution. In a week, the company was able to create a prototype and go live as compared to working on a traditional platform which would have taken almost eight weeks of effort.

“Tableau has helped us bring colour to visualization and the art of storytelling. I would propagate Tableau to every organization that has a mature outlook towards business intelligence. If organizations are looking to embark on analytics journey and don’t want to invest on cumbersome and resource-intensive solutions, I would definitely recommend Tableau,” Merchant says.