Tableau: A business like Genesys must encounter a lot of data. Before implementing Tableau, how was Genesys consuming its data?
Anthony Chamberas, Director of Business Intelligence: The only way to get information from the Genesys platform was through basically database dumps of raw data. There was no real good way to consume the data. Excel was the primary tool. So they just needed a better solution for manipulating and analyzing data.
Tableau: So what prompted the company to eventually try out Tableau?
Anthony: One of our employees saw Tableau Public on a website, said this is exactly what we need, and he convinced his boss to buy a copy, and then took off from there.
Tableau: And you came to the company pretty soon after that, right? Tell us a little about your start at Genesys.
Anthony: I was actually hired into Genesys because of my background in Tableau. I had no idea coming into this job—I started about a year ago—of really how the whole communication process worked when you’re dealing with a platform like ours.
Tableau: Right, so Genesys helps businesses improve outbound communications to their customers. How does Tableau play into that?
Anthony: The time that I'm recapturing with Tableau, what I'm able to do is really focus on understanding what the customers' needs are, whether it's an internal customer or an external customer, really listening to their problems and what they're trying to achieve, their business objectives, and figuring out, you know, how we can influence or change that outcome by using better information.
Tableau: And some of that process must include your own intuitions about customer interactions. How does Genesys use Tableau to expand upon its hunches about customer behavior?
Anthony: Well, one view that allows us to test some of the hunch is with respect to what we call scripting. So once we get someone on the phone what are we saying to them? There's usually an automated message, and is there a certain point when people lose interest or hang up, et cetera.
Tableau: How does that help you improve phone calls to customers?
Anthony: What we want to see is a slow deterioration. If we see a big drop at a certain point it means that the script or the message is saying something that is upsetting people or turning them away. So we want to investigate what—what’s being said at that moment and what can we do to change it.
Tableau: And how do you communicate that information to your business clients?
Anthony: Some of the functionality we built in here was to package up reports and e-mail them out. So we do a lot of that. And what we're trying to move towards, those customers that are using Tableau already, for them to connect to our server using their own Tableau Desktop licenses.
Il est plus facile d'obtenir des informations dans un format utilisable à l'aide d'un outil comme Tableau qu'avec Excel ou une autre solution d'aide à la décision plus adaptée à l'entreprise, plus lourde et plus volumineuse. Les gains de temps sont immédiats, en particulier grâce à la rapidité avec laquelle nous pouvons créer et améliorer nos campagnes. Nous pouvons identifier les opportunités bien plus rapidement qu'avant.
Tableau: It sounds like Tableau is helping you communicate faster and better with clients. Can you tell us a little more about the time Genesys saves by using Tableau?
Anthony: So there are several different time savings. The first one is really just its ease of use. It's a lot easier to get information in a consumable format using a tool like Tableau as opposed to Excel or some more enterprise-wide, big, heavy BI solutions. So that's one immediate time savings. The other is really just the speed at which we can iterate and improve the campaigns, as we call them, the outbound communications. We're able to much more quickly identify where opportunities might be, whether it's calling a different time of day or calling a mobile device or sending a text message rather than calling.
Tableau: So let’s return to that visualization for customer phone calls. How did you share the insights you get from that analysis?
Anthony: So it's that kind of insight that was surprising to me, and it also validated a lot of what my coworkers kind of knew but could never really show. So it really brought us both together, again having this conversation, communicating, coming from two different worlds, the data and Tableau in the middle did that for us.
Tableau: It sounds like Tableau is really benefiting your business and its communications with clients. Can you tell us more about that?
Anthony: Being able to visualize data is definitely changing the relationship with our clients. So we're no longer talking about how they can get data or talking in a vacuum of how we can make improvements. Now we can have conversations with them about what we see and how we can improve, and—and we can very easily.
Tableau: And what have been the personal benefits for you in using Tableau?
Anthony: So the difference for me in having a tool with Tableau is it takes me out of the space of becoming a developer or being a developer and becoming more of an analyst, which is really what I want to do as a professional, how I want to grow as a professional, so I can focus more on the business problems rather—rather than the technical problems.