SOS International uses Tableau to position data at the centre of its global service offerings for travellers

SOS Tableau Server used by more + 60 % of workforce as central analytics hub

Accurate data helps identify hotspots for vehicle breakdowns, peak hours in alarm centres

Powerful data governance always ensures regulatory compliance

When a child falls ill while travelling on holiday, the family calls SOS International’s 24/7 call centre to get urgent help. The company is one of the leading assistance organizations in the Nordic region. From its alarm centres in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they provide much-needed assistance to travellers worldwide on behalf of their insurance companies, night and day, all year round.

Here, Troels Bohnsen, Head of Business Intelligence at SOS International, discusses the critical role of data within the company and how Tableau helps them uncover new operational insights that are significantly improving its global service offerings.

What services does SOS International offer?

We offer a wide range of services in the form of worldwide travel and roadside assistance, and healthcare solutions. Our goal is to secure value for our customers - the insurance companies - while simultaneously providing the best service possible to end-users - the travellers.

What role does data analytics play in your day-to-day operations?

Relevant data-driven insights enable us to be more informed in our decision making across the organization, which benefits both our customers and end-users.

Tableau also helps us to improve our data governance, allowing us to tightly control access to data and reports within SOS International. Only seeing relevant data enhances the experience for business users whilst ensuring the company adheres to all regulatory requirements as efficiently as possible.

What has been your journey with Tableau?

Our journey began around six years ago. At the time, we relied on basic spreadsheets for most of our analytics, which was causing issues with data consistency. We had different numbers in every meeting! As a result, our management team requested the establishment of a group-wide Business Intelligence function to create a single source of truth that would eliminate these issues.

The first stage was building a modern and sustainable data warehouse, which significantly improved data transparency. To help us in this process we entered a strategic cooperation with Data Inc., who provides Datawarehouse as a Service. Next, we needed to implement an analytics platform that enabled us to deliver data and key insights to business users in a fast and effective way. We looked at numerous different solutions but quickly settled on Tableau because it was one of the only platforms that offered a server for publishing reports, which was important. Following implementation, we re-labelled our Tableau Server as SOS Report, which is what it’s known as throughout the company today. We currently have around 600 unique Tableau users, equating to roughly 60% of our full-time workforce.

How has Tableau helped improve your business operations?

Firstly, it allows us to extract much more value from our data and put key insights directly into the hands of relevant employees throughout the business. For instance, we had a tremendous amount of phone data from our alarm centres that we couldn’t analyze effectively. Now, we can visualize relevant data in Tableau in order to analyze it and quickly spot trends. We are also able to identify hotspots for vehicle breakdowns, peak hours in our alarm centres, and cost outliers, all of which we have used to refine our worldwide services.

Finally, it has dramatically expanded the kind of analytics we can do. We’ve started using self-service analytics to bring data to employees in new ways, via a platform that lets them explore data themselves. Not only has this improved the user experience in the business, but it’s also enabled us to distinguish between different user needs as well. For instance, some prefer to be presented with insights via a dashboard, while others - such as analysts - want to dig into data themselves. Understanding these different needs is incredibly powerful.

What’s next for data analytics at SOS International?

We’re currently looking at advanced analytics techniques to extract even more value from our data. A great example is the adoption of better predictive data at our alarm centres, which improves the service our employees provide to customers while also reducing costs. Besides that, we continue to expand the use of Tableau and data throughout SOS International, driving more informed, data-based decision making at every level of the company.