Tableau makes it easier for us to build quick reports, build quick analyzers, and then quickly report to our customers.
Celsius International specializes in managing multi-country data and lead generation programs. They provide multi-national corporations with database management and analytics, including creating, enhancing, maintaining, and hosting B2B multi-country databases. Analytics includes dashboard-based process and status reporting and insight, and predictive model development. Operating in a specialist niche, Celsius International provides data and campaign management services in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. At our 2012 European Customer Conference, data management specialist David Saintyves talked with us about how this data-friendly company is using Tableau to enhance performance for the company as well as their customers.
| Tableau: | What sort of company is Celsius International? |
| David: | Celsius International is a B2B data marketing company. So, we do various tasks around data related to marketing campaigns. |
| Tableau: | How do you use Tableau to deliver data to customers? |
| David: | Tableau makes it easier for us to build quick reports, build quick analyzers, and then quickly report to our customers. We sell a web-based tool for marketing campaigns that handles the entire process of campaign qualification, lead generation, and reporting. Tableau is our preferred reporting tool to show our customers data we pull out from our web tool, and also from other sources like Xcelsius.
Our customers can access the published reports we build for them via the web browser using Tableau Server. One way our customers benefit from Tableau is they use it to better prepare their running campaigns over time. After looking at the result of their marketing campaigns, they can use those results to schedule their next campaign volumes to better target what is included in the campaign. |
| Tableau: | What’s the value Tableau provides your customers? |
| David: | Our old methods required days of human intervention before we could actually start analyzing data. Tableau has made it a lot quicker to have the data ready to analyze. When customers get their data faster, they feel closer to the process and can get to insight more quickly. |
| Tableau: | Has Tableau changed the way you work with data? |
| David: | Tableau has really facilitated the way we handle data, making it a lot quicker to have data ready to use and analyze. All our data is going to Tableau. It’s an additional step that has proven useful, because we can achieve better quality analysis and our customers receive a better way to look at their data. |
| Tableau: | What size and sort of data do you use? |
| David: | We can combine a variety of data sources like Xcelsius, SQL, and Access in Tableau. Our customers’ database sizes also vary from small to tens of thousands of records up to a couple of millions. We try to use SQL and then data extracts on top to connect to Tableau. In exceptions, we have to use CSVs for specific dumps from our web system. And on really point-to-point occasions, we use Excel and Access databases if the data is only available that way. But as a general practice, we try and use SQL as our main container for original data source. |
| Tableau: | How has using Tableau impacted business? |
| David: | It’s basically allowed us to achieve better quality using it as an internal analysis tool. And our customers get a better quality reporting tool they can use to analyze their data themselves. Our old reporting system was pivot table oriented, with no further graphical interface. With Tableau, we have the flexibility of data filtering and actions combined with the visual aspects—a great improvement for what we deliver to our customers. |