Powered by data analytics, True Digital speeds up sales cycle by 50% to lift revenue

True Digital Group is the digital arm of True Corporation, a major communications conglomerate that provides the lion’s share of mobile services, high-speed Internet and paid television in Thailand. Its goal is to enable digital transformation in consumers’ lifestyles and business operations.

With a customer base amounting to millions, True Digital has scores of numbers to crunch in order to come up with a customized solution for each client. Tibadee Suraswadi, Head of Analytics Solutions, Analytics Business, adopted Tableau to help clients better make sense of and manage the information. What the firm saw was a significantly optimized sales cycle that boosted revenue and relationships with clients that were more meaningful.

In the fast-moving digital marketplace, companies need to seize growth opportunities promptly. But analyzing and drawing useful insights from data can be time-consuming.

To speed up the process, Tibadee used Tableau to customize the use of data according to each client’s needs. This allowed their clients to look at key operational insights from different angles instead of static slides filled with unintelligible numbers. They were then able to interact with the data and enter into a productive dialogue with True Digital on how to improve their services.

Having more of such productive discussions has cut the sales cycle for True Digital by half, providing a significant boost to revenue.

“Tableau’s biggest advantage for us is the ability to do customization at scale. First, we build a standard template that answers important business questions. Then, we customize it to suit every client’s needs,” said Tibadee.

Before Tableau, True Digital used to engage clients over long presentations and meetings, where they would both pore over static slides and reports with large amounts of numbers.

But this also meant several meetings were required to resolve one issue, for instance.

To build more productive discussions, Tibadee swapped presentations for creative workshops, where clients could interact with critical insights that True Digital prepared using the Tableau software. This allowed True Digital to have “very dynamic and meaningful conversations” with its clients, and better address their needs.

“The flexibility and agility of the Tableau dashboard allow us to look at the client’s issues in a very comprehensive manner and resolve them in just one workshop – much more efficient than the traditional way,” Tibadee shared.

“What’s also interesting is there is always an element of surprise because there are times our clients will discover something we did not foresee, through their interactions with Tableau.”

Where oil once dominated the global economy, data is king today. But Tibadee believes that like oil, data is useless “unless processed and used appropriately”.

Faced with vast amounts of data to mine and transform into impactful insights, True Digital needed a way to communicate complex datasets and insights to clients in an accessible manner. “Imagine how difficult it would be to try to explain how logarithmic-based propensity model coefficients relate to marketing investment decisions. It’s not easy,” he said.

With Tableau, complex insights became a thing of the past. The software’s visualization tool represented data in interactive, simple-to-understand graphs and charts that were, at the same time, “beautiful and visually appealing”, often leaving clients in awe.

Tibadee also encouraged clients to adopt Tableau to drive digital transformation within their organizations.

“Over time, our clients also picked up basic analytics functions on Tableau because it is so easy to use,” he said. “We want to create long-term value for our clients. Instead of giving them a fish each day, we hope we can eventually teach them the skill of fishing for insights in the sea of data.”