It increases our sales; it decreases our costs—there’s a direct impact. It just gets you insight faster. Of all the goals that you might have in your position, you can just accomplish them faster and better (with Tableau.) I think it has a huge, positive, rippling effect across the org.
Tableau: One Kings Lane is a fast-rising star in a very challenging industry. How is data insight contributing to your success?
Geraldine Niemczyk, Manager, Planning and Business Analytics: In order to do retail well, there is a lot of complexity in it.
Jeff Ferris, Data Product Manager: We're working with huge amounts of data, where we can start to tease out customer trends, figure out customer clustering.
Geraldine: And there are a lot of metrics that go into that: How are you performing? How are you delivering the experience to customers?
Tableau: How would you describe One Kings Lane?
Jeff: The mission at One Kings Lane is to disrupt the home décor industry.
Geraldine: We are changing the way people do home décor.
Jeff: We have a very dynamic business that can change day-to-day drastically because we're constantly launching new product.
Tableau: What do you think sets your company apart?
Rich Hicks, Data Analytics Engineer: People here are very good at what they do. They're amazingly good at what they do.
Geraldine: The aesthetics and how we present the product to the customer is off the charts. I've never seen anything like that. Technology has enabled us to become what we stand for as a company, and it has also enabled us to grow so fast.
Tableau: How does data play into that?
Rich: There's this exponential growth of data in the company that's being used on a daily basis by merchandisers, by marketers, by executive staff. So it's pretty core.
Jeff: The engineering team is solving a diverse set of problems. Data is very important to One Kings Lane, and has been since the inception of the company. When you're talking about running as many products as we do, you can't avoid using data. There just isn't enough time in the day for people to manually figure out what is working and what isn't.
My favorite way to use Tableau is to sit down with someone that has some questions about the business, and actually start explaining things in real time. I think that's where Tableau shines. I haven't worked with another tool that can keep up with the speed of thought essentially. You can ask a question and then you can start to tease out the answer to that question in front of them visually.
Tableau: What sort of benefits have you seen from choosing Tableau to understand your data?
Jeff: The time saving we’ve achieved using Tableau is incredible.
Rich: Basically anyone in the company can log into Tableau Server and find data.
Geraldine: It can save hours in a week, in some cases hours a day.
Rich: The merchandisers who curate the sales events on our site, they save days’ worth of time. And it actually sparks a little bit of competition for the guys that are sitting (behind me) answering the calls.
Tableau: How does it benefit One Kings Lane to put that sort of information into the hands of colleagues who might not traditionally be considered “data people”?
Geraldine: I think one of the great features about Tableau is the ability to enable other business users that may not be that savvy or experienced with data to actually look at their own data and make decisions from it.
People can look at the same thing that I'm looking at, and can also be self-sufficient and look at other things that may be I would not have been able to spot.
Jeff: One Kings Lane is a very visual audience. You've got people that are very aesthetically minded. And if you can't present data in a way that is visually appealing and understandable, it's not going to work.
My favorite way to use Tableau is to sit down with someone that has some questions about the business, and actually start explaining things in real time. I think that's where Tableau shines. I haven't worked with another tool that can keep up with the speed of thought essentially. You can ask a question and then you can start to tease out the answer to that question in front of them visually.
Tableau: What would you say to someone considering Tableau?
Geraldine: It increases our sales, it decreases our costs, there’s a direct impact. It just gets you insight faster. Of all the goals that you might have in your position, you can just accomplish them faster and better (with Tableau). I think it has a huge, positive, rippling effect across the org.