In an era of Big Data, Business Intelligence, and Data Analytics, using the expert assistance of external IT teams to customize and build data analytics algorithms and engines can help your business scale and save money. This project focused on Data Analytics and Performance Management Systems. The client had a simple idea, but one that was not easy to execute.
Impact
Our client was supporting an extensive set of brand partners in different markets. They were observing and trying to figure out how some organizations (like brand partner organizations) performed better than others. At the time, they didn’t know why. Each team member had their opinion, but it was not substantiated by any insight from the data that they already had. They had to continually change their incentive plans, even though they had no idea which incentive plans were most effective. The executive team felt like they were throwing spaghetti at a wall. Essentially, they needed a way to know whether Plan A worked better than Plan B. Until they contacted us, they were using common sense and experience.
Solution
They had all the data, and they wanted us to bring some data scientists in to churn the data and tell them what they were missing. That was our project. We were able to churn the data – multiple types of data, not just transactional data, including the brand partner interaction – and we were able to give them some fascinating insights and suggestions. Our first insight focused on what triggers a brand partner to be more engaged with our client over another client. Our second insight pinpointed which brand partner leader was most effective in making his or her downline more optimized, and what the significant ingredients for that effectiveness downline were. Then we scored the effectiveness of their incentive plan and gave their executive team some ideas on how to design their next incentive plan.
Result
These three results of our research allowed the customer to take the best practices of high performing brand partner organizations and turn those into training material that they could propagate to the rest of their brand partners. They were able to take most of the guessing game out of their next incentive plan because they had some real insights into what was useful.