November 14, 2020
Founded 85 years ago, built on the principle of “people helping people,” CUNA Mutual Group is a financially strong insurance, investment and financial services company that believes a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone. My role is as an Experience Analytics Senior Manager, managing a team of data aggregators, data scientists and dashboard developers.
We were experiencing pain in supporting our sales team with the information that they needed to run their business. We were creating weekly spreadsheet reports providing pipeline and sales details. The scope of this effort entailed creating 4,000 spreadsheets on an annual basis. This was not scalable nor adequate. The business was asking for self-service and daily insights. We chose Tableau server.
Impact – Eliminated 4,000 spreadsheets, saved over 7,000 hours. Enabled controlled, standard dashboards with self-service.
Since then, more than half of the company is on Tableau server.
We had a challenge to build and implement a new sales compensation system. We were using a simple point-based system using expected revenue tiers. This point system drove wrong behavior as salespeople maximized points, not revenue.
We held white boarding sessions to identify requirements for compensation scorecards, including metrics and data needs. We also developed requirements for supporting dashboards, such as pipeline management.
We completed the build in three months, initially rolled out to sales managers and sales executives. The next year, we rolled it out to the entire sales force.
Impact: We had the best sales results in past 10 years. “This is what happens when you put actionable insights into the hands of our front-line teams.” CRO’s reflection
Note the impact in the previous sales compensation system example. You get results when you provide self-service capabilities, allowing front line staff to make good, data-based decisions.
One other example would be leveraging Tableau to provide data science insights to the front line. We have developed multiple product propensity models that provide insights into identifying clients with the highest probability of purchasing a product or service. We have commercialized these models by deploying the model output in Tableau dashboards. Besides identifying the highest probability clients, the dashboards provide additional insights as to why. These levers drive prescriptive actions.
AE Business Solutions has been a trusted partner every step of the way. They were critical to our successful launch of Tableau. They were instrumental in its growth and adoption. They continue to be partners providing consulting support for white boarding and dashboard development.
