The issue was that I was talking about the new school of big data, the one in which businesses use intuitive, interactive UIs to derive value from big data and avoid the dependency on data scientists. The people taking issue with this didn’t see beyond big data infrastructure — and the data scientists who interpret what comes out of those systems.

The  panel I attended was called “Big Data Analytics: What’s the Next Big Thing for Data, Both Big and Small?” It featured one data scientist, three database infrastructure experts, a senior infrastructure architect and myself.

I stuck out like a sore thumb. As the Senior VP of Customer Success for GoodData, I was the only panelist focused on customer-facing activities. The tech guys were mainly focused on infrastructure issues, like speed, scalability and latency. I’m close to customers who are actually using the technology. It’s my job to be aware of how customers use big data to gain business value. So I see the world of big data in a different way.

I made three points that were seen as particularly controversial:

1. Companies need to provide solutions that a business user can understand.

Business users are hungry for expertise on how to use the massive amounts of data at their disposal. They often don’t know where to start, however, or who to turn to. Big Data providers need to educate business by providing best practices on how to derive value from their data. That involves metrics and visualizations that measure success, layered over the high-performing back-end solutions that everyone’s still talking about today. In other words, you need to know how to measure your marketing funnel, track customer engagement, benchmark yourself against the competition and maintain the health of your user base, among other functions. These are all business functions, and they must be presented in a way that anyone can understand.

2. Data in spreadsheets isn’t as powerful as a graph or a chart.

Spreadsheets are functional, but they don’t encourage deep interaction. To derive the greatest value from big data, users need to view and engage with their data on an ongoing basis. A spreadsheet doesn’t offer any motivation to do that. An intuitive UI, on the other hand, promotes regular useage, enabling companies to befriend their big data. Those visuals, in turn, encourage companies to make smarter, data-driven decisions. You just don’t get as much out of a quarterly report as you do from daily engagement.

3. The data scientist concept will die.

This is the one that really got people. Companies need solutions that enable them to use and customize their data easily, because it is the whole team, not just the individual analyst, that knows the business best. By offering business users intuitive data solutions, we bypass the need for the data scientist, who works in isolation. In fact, most data scientists are associated with the old school of business intelligence, where systems were so complicated that they needed someone with a data science background to run and get value from them. The new generation of solutions, on the other hand, is making it easy for business users to engage big data. An interdisciplinary team will see and use the visuals provided, and collaborate on the best decisions on a regular basis.

For me, speaking on the panel triggered a larger perspective of the market for big data. A new generation of data solutions is emerging. They are making big data accessible to the masses. That’s a hard fact for the old school to accept.

It’s time to move beyond infrastructure. We need to deliver applications that everyone can use, and turn big data into a democracy.

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To learn how GoodData can help you monetize your data, ask for a demo, or call us at (415) 200-0186.

The post No Data Scientists Required: Big Data is All About Business Users appeared first on GoodData.

To enable our customers to build a successful Customer Support strategy, we introduced a new Bash, GoodSupport. Just like the Bashes we introduced last summer — GoodMarketing, GoodSales and GoodSubscription — this new solution includes industry best practice metrics, reports, and dashboards, and leverages GoodData’s powerful analytics and beautiful visualizations.

To showcase how our new Bash, GoodSupport, can increase customer retention and turn customer data into a source of revenue and profits we thought it’d be useful to share how we’re using it internally at GoodData. We have asked our rockstar director of customer support, Ray Light, to share his thoughts on what it takes to build an A+ customer support organization and why good data is key.

Ray has taken advantage of the capabilities of GoodSupport to give him access to a wider range of relevant information in a way that makes it easier for him to manage his team and focus on the right actions.

“I tend to use customer support metrics for either strategic applications – for instance, when determining how I allocate team resources – or operational applications to understand how my team is performing.”

To run an efficient team, Ray needs to have both a strategic and operational view into his data. As such, Ray has divided his reports into separate strategic and operational areas, enabling him to only look at one dashboard for either purpose.

Here is a breakdown of how Ray leverages GoodSupport.

Step 1: Leveraging Data to Set a Successful Strategy

Ray relies on two core capabilities of GoodSupport to meet his strategic objectives: visualization and heat maps.

Visualize essential metrics

In Ray’s own words: “I need to know which issues are coming in at what rate and at what time so I can make sure my team is well equipped to handle incoming requests. I want to see all of the factors that influence those strategic decisions in one place.”

To provide this information, Ray uses graphs to visualize key metrics. These metrics include: number of tickets created by month over the last year to identify seasonality and long-term trends; tickets solved by agent over time to see how those tickets are resolved; and, last but not least, tickets created and solved by week for when a closer look is needed.

Heat maps reveal trends

Ray also found a lot of value in using heat maps. “I use heat maps to see how many tickets are created per hour over the course of an average day, and look at how that map changes over the last twelve weeks. This tells me within what hours of the day tickets tend to be created the most, and if that rate is changing. This information allows me to distribute my resources accordingly.”
The heat map tells Ray which hours of the day require the most resources from his team. He can also look at how tickets come in from different regions across different hours, suggesting that he might need to consider support in a specific language at a certain time of day, for example.

All of these pieces give Ray a good high-level overview of the status of our Customer Support team. As GoodData grows and more customer support tickets come in, Ray can see month-over-month trends and compare them against previous benchmarks to determine the progress made to date and adjust resource allocation accordingly — all from the insights offered by one dashboard in GoodSupport.

Step 2: Streamline Customer Support Operations Through Data

When it comes to the operational performance of the team, Ray relies on a different set of metrics. “I need real-time access to reports at an operational level, including customer support agent performance, customer satisfaction scoring and backlog status.”

Monitor customer support agent performance

To efficiently manage his team, Ray looks at how an average agent performs in terms of tickets closed, response time, satisfaction score, and other metrics. This allows him to understand what to expect if he were to add an additional agent to his team. Ray also requires visibility into individual agents’ performance relative to the average, allowing him to properly reward rockstar agents and make sure his team is achieving their KPIs.

Drive optimal customer satisfaction

Ray is measured on overall customer satisfaction, which requires an intimate understanding of the factors that influence customer satisfaction. As such, he looks at both overall customer satisfaction levels, as well as scores by individual customer support agent – all in the same report. This single report clearly shows Ray the feedback loop, detailing which customers submit tickets, how they are resolved, and how satisfied they are with the outcome so he can identify who needs more attention or support.

Minimize ticket backlog

While he monitors agent performance and customer satisfaction very closely, Ray checks in on ticket backlog a little less frequently. “I like to take a look once or twice a week to make sure we aren’t overlooking any customers’ tickets. I also want to understand the ratio of tickets created vs. solved in a week.”  Ideally, Ray’s team solves more tickets than are created, reducing backlog over time. He has built his backlog report to show which agents or customers are responsible for backlog tickets, flagging any potential problems with a customer or agent so he can manage accordingly.

Using GoodSupport, Ray is able to effectively set the long-term strategy for his team, while monitoring operational performance in real-time, to ensure happy GoodData customers. GoodSupport gives him everything he needs to know, without relying on complex, heavy IT systems or waiting days or weeks for reports to be created. It’s the new approach to customer support, where real-time insights shape the right actions.

If you’re interested in learning how GoodSupport can help you maintain happy customers, give us a call at  (415) 200-0186 or ask to set up a demo.

The post How to Build a Successful Customer Support Strategy Using, Well … Data appeared first on GoodData.

Here are the three steps we’ve found at GoodData to help build long-term, successful customers.

Step 1: Stay in touch
Making a customer successful is an ongoing process –– it requires a commitment to innovation and customer engagement. By working with customers to understand their needs, your company can continually improve while getting buy-in on the roadmap.

To succeed, turn your customers into valuable partners. Reach out to your customers on day one to establish clear communication channels and help them understand next steps. Then, stay in touch regularly. A quiet customer does not mean everything is going smoothly – having an outreach plan will help you catch concerns early and keep customers engaged.

At GoodData, customers have one main point of contact throughout their life cycle. This person can marshal the resources needed to make them successful, and also looks for opportunities to add business value by sharing GoodData improvements.

Step 2: Take advantage of your usage data
Cloud-based businesses have unprecedented access to product-usage data. This data can provide insights into customer behavior that helps you stay ahead of your competition.

To track your growing customer base, build analytics that quickly show usage trends. If a customer’s usage is falling below a baseline, create an alert to contact that customer immediately. Catching and addressing negative trends early is key to retaining your customers.

GoodData tracks usage to identify at-risk and happy users. We have asked some of these customers to write guest blog posts, serve as sales references, and participate in events to share their experience with GoodData.

Step 3: Get a holistic view of customer satisfaction
Customer knowledge lives throughout your company. CRMs, accounting systems, website traffic analytics and other tools contain part of the customer story. But to keep customers onboard, you need to understand their entire experience.

Make sure you identify the data you need and where it exists in your company. Then, create a process to share insights from this information. At GoodData, we pull together sales information, usage data, communications history, satisfaction surveys, and more, and share it across the company to:

• Quickly understand the health of our customer base;
• Increase customer satisfaction and engagement;
• Identify and retain at-risk customers;
• Find upsell and cross-sell opportunities; and
• Efficiently predict and track renewals

Spotlight on customer success
As the SaaS model proliferates, smart customer management is taking center stage. Companies need to build close relationships with customers and leverage technology to stay competitive. Help your customers succeed and you’ll receive a standing ovation.

The post Three Steps to Customer Success in a SaaS World appeared first on GoodData.

Three (More) Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Data

As GoodData’s first “Powered By” partner, it was a pleasure to speak at the Dreamforce 2012 session, “How to Generate Revenue from Your Data.” Since 2010, Get Satisfaction has offered a GoodData – Powered By solution – Community Health Analytics (CHA), – which is now used by more than half of our enterprise customers to monetize their data.

Since the launch of CHA, GoodData has become a core component of our sales and customer engagement process.  Due to the fact that we are able to provide a higher value proposition to our customers, CHA has opened up new opportunities for increased business. Here are three tips on how we turned data into revenue with GoodData:

#1 Build and Sell an Analytics Product (Powered By GoodData)

Get Satisfaction powers customer communities for thousands of businesses. These communities generate a lot of customer data. The challenge becomes how to present this large amount of data to our customers to help them understand the health of their community, the marketing value of word-of-mouth customer content, the effectiveness of community managers, and finally the efficiency of peer-to-peer interaction (or, what we call self-directedness.) Since launching CHA to in 2010, our enterprise customers continue to love it, primarily because it empowers them to analyze, synthesize and transform their data into valuable business insights.

#2 Tell a Value Story in Sales

Due to its strong value proposition to our customers, CHA has become a critical part of our sales process. We use CHA on sales calls and in demos, as it enables us to tell a much stronger ROI story. In addition, CHA is a key component of the customer implementation process as it allows us to set up our new customers with out-of-the-box key success metrics – a significant differentiator in our market. Enterprise clients utilizing GoodData’s platform are not only more likely to renew, but also to grow their relationship with Get Satisfaction.

#3 Expand the Big Data Story

In 2012, we’ve been working on telling an even bigger, “Big Data” story. Here are a few initiatives: Over the summer we released our own primary research that challenged much of the conventional wisdom around social marketing. In November 2012, we plan to release a new solution in partnership with GoodData, called “CHA for Small Business.” This offering is specifically designed to meet the analytics needs of our SMB customers. In addition, we are expanding “network-wide” analytics of Get Satisfaction data to better benchmark customer engagement, satisfaction and loyalty across industries.

We unquestionably attribute our data “smarts” to working with GoodData. They were not only integral to building our product, but also in building Get Satisfaction’s analytic capability and company DNA.

Scott Hirsch is Get Satisfaction’s Vice President of Product Marketing and Business Development. He is responsible for defining Get Satisfaction’s go-to-market product strategy, as well as strategic partnership development. Prior to joining Get Satisfaction, Scott was co-founder of a boutique strategy consultancy that brought design principles to exploration of greenfield products and business models for global 1000 clients. His clients included Rodale Publishing, Telefonica, Nokia, and British Telecom.

The post Three (More) Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Data appeared first on GoodData.

 - Adrian McDermott, Vice President, Product and Engineering

Zendesk is a cloud based help desk company with over 10,000 customers, thousands of product trials each month and uber amounts of business data to wade through each month. Tying the data together in a logical and readable manner use to be a long and complicated process, but now, thanks to GoodData, Zendesk  has the metrics that drive their business front-and-center throughout their company – revenues, customers, trials, conversions, product usage.  Zendesk’sDirector of Business Analytics states, “GoodData has successfully positioned us to derive meaningful insights from our subscription data.”

After a six-week implementation, Zendesk had its first set of revenue and subscriber dashboards, which reinforced long-held assumptions about the business and uncovered a few surprises about customer behavior. Read more about what Zendesk learned through their GoodData reports and dashboards HERE.

How has GoodData changed the way you do business?  What GoodData dashboard helps you make important business decisions?  Tell us your GoodData story and you could be our next featured success story.

The post Customer Story: Zendesk Measures Their Business One Dashboard At A Time appeared first on GoodData.

The 800 Zendesk accounts – and over 1,800 Zendesk users – who have used it so far agree that it’s a pretty powerful way to measure your help desk.

My favorite part of working with such an active and engaged customer base is that we figured out how to crowdsource BI apps. Nine months ago, we knew little about measuring helpdesks, but now I can confidently say that thanks to Anthony, Travis, Beth, Steven, Ryan, Ann, Gary, Mike, Sarah, Renee, Larry, Lindsey, John and dozens of others, we’re pretty darn good at it.

We take inspiration from Howard Dresner’s Wisdom of the Crowds approach to understanding what analytics are about in the real world. Don’t believe the vendor-analyst information duopoly.

Next up … a crowdsourced app for Salesforce Sales analytics – ping me if you want a beta invite.

The post Introducing the New GoodData for Zendesk appeared first on GoodData.

Here are my top 5 dashboards that our partners are already offering to their customers.

1) Get Satisfaction Community Health Analytics

We created four basic metrics to measure any online community – all in plain english. We blogged about it here, and you can hear Scott at Get Satisfaction explain them here, too.

2) Aurix Customer Contact Analysis

Aurix is a pretty cool company that interprets phonetic speech. They are analyzing call center data from the audio data itself, which is often more accurate than call center rep’s interpretation of speech.

3) Zendesk Mashups

Zendesk is offering GoodData for free to over 1,000 companies. Some of them are mashing up Zendesk with Salesforce CRM to see their help desk from the perspective of their sales pipeline. You can see a live mashup dashboard here.

4) Brightidea Innovation Analytics

Brightidea helps their customers monitor the social process of innovation from concept to cash. That’s ideas-in, dollars-out.

5) Pardot Marketing Analytics

Pardot’s customers are hungry for metrics around their marketing funnel, campaign performance, nurturing success. Now they can see it all live!

Let us know what you want to show on your embedded dashboards!

The post My Five Favorite Partner Dashboards appeared first on GoodData.

San Francisco, CA—Zendesk, a web-based customer support software provider, announced an integration with GoodData, an on-demand reporting and analytics provider, that delivers powerful dashboards and advanced analytics to Zendesk customers.

GoodData for Zendesk enables companies to gain business insight into their customer support activity, improve key support metrics such as customer satisfaction, agent performance, and ticket resolution, and easily analyze the results.

“GoodData for Zendesk gives us a customized view into our Zendesk activity without having to struggle with complex reporting or analytics products,” said Rob Holmes of New Zealand Post. “With just a few mouse clicks, we can see details of our support activity by type or resolution time, and even see how our backlog changes over time.”

GoodData for Zendesk allows customers to:

• View dashboards and reports that are automatically updated daily with the latest Zendesk ticket data
• Access pre-built dashboards on support ticket creation and resolution, agent performance, and top trends
• “Slice and dice” data with all standard and custom ticket fields
• Collaborate and share custom projects, reports and results with colleagues and management via email, PDF, CSV, or embedded into websites

“At GoodData, we’re on a mission to take the BS out of BI, and delivering dashboards directly to Zendesk customers is a great start,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “Now Zendesk customers can measure the health of their support channels without going through Excel or BI hell.”

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so all businesses want to be able to apply metrics to their customer support efforts, but until now business intelligence has been synonymous with painful, expensive software implementations,” said Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk. “Fortunately, those days are over. Now our customers can add advanced analytics with one click. It couldn’t be easier.”

The GoodData business intelligence offering is available today for Zendesk Plus+ customers only at no additional charge.

For more information, visit http://www.zendesk.com/gooddata.

About GoodData

GoodData is the first company to offer a complete business intelligence platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS), providing our customers and partners operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at http://www.gooddata.com.

About Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading provider of web-based customer support software that is reinventing how companies engage with their customers. The company serves more than 5,000 businesses large and small, including Twitter, MSNBC, Lonely Planet and SAP. Zendesk products are easy to customize, integrate, and use so companies can quickly start offering better customer service. Founded in 2007, Zendesk is funded by Charles River Ventures and Benchmark Capital.  Learn more at http://www.zendesk.com

The post Zendesk and GoodData Bring Business Intelligence to Customer Support appeared first on GoodData.

1. We don’t see customer metrics on a regular basis

Nowhere does Peter Drucker’s quote resonate more than here. If front-line marketers, sales managers and customer service folks cannot see the metrics that matter for the business, how can they actually improve? Customer Analytics should be an open and visual part of your business. BI and analytics have been shrouded in secrecy for too long – sensitive data around finance and operations weren’t right for sharing, and it used to take a PhD in statistics to understand any report. But no longer – you want everyone interacting with customers to understand the underlying business. Give everyone access to the metrics that define your business; take analytics out of the grasp of the specialists and get it into the hands of people who can use it to improve the business.

2. Anecdotes are more common than facts in our company

Stories drive how companies engage with their customers. Marketing campaigns are lauded by their creativity and wit. Effective selling is guided by heroic wins from the field. And customer service excellence is measured by the raves that line the walls of call centers. While these anecdotes are critical to any business, equally important are the facts that surround customers. Many companies value anecdotes over facts – and make poor decisions by an over-reliance on anecdotes. The best marketing campaigns, sales efforts and customer service methods are the ones that cost-effectively deliver the best results – and facts not anecdotes tell you that.

3. Marketing tracks the leads, sales tracks the pipeline, and support follows the help desk

Companies tend to silo their customer analytics data departmentally. Marketers have sophisticated web analytics and marketing campaign tools. Sales departments track their pipeline and sales rep performance. Professional services, help desks, warranty departments, even finance and accounting all track customer engagement separately. The problem is that everyone benefits when they can view the metrics across the customer lifecycle. For example, marketing needs to understand the campaigns that drive the right opportunities for sales, sales needs to know if its signing new customers that are expensive to support. Siloed data is a huge deterrent to effective customer analytics.

4. We don’t understand these metrics

There is a cottage industry of consultants and experts who preach complex metrics to track customer success. Be wary of anything beyond teenage math, and any metric that cannot be explained to your friends. Very often, it’s the simplest and most obvious metrics that provide the greatest insight into what’s right and wrong about your customer relationships [we’re spending more on support but our sat is going down; poor sales forecasting is causing delays in production; it costs $500 to acquire that customer, and she’s only going to pay us $250]. Maybe you have some of these simple symptoms – do you actually know? Specialization can be the enemy of insight. I’m not poo-pooing the power of deep and rich analytics, which have an important and growing influence for specialists like consumer and web marketers, but for the other 90% of the world, keep is simple.

5. Our CEO talks about driving a metrics-driven culture

Leaders who are successful in driving a focus on metrics recognize the importance of corporate culture. Metrics-driven businesses need employees to embrace the numbers. If your CEO and other business leaders identify the metrics that matter, review them regularly in meetings, and highlight corporate efforts to improve the numbers, then your company is well on its way to being metrics-driven. Listen to your leadership and adopt the culture of metrics.

Recognizing these symptoms through your customer relationships is often the first major step to adopting Customer Analytics and becoming a metrics-driven organization.

The post 5 Symptoms You Are Ready for Customer Analytics appeared first on GoodData.