A look at the technology that will take your data analysis from “stuck” to “soaring.”
Enterprise organizations that hope to better understand their business have more access to information than ever before. Data can come from a multitude of sources, with very little lag time between when it is collected and when it is delivered to the analysts who will leverage it.
The problem that analytics and business users have faced for years isn’t the availability of data, but how they analyze and extract insights from that data. The current state of data analysis is manual, non-standardized, time-constrained, and biased.
And the problem of data analysis isn’t limited to analytics and insights teams, it creates a snowball effect that affects the entire organization.
In this blog we’ll talk about the current state of data analysis and how AnswerRocket aims to simplify data analysis and democratize insights for all.
The Vicious Cycle of Data Analysis
Companies usually have no shortage of tools that they’ve invested in, dashboards to access, recurring reports to review, and other tools that they can review to evaluate their performance, but this typically only gets them so far. These views of data typically prompt follow-up questions and require further exploration to understand:
What is going on?
Why is this metric up or down?
These are questions that business users or key decision makers who are trying to take an action can’t easily answer on their own. This means they then have to involve an analyst or insight team member who has to dig into the data, compile supplemental data, evaluate it, interpret it, and then translate it into an answer that the business user can understand.
Analysts, Business Users, Executives and more can all relate to the “vicious cycle” of gleaning insights from their organization’s data.
This then prompts more follow up questions, and the vicious cycle continues. This process is currently very time-consuming, and inefficient.
Why Does This Matter?
Organizations that are stuck in this vicious cycle are likely experiencing one or more of these side effects as a result:
- Wasted time and resources
- Wrong strategies and tactics in the market
- Missed company targets
- Vulnerability to competitors
The challenge to analysts and insights leaders is, “How do we get people the answers they need, FASTER?”
Faster insights means better, informed business decisions can be made more quickly, which can mean the difference between outpacing your competitors or getting left behind.
Who Does the Vicious Cycle Affect?
The vicious cycle of data analysis is a broad enterprise problem that doesn’t just stop at the analysts’ desks. At the core of this challenge is the fact that despite the vast amounts of data available, gleaning actionable insights remains a significant stumbling block.
- For executives, this cycle means strategic decisions are often delayed or are based on incomplete insights, potentially resulting in poor market tactics or even missing crucial business targets.
- Business users, typically in need of quick answers for operational decisions, find themselves stuck in a loop of follow-up questions for which they are often reliant on analysts to help answer.
- Analysts, entrusted with the task of data analysis and interpretation, often find themselves overwhelmed by the demands of multiple stakeholders, which they juggle alongside business-critical initiatives.
- For data scientists, this process can be particularly frustrating as the tools and dashboards they’ve crafted, while advanced, still don’t yield the streamlined, quick insights the business desperately seeks.
What do these personas need to break out of the vicious cycle?
What Does the Vicious Cycle Look Like in Real Life?
Global Pharma Manufacturer
This pharmaceutical manufacturer has been trying to understand their performance in the market, as it relates to the sales team’s performance.
They have a huge sales force that is in the field talking to doctors and hospitals on a regular basis, promoting the company’s prescriptions. The ability to analyze the efforts of this sales force to see what’s working, what isn’t working and change tactics on the fly is crucial to the success of the company.
Up until now, they have never been able to combine their market performance with what their sales time is doing. Questions like:
- How is our sales team impacting a change in the market?
- Does more prescriptions written equate to more share in the market?
AnswerRocket developed the omnichannel sales driver copilot, combining data that has never been combined in the past: market performance + sales teams efforts. Sales leaders can now see what’s working, what’s not, what’s driving growth, what to avoid, all with the goal to drive additional share gains.
By implementing this copilot and follow up questions, this allows them to pinpoint regions or districts that are struggling (to help) or pinpoint areas that are succeeding and implement what they’re doing in other areas.
Global Beverage Leader
This multinational enterprise has prioritized working with brand equity data to drive their global marketing efforts and pricing strategies. This data captures how consumers perceive their brands in the marketplace.
In the past, someone like the CMO might ask “why is brand equity down in Europe?” and then everyone would drop what they’re doing and try their best to tell a story from very complex data.
Their data provider partner does not currently have great tools for storytelling. They have dashboards, but that’s it.
With the Max brand guidance copilot, they can glean insights and answer questions faster than ever before, taking a 21-day process each quarter down to just 5 days (a 75% reduction).
Previously, it was nearly impossible to keep a “real time pulse” on what was going on in the marketplace. But now that they’re able to cut out about 4 business weeks of wait time, they’re able to be as agile as they want to be.
How are We Breaking the Vicious Cycle?
With our first-of-its-kind AI assistant for data analysis, Max, we put the power of data analysis in the hands of everyone in your organization, not just a select few. No matter your role, your technical experience, or what your insights goals are, Max is here to help.
By integrating with the power of GPT with AnswerRocket, Max allows users a chat-based analytics experience that allows them to ask questions in basic, conversational English, and get answers back in plain English. By getting “beyond the dashboard” and avoiding complex reports, there is no longer a steep learning curve.
This element of self-service allows business users and executives to investigate changes on their own, and ask follow up questions on the fly for deeper insights.
Check out this 90-second Max demo below to see more of what Max can do.
Bringing Max to the Enterprise
At AnswerRocket, we have been working with each individual customer to thoroughly understand the problems they’re experiencing. Each customer situation is nuanced, and has a workflow that we need to fit into.
We like to understand:
- What is the current state of data analysis in the organization?
- What should the future state of data analysis look like?
- What is their vision for what an AI assistant could do?
- What should the output look like?
- What insights are they missing today that they would like to have?
The process is very consultative and individualized.
We are trying to understand the skills that are required to solve each customer problem. Information such as what are the data sources and formats, how do we insert our tool to make it a seamless part of their existing workflow?
In this way, we can co-create a purpose-built analytics copilot that addresses our customer’s needs head on.
Max is helping to achieve the AnswerRocket mission more than ever before, automating meaningful insights to help decision-makers take action, faster.
