A Study in Business Intelligence Vendor Selection

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A Study in Business Intelligence Vendor Selection

A Study in BI Vendor Selection

The Problem:

Customers typically had multiple service tickets open at any given time, but Hiperos customer service reps were not able to gather quickly and report on information customers wanted: how many tickets were open, the status of each and/or how long it was taking to close them. CEO Greg Dickinson was also unable to see how well and efficiently his company was responding to client needs.

The Search:

The team looked at numerous BI solutions but steered clear of any that required too much development on the client end. “We had experimented with another vendor a few years ago, but you had to be a programmer to create the charts and graphs and drill downs, etc.,” says Dickinson. “I learned from that mistake. I really don’t want to be in the analytics business.” Hiperos also needed a solution that would integrate with Salesforce.com and one that would allow him to keep his client’s sensitive data housed on site, rather than in the cloud.

The Solution:

Birst’s BI technology, which extracts the relevant data captured by Salesforce.com and uses advanced analytics to provide customers’ service reps with instant access to the status of tickets. Dickinson’s dashboard allows him to monitor how well customers are being serviced, as well as how Hiperos is doing relative to its competitors on a variety of metrics.

The Opportunity:

After deploying the solution to solve the initial challenge, Dickinson realized Hiperos could embed Birst technology into one of their flagship products, Hiperos 3rd Party Management, offering customers easy, self-service access to enterprise-class analytics, with real-time dashboards with drill-down capability to analyze data from multiple sources and better manage their third-party providers.

The Result:

Service reps can quickly prioritize their workload, give customers critical information and close tickets more efficiently. The metrics Hiperos uses to measure response to customer needs have improved by 30 percent in the 18 months since implementation. Revenue is up, thanks to the new BI analytics embedded in its flagship offering. Accountability has also improved with the more transparent system, and Dickinson’s dashboard alerts him to problem areas that need immediate action. He is also able to better delight his customers.

When prepping for a call with a Fortune 500 customer, he can quickly review recent activity with his service department. “I can see their relationship with us. Are they utilizing us? How often? Is usage up, down, sideways?” he says. “I don’t walk into a conversation like that uninformed of the possibility of a problem. Or the opposite—maybe they’re doing so well, we can do something strategic with that on [the] growth side. I don’t have five hours to prep for a customer meeting; but if I can quickly get some tangible nuggets and articulate that to them, that’s very impressive to them.”