Bunchball games itself with Alteryx to blend data and add value
- Summary:
- Bunchball's gamification may be well known but it requires complex analytics. Alteryx helps sift the data so that analysts spend more time adding value.
Bunchball has enjoyed good success with its gamification software but the company always knew it would end up tracking very large amounts of data at a fine grain level. It doesn't stop there.
Bunchball needs to track data across multiple systems so that it can provide a rounded out picture of performance and outcomes. An example might be the call center where the client wants to measure how employees are progressing through learning. Keith Conley, Director, Analytics & Insight at Bunchball says:
We knew we need to absorb external data into the Bunchball environment and typically this is client data. In the employee learning case for instance, you won't likely find compliance metrics inside the learning management system. Just aggregating the data wasn't easy for us. Blending and enriching the data was also a challenge.
Spreadsheets are a common way of building data models but these present their own problems. Conley's team were building ever more complex VLOOKUPs and the challenge was to make them responsive to changes in the data.
Outliers were costing us the most amount of time in a team that is lean in the first place. We wouldn't know the end result from the skewing of outliers. So even though we could solve for outliers in the end, there was no real way to efficiently and confidently exclude outliers. That in turn meant we had an issue scaling our analytical operations to meet the needs of a growing customer population.
Having Alteryx available to not only aggregate but also blend and cleanse the data made a significant difference.
We gave guidance to over 75 clients and improved service for over 20% of our top customers. These are Fortune 200 customers so you can probably tell - they're pretty big and correspondingly demanding. We were able to expand services but without the need to expand physical resources. This has meant that our customer relationships have become both strategic and scalable.
For the future Alteryx helps Bunchball demonstrate its value as a strategic partner for end to end solutions that incorporate gamification. But what advice would Conley offer others considering the use of Alteryx for complex data management?
Any organization that wants to add information value should recognize there is often a disparity between spending time blending, cleaning and aggregating data and then being time constrained when it comes to understanding the value in the information. Once you see that then choosing a tool like Alteryx becomes easy.