The art of sharing knowledge
‘The Tribe combines and enriches incoming data, and converts it into data products,’ says Chapter Lead Bart Cloosen. ‘It enables people to make better decisions, instead of just relying on their gut feeling, and also improves the output of our systems.’ Together with his colleague Maike van den Berg, Bart is responsible for the front end of this process. ‘Our team of 40 “data artists” makes sure that users are offered the most relevant data in the best possible way.’
Financial performance
VodafoneZiggo management is extremely interested in how customers, employees and shareholders perceive and rate our brands. Besides monitoring this aspect, management also keeps a close eye on matters such as financial performance. The data reports for the management are therefore somewhat more detailed in this respect.
Team and individual level
The team managers benefit from completely different information, not least a clear overview of their team. How’s everyone performing? Are the training courses going well? And what kind of progress is the team making? The managers want to monitor the progress of the team as a whole, but especially progress at an individual level. An overview designed to reveal everyone's development helps get the right conversations started with team members.
Everything clearly laid out
All this data is collected and shared via apps; Qlik apps. 'The word “app” is a bit misleading,' Bart continues. 'Qlik is a solution that enables us to create and analyse interactive data visualisations. It’s drag-and-drop, intuitive, and straightforward. It has everything; web pages with dashboards presenting all kinds of information at a glance. A handy graph comparing this quarter's sales figures with last year's performance. Or a meter that displays the number of customer contacts via chat in real-time. It does it all.'
Personalised dashboard
'In principle, we can output endless quantities of user data. However, not only does our privacy watchdog not allow this, what would people do with it all anyway? A user needs to see exactly the information which is relevant to them. To achieve this, we design dashboards to be as personal as possible, and apply levels of authorisation. Depending on your role in the company, this determines your access to data from all your digital devices.'
Designing data presentation
'Our tribe studies the best way to present data from a source system. It’s not helpful to make one big table or a thousand small tables from the data, so we find a compromise and model it. Our specialists then get involved and ensure that data is presented to users in a captivating way, rather than a series of boring tables they have to browse through.'
Stimulate appetite
From interactive charts to engaging maps, ‘tasteful visualisation’ is key for Bart and Maike's teams. While we’re talking about flavours, he has another nice metaphor. 'A restaurant has lots of ingredients in the kitchen, but it doesn’t do anything for customers’ appetites if they’re all served on a plate at the same time. They have to be made into dishes with good flavours. That’s what we do with Qlik.'
Colour-blind
Qlik is a standard design software that basically anyone can use to create apps. 'We’ve completely adapted it to our liking, so that it can be exploited to the maximum for VodafoneZiggo. For example, we have guidelines on which colours are used. This ensures a consistent VodafoneZiggo look and also allows us to use strong contrasts in the designs so that colour-blind colleagues can still read the data correctly. There are also clear guidelines about where things should be positioned, based on how people read a screen, among other aspects.'
More data, fewer reports
Bart is quite clear that Qlik works well. ‘Although I say it myself, we're doing pretty well. We used to have 10,000 reports at one point, most of which were Excel sheets and other outdated information products. We’ve now reduced that mountain to about 350 apps. More than 3,000 people at VodafoneZiggo use it. Some use it every month, some daily, and some as often as they check their inbox. We have a couple of other applications that are also fed with data from Qlik. One of these is used by all internal and external VodafoneZiggo contact centre staff; that's another 3,000.'
Star rating
To conclude, Qlik helps technicians improve the service they provide. ‘While they’re working, they see data that is relevant at that moment. For example, a customer review using a star rating system, so they can see immediately after a visit how satisfied their customer was. This enables them to continually adjust their service independently. By working together and using data smartly, we make our company better.’
Note:
In the meanwhile Bart has found a new job at another department at VodafoneZiggo. Are you interested in all career opportunities in our organisation?