Take Corilus, where I used to work at as a BI developer as an example. Corilus builds, sells and supports software for the medical professional: general practioners, pharmacists, nurses and midwives and so on. To be a one stop shop for their customer, they also sell, install and maintain the hardware that runs the software.
At the strategic level, management decided to focus on Customer Delight.
To support this strategy, two key departments were at the forefront of interactions with our customers ensuring their delight: the customer care department and the after-sales department. The customer care department took care of incoming support calls. If these calls are about the software they pick them up themselves. If the calls are about hardware they distribute them to their colleagues of the after-sales department to plan an intervention to solve the customers issue.
On the operational front, they have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to service the customers. Customer care heavily leans on highly trained employees to troubleshoot whille taking the customers call, who is often blocked by the issue they are experiencing. To relieve these specialized people from this kind of high pressure calls they also write manuals, record webinars and organize trainings. After sales has vans for onsite installations and repairs. They track their work in tablets.
Information about these customer interactions of both departments is captured in a custom CRM linked to Venice accounting software for customer master data and invoicing. These signals include information from support cases, technical interventions, sales calls and more.
Once registered in this CRM, I modeled these events in our BI tool for in-depth analysis. This analysis paved the way for well-informed decisions, whether it involved refining processes, updating workflows, or enhancing data quality in our accounting system to be able to link more data together.
Incremental improvement was our mantra. As processes and source systems evolved, I ensured that new data fields integrated into our data model and data visualization dashboards. This allowed us to gauge the impact of our changes and whether they aligned with our goals.
Remember, business intelligence isn't a one-off project: it's a continuous cycle of improvement.
Of course the Customer Care and After Sales don't work in a vacuum. They support the software that is built by the R&D engineers, and that is sold by the Sales colleagues. The servers, screens, mouses, keyboards and so on are purchased in large volumes at the harware supplier and stored in the warehouse. Finance sends invoices and tracks payments. Marketing and HR support these activities with their expertise. And all the wile, a keen eye has to be kept on where the market of this type of software is going.
Connecting all these considerations is what make BI projects so valuable - and fun to work on.
