Customer Story

Prepping Data for Single Click Use Enables Engage2Excel to Provide Better Customer Experience

Company Overview

Engage2Excel (E2E) is a career experience company providing recruitment, onboarding, employee recognition, manager development, and employee survey solutions tailored to a specific organization and designed to help clients find and keep their talent.

Problem: New tool, old data make for not so accessible reporting

E2E—a career experience company—provides employee recognition software designed to allow an organization to engage, celebrate, and reward its employees, as well as provide strategic analysis of how to better find and retain their talent.

The company collected a lot of data from various clients through their engagement platform but didn’t have a formal BI strategy to manage that data. As a result, they lacked the ability to perform enterprise reporting and quickly understand which clients were using their engagement products, which client employees were ordering incentive rewards and track which items were most popular, and monitor overall business trends related to the quantity and type of recognition products their clients were using.

E2E also did not have standard reporting software, which led to the inability to quickly provide analysis to individual clients on how their recognition programs were performing. They, instead, were creating ad hoc reporting with structures customized for each client. This was time consuming as it required intervention from database admins who needed to go back to disparate source tables to find the relevant fields, many of which did not have standardized naming conventions.

E2E decided to move to Tableau to address their reporting needs but needed help with prepping their data so that they can realize the full value of a modern BI platform.

Solution: Data: Ready, Prep, Go

E2E had already decided on Tableau as the BI platform and Tableau Prep as the ETL tool to extract data from their legacy source systems—two in the U.S. and two in Canada—and prep it for analytical use. Analytics8 was brought in to help with the data engineering process.

The first step was to compile relevant source data into a SQL table in each of their on-premise SQL servers. Analytics8 took this data and built a pipeline that combined these tables into a cohesive, BI-ready dataset by cleaning relevant fields, removing extraneous data, and automating data preparation with scheduled tasks.

Next, we documented the flow of data from source (engagement apps) to target (BI-ready dataset), both conceptually (flow chart) and on a field-by-field basis. We took this BI-ready data and built Tableau dashboards that could ultimately be used by both internal and external stakeholders; the dashboards we built focused on the quantity and type of recognitions sent and received by employees at each E2E client.

We built one Tableau Prep flow (which consists of a combination of ETL steps) for each area of E2E’s business—employee recognitions sent, products ordered by E2E clients, client logins to E2E portals, and social media engagement by clients on E2E platforms. By creating a series of these ‘flows,’ Analytics8 enabled E2E to create a single source of truth for each distinct business area. These tables ultimately make it easier to then analyze their business’ data in Tableau or for advanced data science purposes in the future. We also built out a row-level security solution within Tableau to allow each client to access the same single dataset while only exposing the relevant data to each client.

Finally, we built a dashboard summarizing all the recognitions that were sent globally across clients because E2E lacked the in-house expertise necessary to build modern BI reports. This included both high-level KPI and trends summaries as well as a detailed, row-by-row breakdown for clients that needed to export the data for their own internal reporting.

Results: Single Click, Single Source of Truth Yields Reports Everyone Can Use

By creating an efficient data pipeline that provides a single source of truth for all reporting, E2E can now see—with a single click—a summary of how recognitions are trending across their business. E2E can gain insight into their key KPIs across their business, such as:

  • Analyzing the pace and growth of recognitions offered across clients. This helps E2E understand the quantity and quality of client engagement with their recognition products and helps clients get easier access to their own data for their own reporting.
  • Understanding the products their clients are ordering, so that E2E can be more proactive about filling and routing customer orders.
  • Tracking overall engagement by client employees, so that E2E can better assess the direction of KPIs that affect their business, namely the overall growth of recognitions and growth in product orders.

The solution has also saved E2E a lot of time, allowing for reporting based on ready-made datasets rather than going to source data each time to build manual PowerPoint reports, which before took hours to complete. Users can easily see how the business is trending without engaging database admins or subject matter experts. It also provides a better user experience for clients because they won’t have to rely on E2E representatives to send them manual reports on their recognition and employee engagement.

E2E can now offer a better engagement experience for its own business users, as well as for their clients.

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