The Challenge
A regional utility cooperative experienced rapid growth that led to the creation of 3 distinct lines of business. As a result, customer data was collected and stored in siloed applications that limited our customer’s ability to identify actionable insights and inform their strategy. Realizing the untapped power of this disparate data, the organization’s leaders sought a partner in developing a data strategy to gain a holistic view across the business and assess opportunities for growth.
The Opportunity
Point B collaborated with the cooperative to develop a holistic data strategy, design and build a cloud-based data architecture, harness their data to create a unified Customer 360 profile, and uncover key customer and product insights. Our dynamic team brought operations, utilities, data & analytics, and tech transformation expertise together to ensure success. In addition, Point B leveraged data products methodology to prioritize business objectives, build dimensional models, and successfully deploy this multiphase solution.
Our Approach
We assessed the current state data systems to identify gaps and develop a clear vision and strategy for the data and analytics initiative. This assessment quickly identified high-impact data quality issues that our team provided personalized recommendations to offset. These issues stemmed from three lines of business storing customer data separately in siloed applications, limiting a holistic 360 customer view of customer at the enterprise level. After sharing our findings, we designed and implemented a new data warehouse to integrate customer and utilization data across multiple lines of business. This data warehouse enabled the development of a customer matching algorithm to identify accounts by unique customer or family.
As our customer’s data capabilities expanded, we provided intensive analytic and data governance training in addition to a personalized data governance program. Following these activities, the cooperative is now able to fully harness their data, gaining a 360 view of their customer and product insights.
The cooperative is now able to fully harness their data, gaining a 360 view of their customer and product insights.
Project Results
Our client has already experienced significant improvements in customer insights and data visibility through the implementation of Point B's solutions. By optimizing their data strategy, our client established a clear baseline for their total customer base, gained the ability to monitor new customer acquisition and churn, and performed in-depth segmentation analyses based on demographics and service locations. They were also able to identify next-best service offerings for existing customers, conduct various sentiment analyses and forecast call volumes. These outcomes, along with other key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards, were made possible through our solution.
Key enhancements included:
- Simplified data: A centralized, cloud-based data warehouse and trained internal staff operating under an established data governance framework, resulting in simplified and reliable data access.
- Improved insights: 6 customer service dashboards offering detailed customer profiles, account linkages, and historical usage patterns to generate actionable insights.
- Better tracking: An integrated customer-matching algorithm that accurately identifies customer accounts, even across households, for improved tracking and analytics.
Looking ahead, we continue to partner with the utility cooperative to further leverage their data assets. This next phase focuses on expanding insights into other core business functions such as call center operations, sentiment analysis, workforce scheduling, work order management, labor productivity, power demand forecasting, and digital transaction trends.
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