JPMorgan Chase chooses Tableau to enable self-service analytics, keeping up with rapid industry changes

Business groups wanted to feel empowered to solve problems and answer questions of their own data, while adhering to financial services industry compliance and regulations, along with internal data governance standards. For a long time, the business relied on legacy tools like Excel and SQL Server. However, this ecosystem created inefficiencies and replication of data, resulting in confusion and inaccuracies. With business intelligence solutions like Cognos or Business Objects, it also took months to assess campaigns for effectiveness. A platform balancing IT governance and data access, but addressing business priorities with immediacy, was needed. With new team leadership, IT removed data barriers for business groups and worked with Compliance, Audit, and Risk to develop a governance solution using Tableau. “I would rather create a platform that allows the business to solve their own problems, because we (IT) will never know them all. That’s how I’ve approached our Tableau usage, simply because it allows them to connect to and analyze their own data, which they were already doing,” explained Steven Hittle, Vice President and BI Innovation Leader. Providing Tableau access when people had the desire to try something new, JPMC enabled governed self-service at enterprise scale. The Center of Excellence (COE) team played an important role with adoption and continues to set the vision for Tableau and analytics use across JPMC. Eight individuals trained 1,200 new developers and analysts on the platform throughout all of 2017, creating grassroots momentum and sparking interest that’s led to nearly 215,000 current users. With the COE’s help to motivate and train users with classroom learning and Tableau Days (a full-day session with Tableau sales and bank staff collaborating on Tableau), steady wins occurred and created a positive, virtuous cycle of data analytics. “I think that’s been the biggest contributor to Tableau’s success at JPMC...it evolved from nothing to where we are today because people want to use it, and not because IT went off in a bubble,” reinforced Jason Mack, Director of Analytics. The bank has 18 Tableau Server clusters where they monitor usage, performance, and key metrics to make sure everyone is satisfied, there is sufficient data capacity and efficiencies are realized. By allowing analysts across business teams to question data with Tableau, JPMC has also reduced manual reporting time from months to weeks, which saved thousands of hours and created better enterprise-wide decision-making with elevated transparency. Analysts to C-level executives have gained more time and access to think about data’s impact on the business, have more capacity to innovate and have set more consistent definition of metrics to better understand the journey that customers take with the bank.

While business teams reviewed analytics (e.g., measuring account-specific data and retail data), they struggled with viewing the whole customer and their end-to-end journey. Tableau now acts as the front-end for customer analytics and Marketing has built robust data sets tying the line of business relationships like products, marketing, and service touch points with customer data to evaluate overall customer relationship worth.

“We put a Tableau front-end on our robust customer data sets that enable analysts to quickly ask questions like ‘how many customers have a Freedom and a checking account and use the mobile wallet,’” explained Jason. This arms JPMC with insights to improve customer satisfaction while growing its customer base.

When launching campaigns, the Marketing team analyzes population data in Tableau to determine optimal targeting. And the operations side looks at customer journey analytics to understand process breaks. It’s important to see why and where customers abandon an action with the bank or where there are key volumes on channels so product improvements can be made. “There are call center metrics. There are website analytics. Everything you can think of from a customer experience where we’re trying to improve customer satisfaction,” added Steven. The outcome is quick wins versus putting items on a roadmap to eventually be addressed.

Marketing also supports JPMC’s retail branches with Tableau dashboards to better understand their market. For instance, certain dashboards help better prospect small businesses. And they’re delivering greater detail on home sales and realtor activity to inform select programs and customer targeting. There’s now a piloted rollout of Tableau to branch staff such as Private Client Bankers and Home Lending Advisors that will eventually include all 5,300+ branches.