Unacademy Scales Data Analytics and Makes Data-Driven Decisions in Near Real-Time
Tableau seamlessly combines multiple sources of data to provide a single source of truth on learner and educator behavior
Adoption of Tableau has scaled to include nearly 25% of the company’s workforce
Shared performance dashboards like the Marketing Performance Tracker have reduced reporting time from weeks to hours
Unacademy, India’s largest online learning platform (Source: The Indian Edtech Story: Q1 2022 Round-up by Markelytics), aims to democratize education. The company makes learning fun and easy with live and recorded classes from the country's best educators and products and services such as test preparation and one-on-one mentorships.
Since its establishment in 2015, Unacademy has achieved phenomenal growth and now has more than 90,000 registered educators and over 92 million users. Tableau helps to inform the company’s strategy to grow even further and maintain its advantage in the highly competitive edtech space.
Tableau has also made business intelligence more scalable and is now used daily by more than 1,300 employees to make sense of their data and optimize performance.
Data is an essential element of our business and used to drive all kinds of decisions, big and small. That’s why it’s important for all employees to have access to reliable and updated data and for data to be presented in a way that’s easy to understand.
Scaling data analytics
Unacademy previously managed reporting and analysis with spreadsheets. However, this became unsustainable as the company grew and began to generate vast amounts of data.
Needing a robust business intelligence tool, Unacademy evaluated multiple options before selecting Tableau. In addition to its capacity to handle large volumes of data, Tableau met the company’s requirement for a solution that was easy to deploy and use. The ability to automate and schedule data refreshes in Tableau also meant data could be kept up to date with minimal support from the engineering team.
Unacademy implemented Tableau Online in 2017, bringing together a number of data sources to establish a single source truth for all learner and educator behavior as well as activities such as sales and marketing.
The analytics team created a number of visualizations to start with and provided access to a limited number of users. Since then, adoption has scaled to include nearly all departments and almost 25% of the company’s workforce.
Supported by regular training and resources like an internal wiki, employees have also been empowered to analyze data on their own.
In the past, everyone depended heavily on the analytics team for even the smallest of data points or insights. With the introduction of Tableau, employees across all departments are equipped to analyze data.
Driving performance and ROI
Unacademy has now successfully democratized data, enabling employees at all levels to make data-driven decisions in near real-time.
The product team is one of several using Tableau to understand and optimize performance. For example, the team has dashboards to track the adoption of products by different types of users. They can drill down to identify which features are most popular and which need refining. They can also identify and prioritize opportunities to improve the user experience.
Manindra Mohan, Senior Vice President of Analytics, shared that the speed to insight provided by Tableau is especially important following the launch of new products.
“As soon as we launch any new product or initiative, everyone is impatient for the data. If we introduce a new test preparation category, for example, product and marketing teams want to understand adoption across regions and know what’s working or what’s not in respect to product features or marketing campaigns,” said Manindra.
Marketing uses Tableau more broadly to analyze the effectiveness of various channels and identify which drive the most acquisition and conversion. The team can then use these insights to optimize returns from their marketing spend.
Marketing also reduced reporting time from weeks to hours with a new Marketing Performance Tracker that gives the CEO’s office visibility of performance. The team achieved a savings of 30+ hours or the equivalent of 80% reduction in turn-around-time.
Other key dashboards help Unacademy to maintain its high standards and deliver high quality education. For example, there are dashboards to track and rank the performance of classes and another to ensure educators receive timely payment. These things combine to help Unacademy incentivize educators and retain the top talent.
Accelerating momentum
The analytics team has leveraged the integration of Tableau and Slack to automate the flow of data and deliver insights straight to the hands of employees. The company now has nearly 100 channels in Slack with different slices of data that are refreshed as often as every 15 minutes. This is especially convenient for senior executives and means they always have access to the latest performance data, including actual and projected revenue.
In the future, the analytics team expects data analytics to become even easier for employees. For example, advances in natural language processing will make it possible to access personalized insights quickly without the help of a data analyst.
“We feel confident that data analytics will continue to gain momentum and will be at the core of technological and business execution,” said Manindra. “Tableau, with its scale and penchant for innovation, will play a big role and serve as a medium to make sense of increasingly complex data, build holistic views of company performance, and ensure data consistency and security.”