Finnish Telecom Provider DNA centralizes data and enables self-service analytics for 1,000+ users with Tableau

DNA is a Finnish Telecommunications company offering cellular and landline phone services alongside terrestrial and cable television services throughout the country. Founded in 2000, it employs 1,683 staff and has annual revenues in excess of €850 million. DNA uses Tableau to consolidate a wide variety of online and offline data sources into a single source of truth, enabling a holistic view of a typical customer’s journey. Tableau has also helped to slash the time its analysts spend creating reports whilst empowering employees across the organisation to self-serve analytics and make better, more informed decisions.

“Our customers often visit our online stores first, but sometimes they contact customer service or come into one of our high-street stores,” says Hanna-Mari Blankenstein, Online Insights and Analytics Manager at DNA. “With Tableau, we can now combine web-based data with data collected offline much more effectively than ever before, giving us a truly holistic picture of every customer’s journey.”

The ability to connect all this information together through Tableau has allowed DNA to gain a much deeper understanding of customers’ needs and adapt/develop its services accordingly.

“Using Tableau, we can merge, visualize and analyze customer data every day. Everything can be done in real-time too, meaning that if a customer contacts us, we can quickly see all of their pertinent information in one place and respond to the enquiry appropriately, regardless of the channel it has come in on.”

In addition to supporting DNA’s business operations, Tableau has also helped the company achieve its goals of becoming a more data-driven company. In particular, the role of the IT team has shifted from a traditional report factory to preparing high-quality data sources and offering technical support and training.

“Before Tableau, a significant percentage of our analysts’ time went on creating and maintaining business reports that, whilst important, weren’t helping move the business forward,” says DNA Development Manager, Antero Kivi. “Now, employees can self-serve their own reporting and analytics needs through Tableau, which frees up our analysts to provide a much wider range of strategic services to the business.”

This shift to self-service analytics has also reduced the bottleneck effect that comes with relying on one team to create reports for the rest of the business, helping to improve overall operational efficiency and increasing speed to insight for everyone.

“Tableau’s intuitive user interface and visual nature means users can quickly get to grips with it, generating insights right away,” adds Antero. “Now, everyone can be a data expert.”

There are over 1,000 regular users of Tableau at DNA, which Juho Ansio, Group Business Controller, attributes to both its ease of use and the fact that employees’ buy-in was secured early on.

“Our employees actively participated in the decision-making process right from the beginning, so it wasn’t a case of the IT team simply choosing a new analytics tool on their behalf,” explains Juho. “We made sure Tableau was the right tool and invested in employee training so users could hit the ground running, which has been an essential part of its acceptance and success within DNA.”

The company now consolidates data from all over the business in Tableau, ranging from customer management programs and invoicing to warehouse and store stock levels, enabling more informed decision making and greater support of business objectives.

“Everyone at DNA knows what Tableau is and what it can be used for,” concludes Juho. “Now, there is a willingness to make data more available to each other because we’ve all seen first-hand just powerful it can be with the right tools in place.”