Consumer Orbit Enables Instant Insight with Alteryx & Tableau
Consumer Orbit provides customer behavior insights by combining their vast database of consumer behavior with company’s customer knowledge such as store transactions, to develop a single view of the customer. In this video, Bill Engel, Chairman of Consumer Orbit discusses how his company uses Alteryx and Tableau to turn big data into valuable knowledge.
Tableau: What sort of questions do you help your customers answer?
Bill Engel, Chairman: A CMO will pick up the phone and call our people and say, "Such and such is happening in this particular store, I need to know what's happening. We're able to focus in on that store using Tableau and generate a custom report for the CMO. This is the wave of the future: Instantaneous information on who the customer is, linked to what they're buying.
Tableau: What is the biggest challenge you run into?
Bill: The biggest challenge is the amount of data that we handle. We carry 120 million households with all of the consumer data around those households. Where they shop, what they buy, the products they prefer, the brands they prefer.
We also get data from our clients, transactions-based data, what's happening at the cash register, what their customers are doing, and a number of other data sources as well.
Tableau: That is a great deal of data. How do you manage data of that size?
Bill: We integrate all these databases into one large database using our data partner, Alteryx. We use Alteryx to make sense of massive amounts of data. We use Tableau to present that so that a CMO or somebody at an ad agency who is looking at the same definition of that customer can say, "Okay, I see what the CMO's problem is and here's how we're going to solve it with media. We're going to buy these four television programs that are listed here on the Tableau Server because, you know, we have information about what TV programs these people are watching." So it's become an incredible tool. It's revolutionizing the way things are being done.
Tableau: You’ve been in the market research business for more than 40 years. Can you describe what’s different today?
Today's CMO doesn't have six months to wait to make a decision ... What Tableau does—with its different sets of data visualizations—is it gives that ability to us to take data, distill it to its essence, to one word. 'Here's the problem.' And the CMO can look at that and say, 'Okay, I got it.'
Bill: Today's CMO doesn't have six months to wait to make a decision. So the transactions-based data from his cash register that comes from the data that they collect through supply chain can be incredibly valuable to his decision-making process.
What has happened today is that we have so many possible data sources for decision-makers, they're all using their own definitions of the customer. So what CMOs have asked us to do is take all of this data, bring it together so we can create a single definition of the customer, and that what gets run through Tableau.
And what Tableau does, with its different sets of data visualizations, is it gives that ability to us to take data, distill it to its essence to one word, and the CMO can look at that and say, "Okay, I got it."