Breaking Down Data Siloes for a Financial Services Firm
Overview
A financial services company that provides invoicing services to streamline accounts receivable processes grew significantly through acquisitions over its 20+ year history, creating complex, siloed data systems. This company issued a request for proposal (RFP) asking for assistance with breaking down its data siloes and creating a more unified platform to leverage data across the organization. Brooklyn Data Studio responded to the RFP and was selected to perform the work.
Challenge
Even though this financial services firm was already migrating to a modern data infrastructure with tools like Snowflake and dbt, because of its siloed systems, it was bogged down by inefficient data retrieval and potential inaccuracies with its data. This prevented the company from making data-informed decisions that could continue its organizational growth.
To understand the depth of this financial services organization’s pain points, we conducted a six-week discovery and road mapping phase, during which we crafted a multi-step plan to address their issues. Based on what we uncovered, we proposed substantial changes to their data governance and data systems. We developed a multi-pronged approach that included long-term and short-term action items.
In our short-term workstream we proposed building a Customer 360 system, a centralized place for core customer data. We believed that a Customer 360 system would quickly provide tangible benefits to those in the organization who use customer data the most by streamlining customer data collection, simplifying reporting, and ensuring data accuracy.
The company’s stakeholders elected for us just to take our short-term approach to breaking down its data silos.
This client’s challenges included:
- Breaking down data silos across the organization
- Increasing data retrieval efficiency
- Ensuring clean, accurate data to make more informed decisions
- Leveraging new data infrastructure more effectively
Approach
Our plan to address the client’s pain points was to ingest data from existing sources into Snowflake, model it to harmonize and clean it, and build a Customer 360 dashboard to visualize it for the company’s stakeholders. To fulfill this plan, we had to streamline the firm’s data systems and leverage their data tools like Snowflake and dbt more effectively.
Our initial proposal was to build a generic executive-level dashboard with basic customer information and more focused versions for specific teams if needed. However, after further discussions with our main stakeholder, we decided to create an initial version just for the company’s customer success team in Power BI, with the possibility of expanding our work to cater to other teams in the future. Starting with the customer success team would allow the firm to more efficiently onboard customers and reduce churn to improve retention.
Our approach included:
- Ingesting data from existing sources into a Customer 360 system and visualizing it
- Streamlining existing data systems to leverage data tools more effectively
- Building a dashboard in Power BI for the client’s customer success team
Solution
We built two dashboards for this financial services client. The first one was a Customer 360, which contains basic details, financial information, product details, implementation projects, support tickets, and opportunities for each customer. The dashboard has a summary landing page, and specific pages with details for each of the components. The second one was a data quality dashboard that summarizes the inconsistencies and problems when joining data from the multiple sources. This illuminated the issues caused by siloed systems and opened channels for clearer communication between their owners so they can collaborate to correct these glitches.
Prior to our work, each member of the client’s 16-person Customer Success team spent 5–24 hours per week going through multiple applications to pull various datasets with data deficits. The new Customer 360 reduced this time to mere minutes.
By breaking down data silos to build a Customer 360 view for this financial services firm, we provided it with valuable information it can use to retain customers and ensure long-term success for the organization, while also cultivates cross-departmental teamwork and data integrity.
Results:
- Two new dashboards in Power BI for the client’s Customer Success team — one that contains critical information on each customer and one that identifies data inconsistencies that should be corrected
- A new system for pulling accurate data that reduces data retrieval time from 5–24 hours per week to just minutes so team members can spend more time on higher-value tasks