As an analyst in today’s data driven business environment, creating value in your organization can be critical to not only businesses success but also your own career success. That is what Andrew Kim, a Data Programmer/Analyst in the Consumer Insights department at Universal in Orlando, has been able to do with Alteryx. Andrew has effectively used the versatility of Alteryx as a stepping stone to do things that would have previously been impossible, or would have taken him years to learn and understand. Utilizing self-service data analytics, he’s boiled the learning curve down to just 6-8 months, and taken his career to a new level. More importantly, he’s having fun doing it.
Understanding and Improving Customer Satisfaction
Andrew’s job at Universal is to help better understand the visitor experience; including satisfaction levels, how visitors’ experiences stack up versus expectations, and understanding who is coming to the park and why. Andrew’s team does this by collecting data from in-park and panel research surveys, and then transforming the data for reporting in Tableau.
The Complexity of Survey Data- Andrew to the Rescue!
Survey data is messy, and it’s really complicated to aggregate into a single question or a single row structure for reporting . Prior to Alteryx, Andrew’s team was relying on complex SQL queries, or simply were unable to get certain data views because their historical analytics process made it too difficult to convey the information in a visual format. Prepping and manipulating survey data is why Andrew was brought in to Universal. He actually used Alteryx during his interview to demonstrate how easily he could manipulate the data with Alteryx, and his soon-to-be coworkers were absolutely blown away.
The Beginning of a Great Relationship
Andrew came across Alteryx and Tableau in a Gartner Report and when he first downloaded Alteryx Designer, he “was amazed at how quickly he was able to deploy solutions and share information not only with technical people, but also the business users.” He was able to “simply show them the tools on the (workflow) canvas and they understood what the tools were doing just by looking at the icons. It wasn't a huge document of code or some complex SQL statements that were challenging to understand.” It was then that Andrew realized he had discovered the perfect pair of tools for manipulating and visualizing data.
With Alteryx, Universal can take their complicated survey questions, combine and re-join all the responses, append meta-data including geo-spatial information, and perform more data cuts, allowing them to deliver deeper insights about individual US segments. In near real-time, Andrew and team can look at satisfaction data in a dashboard format, across various segments and drill down to see how the guest experience is being affected by weather, wait times, and more. As a result, Universal guests have a better experience when they come to the park.
Extending Insights to Decision Makers
Universal has had Alteryx Server for about six months, and Andrew loves it. Prior to having Server, they lacked the ability to share amongst the developers in Alteryx. The collaboration and ability to easily share workflows allows ideas to flow more quickly and readily. The automation piece is also helping the developers save significant time, since they don’t have to re-run workflows manually. “You’re instantly creating and you're having fun and the data's moving so quickly and you can keep on continuing to take on more and more responsibility. It's definitely worth the ROI.”
In Andrew’s words, Universal has “the ability to glean more information with less effort. That's really what I want to accomplish every day. With the ability to automate these solutions, I'm not doing the same repetitive work every day and instead I'm creating. That's really what drives equity within the business and it drives satisfaction. My job is fun and I love doing it. It makes me excited every day.”
In addition, Andrew’s team is using the Alteryx Gallery to extend self-service data analytics to decision-makers, providing them with self-service portals where they can adjust the settings and do the data cuts themselves. These decision makers can now ask questions, quickly get answers, and eventually drive deeper insights to drive the business forward.
And lucky for Andrew, his time is no longer spent performing data cuts. Now, he’s having fun, going out into the park, and meeting with guests and team members to work on other business problems.
For Universal, Alteryx is the perfect tool for flexible prepping and blending of data. Without Alteryx, “some of the things just wouldn't be possible” and it makes their jobs fun. Andrew said every time he goes into the product, “I’m excited. I wake up excited and before these tools it just wasn't possible.”
Return on Investment: Time and More Fun
We often say that Alteryx allows analysts to deliver deeper insights in hours, not weeks. For Andrew and Universal, the benefit of time saved is more significant. Because of Alteryx, what used to take “1-2 months for the initial creation of reports” has now been decreased “to 1-2 days.” Additionally, “after these reports have been created, they literally take minutes to run, including several layers of validation. The most important part for our team is we can all see the potential to make 98% of our entire process into dynamic automation, which means minimal time wrangling and more time with the FUN part….creating.“
We’re excited to share stories about analysts like Andrew, who are becoming more empowered at their jobs and in their careers every day because of the self-service data analytics capabilities from Alteryx.
Want to be more like Andrew? Experience Alteryx for yourself. Download a 14-day trial and see how you, too, can have fun everyday with your work. We promise you’ll see increased productivity and get time back in your day.
