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Tom is using Alteryx to create automated reports from many different types of data; and analyze social media trends with text analysis to improve member customer service experiences. From data input to output and reporting, Alteryx is Kaiser’s one-stop-shop, allowing Tom to not only deliver on these projects, but to also get back hours and even days of his life, allowing him to focus on growing his team and his career.
Creating and automating reports, and delivering self-service to business leaders
Tom creates reports for 3 teams: one focused on innovation and continual improvement; the social media customer service team; and the medical records team. All of these reports must be customized, which requires accessing and collecting data, putting it all together, creating a report and sending it out to the 3 teams, which is both labor and time intensive, and often took him weeks. The breaking point for Tom was when he got a request for a very detailed 17-page report, which turned a two-week production time into three weeks. In Tom’s words, it was “awful”. That’s when he decided there had to be a better way.
Enter Alteryx, which Tom had previously used for parsing and filtering data. Through a repeatable process in Alteryx, he is now able to take 7 different inputs (Excel workbooks, CSVs, two database connections and a SharePoint list connection), clean and dedupe the data, and pull everything together in a PDF with a header, picture, date stamp and page numbers, and it “looks great”. Did I mention it also runs in 30 seconds? Three weeks, now completed in 30 seconds. Talk about time savings.
Tom has now built the reports for his 3 stakeholder teams as workflows in Alteryx. In his words, “the result was some serious time savings. Some of the reports took 3-5 hours, even 5-12 hours. When I put it into Alteryx, it gave me weeks of my time back. I cannot tell you how good it feels to hit that green arrow, see no errors, and boom, the report's done. Now, I have other stuff to do.”
Tom has also deployed Alteryx apps for managers he works with. While this is a new process, “they've already saved a lot of time.” Managers can now log in to the Alteryx gallery, specify ‘Begin’ and ‘End’ dates, click Submit, and produce their own customized reports. One Quality Assurance manager who processes disability cases now uses one of Tom’s apps, and it “cuts the time in half. She's enabled with the information she needs, and it’s a really, really big time saver.” Tom has leveraged the analytic apps within Alteryx to enable self-service across Kaiser’s management chain.
Enabling Actionable Insight from Social Media
With the time Tom has saved using Alteryx, he’s been able to explore Kaiser’s social media strategy. It’s important for the company to see what their competitors are doing, and to decide what they want to do as an organization. Alteryx is helping them with that, too.
There's a ton of social media data that is public and free, but all good things come with a price – social media data is messy and unstructured. Sarcasm, slang and misspelled words make it hard to define context. But once the data is clean, you can start to see an individual’s experience. For Kaiser, this is member experiences. With Alteryx, Kaiser is building an analytical infrastructure with social intelligence to ensure they meet the demands of their members, and deliver the best customer service experience as quickly and directly as possible.
- Tom is using the Alteryx Twitter connector tool and scheduling it to run on Server to pull Twitter data and export a report that acts as a social monitoring tool, looking at topics, topic frequency, number of tweets by people with a lot of followers on Twitter, and more.
- Tom’s workflow is finding high-profile tweets or tweets from high-profile users, and giving them to the customer service team to proactively respond before something gets out of control. With Alteryx, they can scan social networks for negative mentions and quickly resolve issues.
- Another application is to scan social platforms for any mention where someone is thinking about joining Kaiser. Tom is pulling mentions, putting them directly into Salesforce, and sharing them with Kaiser employees who can help them choose a medical provider.
Tom’s use of Alteryx has reduced the time it takes him to produce reports for 3 different insight teams, and delivered self-service to managers. With his extra time, he has been able to do additional work with social media data, giving Kaiser the ability to proactively reach out to members via social media. In Tom’s words, “this is the point of all of our work, so we can give managers who make decisions better data so that they can make better decisions.”
To learn more about Tom and his experience with Alteryx, check out his slides or watch his presentation recording from our Inspire conference.
Want to be more like Tom? Experience Alteryx for yourself. Download a 14-day trial and see how you can save time in your work day and your personal day. We promise you’ll see both professional and personal impact.
