GOODBYE DEATH BY POWERPOINT AND EXCEL OVERLOAD, HELLO TIMELY, ACTIONABLE, ON-DEVICE STORYTELLING…

Like many large, successful organisations, DLG was in danger of becoming ‘data obese.’

The Hub provides a much healthier ‘snack-able’ approach to embedding an insights-driven sales and marketing strategy into the business.

Representing the single data platform for Direct Line and partner agencies, The Hub encourages users to collaborate and generate insightful stories instead of working in silos, chasing, gathering and producing data. This proved vital in assessing and socialising the performance of the Direct Line strategic re-boot.

Data is now visually represented in ways that allow the Insight Team to tell better stories and ensure the right people see the right information at the right time— stakeholders love accessing immediate insight any time, any place, anywhere via The Hub on tablets.

Today 115 DLG employees from Brand, Marketing, Effectiveness and Competitor Intelligence, Category and Pricing teams use The Hub and it continues to roll out to the organisaton’s wider audience, resulting in a more joined-up consensus of engagement around meaningful, bite-sized, KPI-rich digital stories about business, brand and marketing performance.

It also brings insight into the boardroom and senior stakeholders together with the CEO, CFO, two MDs, CIO, Chief Risk Officer, and HR Director all being Hub advocates and users.

“The Hub enables us, for the first time, to deliver timely insights to our business stakeholders by allowing us to view and analyse multiple pieces of information/data in an integrated way. This allows us to focus back on understanding and delivering insight rather than processing and ‘crunching data’.

The flexibility of the platform, twinned with the expertise/guidance of the team at H&P makes this a winning tool in our eyes.”

Ann Constantine, Head of Insight at Direct Line Group

THE HUB…CAN YOUR DIGITAL DASHBOARD DO THAT?!

THE HUB…THE ‘BIG DATA’ FIXER…

Our collaborative journey with DLG was a deliberate, iterative, staged ‘data journey’.

This highlighted three important, transferable insights:

1. The illusion of perfection:

Instead of spending lots of time worrying about what a platform should do in 12 months’ time, or what ‘perfect’ looks like, the most important thing in today’s rapidly changing customer environments is being ‘agile’. Software and support teams must be responsive and flexible to changing and often unforeseen client and customer needs.

But, with ‘agile’ and ‘corporate culture’ not always sitting naturally together, we collaborated with key DLG stakeholders to agree a consensus on ‘Day One’ priorities, loaded the relevant data, and started user pilot testing.

2. Not everyone likes exploring:

Pilot testing uncovered a fundamental insight; most people at work don’t have the time or inclination to ‘play around with data on a new platform’. They need to short-cut to personal benefits and access information quickly and easily. This made static reports from The Hub that could be emailed directly to people’s mobiles very popular.

3. Data can’t always speak for itself:

Halfway through the testing, we realised our focus was too narrow. ‘Narrative interpretation' was a big part of the missing picture.

Rather than being an analysis tool for the Insights Team, containing all their data sets and metrics, The Hub actually needed to be a ‘compelling storytelling tool’ for the business, using only data that helped tell important stories on DLG brands, marketing and the wider business.

So we developed a ‘plug in and play’ tool that needed no instruction manual or intensive training.

A new landing page was designed to make stories as engaging as possible via simple, clear headlines that enticed users in to find out more and look at the detail behind the story.