Data architecture, automation and BI for a global publishing company

• Lynchpin’s broad analytics expertise and end-to-end solutions has allowed the client to reduce costs and simplify vendor management, with our team taking over the delivery of services previously carried out by an assortment of specialist vendors.
• The deployment of automation companywide has improved customer understanding and reporting, with added returns on staff satisfaction and productivity through the elimination of tedious manual processes.
• Our improvements to BI and board-level reporting have strengthened commercial visibility, allowing the client to locate the sources of lost revenue, pinpoint problem areas within the business, and make decisions to boost operational efficiency.

We met this global publishing client in 2017, as they were facing a host of changes following an acquisition of brands new to their portfolio of Information, Data and Training, and Education solutions. Since then, we’ve worked to support their product, sales, marketing and executive teams in various core areas, including data architecture, BI and reporting, and automation.

At the start of our relationship and with a deadline looming for a full systems migration in the midst of the company’s acquisition process, our project lead at Lynchpin worked adjacent with stakeholders in a series of meetings to help clarify what should be kept or omitted from their analytics set up moving forward.

Acting as translators of sorts, the client called on us to interface with IT to provide consultancy about their data architecture and get a simple understanding about what they had, what they could use as-is, what needed to be redesigned, and what could be simplified to reduce complexity and cost during the migration.

Once in place, a functional and optimised set up meant that our team could begin collating information from across the client’s range of data sources, with the ongoing aim to discover areas for improvement in terms of data quality, as we looked to enhance their customer understanding and reporting.

Due to the nature of the client brands, our team were dealing with extremely sensitive information that required precise scoping and under strict legal agreements. Engaging with stakeholders to establish a level of trust and understanding over what our work together was going to entail was pivotal to getting projects off the ground.

To enable proprietary information to flow freely within the business and also allow relevant public datasets a gateway into the business and their products, deploying automation processes was going to be a key driver for fostering a better analytics culture. Our Engineering team built custom integrations and used ETL processes to ultimately create a central source of information for our Data Scientists and the client’s in-house analysts to draw from.

Once complete, we supplied the client with recommendations to get teams around the business feeding better quality data into their ABM systems, CRM systems, and other owned data sources. This would allow for even stronger reporting capabilities down the line and to eliminate any gaps that had formed in the knowledge of their customers to date.

With plenty of new customers inherited from the client’s acquisition process, and some questions or dubious definitions surrounding information owned by some of their teams (e.g., were certain subscriptions really active or not?), ourselves and the client were keen to begin forming a better understanding of customer behaviour.

The product team wanted to test and explore variables such as: the amount of content they should give away for free to see maximum conversion rates, what their subscription options should be, how these options should be presented, and more. To support and evaluate this analysis, our team designed customer journey analysis dashboards and regularly met with the client, driving an iterative approach to testing and learning across the business.

In this partnership with our client, our Data Science team extends the analytics capabilities of their in-house analysts. Hugely beneficial to the product team in our work over the years has been the new capacity and skill to prototype visualisations with fast turnaround times.
Using the array of data sources we made available in the business, including large volumes of public data, affords the team the convenience of exploring new ideas and having the ability to deliver prototypes to their customers faster than ever before.

The client has stated – beyond the clear enhancements to their architecture and reporting over the years – our team at Lynchpin has afforded them the ability to provide evidence for the things they have known or suspected in the past but could never quite quantify. In terms of ROI, the results from our work can be broken down into three core areas:

• Costs saved
  By using Lynchpin, the team no longer required some of the many vendors they had accumulated delivering specialist services like data warehousing and BI. Our broad range of analytics capabilities and our end-to-end solutions meant we could take over the delivery of those services (and more) at a lower overall cost and with fewer moving parts for their team to manage.
• Improved efficiency
  Our team deployed automation companywide to extract information from outside and within the business to strengthen reporting capabilities and improve customer understanding. As an ongoing aspect to this work, we continually engage with stakeholders to find opportunities to help lighten their workflow and automate processes being performed manually, boosting staff productivity and satisfaction.
• Commercial visibility
  Our BI work, and regular board-level reporting of financial performance in particular, has helped the client gain a comprehensive view of the business and to locate the sources of lost revenue. With the new information surfaced, the team have had the ability to pinpoint problem areas within the business and make the necessary changes to improve overall operational efficiency.

Moving forward, the team has their sights on continuing to make improvements and increasing the value of their products. They want to continue expanding on testing, particularly from a content marketing perspective and to get a better understanding of paid search, quantifying just how much it contributes to their strategy and discovering which content creates those all-important tipping points for their team.