As customer intelligence becomes more central to business operations across sectors, data and customer insights teams face more pressure to provide increasingly sophisticated services – while also making data understandable to non-technical users. However, in many organizations, data and analytics teams remain understaffed, making it nearly impossible for them to stay on top of every data-related demand.
While customer intelligence platforms are often marketed to non-technical business users, data teams at BlastPoint’s partner companies have made us very aware of why they, too, find a lot of value in our product. As data nerds ourselves, we take pride in working hand-in-hand with data and analytics teams. Over the years, our data colleagues have made it clear to us that CI platforms make their lives easier, too – and help data teams drive customer-centricity within an organization, getting results that make customers satisfied.
Based on feedback from the data and analytics teams we work with, here are five distinct ways data teams can glean value from CI platform implementation within their companies.
1. Provide more – and better quality – data across the org chart
Internal customer data is obviously foundational to customer intelligence. These datasets include payment history, engagement rates, program enrollment, and more, and they provide a snapshot of how each customer interacts with a company. Yet analyzing internal data alone provides a rather narrow look into customers’ behavior and motivations beyond company engagement.
Customer data moves from 2D to 3D when it’s enriched with matching external datasets. However, the burden of sourcing, selecting, and utilizing external data is often placed on overworked data teams, who don’t have the bandwidth to fully integrate the data so it can be operationalized.
This is where BlastPoint steps in to help data and analytics teams. Our established partnerships with data vendors make it simple for us to source high-quality external data that improves models and unlocks new doors for analysis. We also help data teams conserve resources by only selecting data that’s relevant to high-priority initiatives. Learn more about BlastPoint’s approach to data sourcing, management and analysis here.
2. Extend bandwidth
Did we mention that data teams are often over-extended? Well, we’re saying it again because it’s a reality that many of our colleagues are facing. On any given day, they get requests from all around their organization to pull and analyze diverse datasets. They often have a long backlog of requests, making it hard to provide value in a reasonable amount of time.
BlastPoint is here to improve their quality of life by providing tools to make data more accessible internally, reducing the need for data teams to be high-touch. Once the BlastPoint Customer Intelligence Platform is implemented, employees across the org chart log in to access all customer data and analytics – instead of pinging the data and analytics team for their every need.
BlastPoint also offloads data management and maintenance for external customer data, ensuring it’s up-to-date and high-quality. And, when new external data is needed, we take the lead on getting the best data for a company’s new initiatives.
Download our Working with IT Teams flyer to learn more about how we can help.
3. Drive internal adoption of data assets and analytics.
Data analytics and customer insights teams work meticulously to build data-driven insights that have the power to transform the way their companies do business. However, the challenge often lies in making those insights actionable for non-technical business teams within their organizations. Valuable insights can get lost in translation as they are transferred between teams.
BlastPoint was founded to close the gap between technical and business teams. Our CEO and Co-Founder, Alison Alvarez, worked as a member of in-house IT teams for years as a data scientist and developer. She consistently saw that companies missed opportunities because of the training gap between technical and non-technical teams. With these lessons learned, Alison went on to start BlastPoint based on the notion that data analytics are most powerful when insights are accessible across the org chart. Hear more from Alison about founding BlastPoint here.
One of BlastPoint’s utility partners has recently been reaping the rewards of data accessibility across the org chart. Over the past two years of working with BlastPoint, they have implemented our AI-powered customer segments across the organization and have generated objective-specific insights, resulting in better engagement metrics, higher enrollment in key programs, a jump in their sustainability score, and the strategic implementation of new communication channels. Strategy and operations have aligned around insights from our platform, helping departments across the organization become more customer-centric.
Learn how BlastPoint helped Duquesne Light Co. increase engagement with assistance program information up to 670% over benchmarks.
4. Fill hiring gaps and make onboarding easier.
Commentators are calling this era of high job turnover The Great Resignation, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. When an employee leaves unexpectedly, the team has to not only find a replacement quickly, but also temporarily take on that employee’s work. For already understaffed data and analytics teams, this can put a large strain on daily operations, particularly because data scientists and engineers have been in short supply for a while now.
BlastPoint’s CI platform has helped our partners’ data and analytics teams ensure continuity of service when positions are vacated, and then makes onboarding new technical employees easier. Because cleaned and enriched data is readily available within our platform, new team members can jump right in to understanding and applying customer data.
And this isn’t just true for technical teams – BlastPoint’s platform also makes it easier for new business team hires to understand the customers they’re about to serve and operationalize customer insights. So even despite high turnover, customer-facing teams can seamlessly continue to serve customers with high-quality service that yields satisfied customers.
5. Access to best-in-class AI models.
Based on our industry-leading technology and our work with large customer datasets from around the world, BlastPoint offers our partners proprietary, industry-specific models that help fill in inevitable data gaps, provide insights that are otherwise out of reach, and ultimately get better results.
Take, for example, our EV Adoption Model. BlastPoint has been able to identify specific neighborhoods in every county of the US where consumers will adopt electric vehicles now, soon, and much later. One of our clients, a major automobile manufacturer, is utilizing these insights to launch new charging programs and develop new EV markets. Another of our clients, a large northeastern utility, is using our EV adoption segments to increase visibility of their EV programs. They quickly boosted adoption of their EV rebate program by 55% and engagement with web-based EV materials by 1000%.
Why trust BlastPoint?
The BlastPoint team is home to machine learning experts from Carnegie Mellon University, ranked by US News Report, CS Rankings, and others as the #1 institution for ML and AI. BlastPoint’s CTO and Co-Founder, Tomer Borenstein, holds a Master’s in ML from CMU, while CEO and Co-Founder Alison Alvarez holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and a Master’s in Computational Linguistics. Our Director of Engineering, Tony Cebzanov, worked for CMU’s Software Engineering Institute for fifteen years.
Yes, we are bragging a little, because we’re proud to have top talent on our team, helping our partners make data actionable. Our approach to segmentation and propensity modeling is unique, making our products more valuable to technical and non-technical teams alike as they work together to build more customer-centric organizations.
Visit Our Technology page to learn more about BlastPoint’s platform, approach to information security, and more. Drop us a line if you have any questions about the “back end” of what we do – we’re always happy to talk shop about data (and throw in some data nerd jokes that most people won’t appreciate).