Building a bank that can surprise and delight with Power BI
When Metro Bank opened in London in 2010, it was a brash competitor in a seriously traditional industry. The vision? To redefine the relationship people have with their bank by innovating customer service. With such offerings as seven-day-a-week store hours and lightning-quick service — a customer can open an account and get a debit card within minutes — the bank built a foundation for fast growth, doubling in size year after year and soaring to more than 500,000 customer accounts.
But with that growth has come a need for deeper and more detailed information about what customers want and need — how they interact with the bank’s services, including stores, online, telephony and mobile. Metro Bank needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that could quickly and accurately provide information to guide analysis and decision-making. Microsoft Power BI gave Metro Bank what it was looking for, with interest.
A focus on customers
“We set out to create fans, not customers,” says Bruce Rioch, head of Business Information and Customer Systems at Metro Bank. “We want to surprise and delight. We want to be the bank that our customers tell their family and friends about — the bank that offers amazing customer service and has a simple, understandable proposition.”
To provide an innovative, personalized service, Metro Bank needs to capture rich detail about its customers, from how long it takes to resolve their questions via telephone call centers, to identifying peak times for transactions conducted via the bank’s mobile app. And those details need to be clear and easy to understand, and available to the right person at the right time.
“As we’ve grown, more and more people have been asking questions about how effective or efficient the service is, and how well we are providing services,” Rioch says. “We struggled along during the first few years; we had what we needed. But as we've grown bigger, the question has become ‘how on earth do we provide the right information to the right people at the right time?’”
A system that looks familiar
Metro Bank decided to implement Microsoft Power BI because the solution integrated easily with the bank’s existing Microsoft stack, and was easy for colleagues to quickly learn and personalize for their daily needs.
“Power BI is our only BI solution,” Rioch says. “We had a solution previously that was fine for us as a brand-new startup organization. But as we grew, we needed something more dynamic, more visually appealing and more user-friendly for our colleagues. Power BI fits the bill in all of those respects.”
Metro Bank uses Power BI to track customer interactions, internal metrics and more:
•Call center operations. Power BI enables Metro Bank to track call volume, service levels, customer demographics, call times and shift scheduling. Reporting data is refreshed each night so colleagues have a clear picture of the previous day, weeks, months or year.
•Mobile and Internet banking. Colleagues can analyze data including the volume and types of transactions customers are performing online, the devices they use, and peak activity times throughout the day. “We get a real sense of how the channels are growing, and how they're being used by our customers, and what services they use once they're inside that service,” Rioch says. “Which is quite important because it helps us direct what we build next.”
•Customer dissatisfaction reports. Metro Bank can track customer complaints, including the rate of open complaints per 1,000 accounts, the time it takes to resolve them and the departments involved. One key feature is the ability to flag the most urgent complaints so that colleagues can take steps to resolve them before the deadline for reporting an outstanding issue to regulatory bodies.
•Staffing and workload planning. Power BI collects data on peak activity times in bank branches, types of transactions and other customer activity details, enabling Metro Bank to plan staffing to meet customer demands — for example, identifying the busiest hour of the busiest day of the month per branch — and help ensure quick, efficient service.
Rich detail, easy to visualize
By collecting rich detail and making it easy to analyze through personalized dashboards, Power BI helps bank colleagues identify problems before they can affect the bank’s relationship with the customer. Colleagues can combine details from account activity, data from customer satisfaction surveys, branch traffic patterns and more to understand which proactive solutions can make the biggest difference to the customer experience. Similar survey data offers insight into the employee experience, or what Rioch calls “the voice of the colleague.”
“The internal survey is built out of the dashboard,” Rioch says. “In the past it would have been all spreadsheet-driven; this year we've been able to display the colleague results really visually — and fantastically."
As a participant in the Power BI Preview, Metro Bank is also working with Microsoft developers to preview and test new features and offer feedback on functionality. The bank’s input helps shape the future of Power BI. And the dynamic program provides frequent updates, helping Metro Bank continually improve its customer service and offerings built on new capabilities.
“We use Power BI for everything,” Rioch says. “We love this product.”
Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
44 New Features in the Power BI Desktop September Update
The Power BI Desktop September updates were recently announced. As you can see on the title of the blog post, this is a massive update to the product, with 44 (yes, forty-four!) new features spread across Report Authoring, Data Modeling, Data Sources and Data Transformation capabilities. In average, this represents almost two new features per working day since the previous update.
The latest release of Power BI gives us a great opportunity to look at how some smart folks in the industry view the latest trends in business intelligence. Here are five ones you should know:
BI for everyone
BI used to be the sole province of data experts in IT or information analyst specialists. Now the move is toward democratizing the access and analysis of data across the organization. Today, a data analyst could be a product manager, a line-of-business executive, or a sales director. Browser-based analytics now enable business users themselves to answer impromptu questions that are relevant to their expertise, and then create sophisticated visualizations to share with others. More companies are recognizing BI for everyone as a strategic advantage. They’re supporting business users with tools to help empower them as data analysts.
What better tool for empowering business users than Power BI? With features that simplify accessing datasets, creating visualizations, and sharing reports, Power BI enables users to integrate data analysis in their work, whatever their role. When everyone can run analyses, amazing insights and discoveries can happen.
Self-service analytics
Industry analysts now predict that within two years, most business users in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis. Such self-service BI solutions can transform business users from data consumers to active data analysts, reducing the time and complexity of data gathering and preparation, and shifting the monopoly on data extraction, processing, and visualization from IT to a model of data analysis across the organization.
Power BI is a complete self-service data analysis tool available right now, enabling all users to make smart decisions with data. Connect with ease to internal data sources and external data services, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and QuickBooks. Process data with drag-and-drop gestures. Use natural language to query datasets and create compelling visualizations. And share your reports with colleagues using content packs. Power BI is at the forefront of tools that help cultivate and strengthen data-savvy knowledge workers.
Real-time analytics
Static reports are giving way to interactive presentations. Interactivity enables business users to explore and answer questions with data updated in real time. Monitoring the latest data helps decision makers respond with accuracy and agility.
With Power BI you’re no longer limited to static presentations. Include real-time data slides in your business presentations. Explore data interactively and flexibly to answer critical business questions on-the-fly. Refresh data in reports and presentations with real-time updates, helping speed insights, and drive faster, informed decision-making.
Data integration
Increases in data volume, velocity, and variety is fueling a trend toward comprehensive BI solutions that process information from multiple sources and in multiple views. Massive amounts of data are now available from disparate sources, increasing the demand for rapid data source integration accessible through simple interfaces.
Businesses are drawing upon huge volumes of unstructured social data to gain insights into customer behavior. Tracking social conversations at scale enables companies to learn when a topic is trending and what their customers are talking about. Insights gleaned from social data analytics lead to responsive optimization of products and services.
Power BI gives business users across the organization an easy-to-use tool to tap into insights hidden in large amounts of data. Whether the data reside in the cloud or on-premises, in structured databases or unstructured data processed by Hadoop, it’s accessible through Power BI. Use the Power BI visualization tools to communicate social trends to colleagues. As social trends evolve, have real-time updates reflected in your visualizations, enabling more agile responses to emerging market changes.
Mobile BI
The workforce is more mobile than ever, and mobile solutions for data analytics are maturing. Knowledge workers can now access and analyze data from their mobile devices more readily than ever. The trend toward mobile BI solutions will only continue to accelerate.
Power BI enables you to access and modify your dashboards no matter where you are, using touch-enabled native apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Use the Power BI app to connect to your data, discover insights easily with data alerts, and share them with your team. The Power BI app also enables you to filter and pivot your data in different ways to quickly find answers on the go through your mobile device.
These trends point to the evolution of BI toward making new sources of information accessible, consumable, and meaningful to organizations of all sizes, including those that do not have advanced analytics skills or in-house resources.
The demand for self-service BI tools will spread to more businesses. The increase in big data means more organizations want broadly deployable, easy-to-use, and often cloud-based technologies for query, analysis, and reporting. Emerging data preparation capabilities now let business users extend self-service to information access, management, and data visualization, enabling them to prepare, integrate, curate, model, and enrich data that’s shareable with colleagues and stakeholders.
Microsoft Makes Small Businesses ‘Data Smart’ With Power BI
By David Smith, General Manager of Worldwide SMB as written on Microsoft for Work.
Despite being the buzzword de jour for large enterprises, the concept of “Big Data” is still in its infancy with small businesses. This is because the process of capturing, storing, extracting and analyzing large quantities of data always required far too much in the way of IT resources and technical expertise for the average SMB. But just because SMBs don’t want to maintain servers, hire data scientists and pay for expensive analytics suites doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from business insights hiding in their own data.
Today Microsoft is releasing a new business analytics service designed to help the non-data-scientists among us uncover those insights and make more informed decisions about their business. It’s called Power BI, and it gives people working for companies small and large a straightforward way to analyze and visualize their information.
Power BI Brings It All Together
At its core, Power BI is a centralized hub that allows users to easily pull in, visualize and interpret the vast amount of data that their business generates on a daily basis. SMBs use a wide range of tools and services to run the different aspects of their business. By generating unified charts, graphs, maps and statistics, Power BI allows users to spot trends that would be difficult or impossible to identify by looking at an unorganized assortment of different spreadsheets and dashboards.
The greatest analytics tool on the planet is worthless if it doesn’t provide a simple and reliable way to connect with the information that matters to your small business, which is why we created content packs for Power BI. Content packs provide a way to automatically bring together data from different sources so the full picture can be analyzed in one place. And these connections extend beyond services like Excel or Dynamics CRM, so even if an SMB uses Google Analytics to track website traffic, MailChimp for email marketing campaigns and QuickBooks Online for accounting and payroll they can grab and analyze all of that data instantly (you can find the expanding list of content packs here).
We also know that small businesses aren’t always run from behind a desk. With Power BI apps for Windows, iOS and Android, users can view personalized dashboards and reports anywhere, interacting with their data in a touch-optimized experience.
Power of Data for Small Business
Say you’re the owner of a small online retail shop and you want to run a flash sale on a certain product to a specific set of customers. To do this effectively you need to have access to data that depicts your customer set to gather demographic information, online traffic that shows your most active customers, likely times to buy and historical sales data that shows you what worked well and what didn’t with the last flash sale you ran. Imagine if rather than searching each data set in its respective location and digging through everything manually, you could view all the information in one simple dashboard that illustrates trends and easy-to-spot insights, enabling fast and informed decisions about when to run the sale and who to market it to.
Best of all, you don’t need to learn a whole new set of skills to use Power BI. Power BI uses natural language query technology, which allows you to ask a question like “show me sales data from January to July.” In other words, you don’t need to be a data scientist to get at the information you need.
How Small Businesses Can Use Power BI
We’re often expounding the virtues of the cloud for small businesses because it provides the benefits of large-scale IT without the cost and complexity. Power BI is a fantastic example of exactly how the cloud is leveling the technology playing field for businesses of all sizes. A few years ago this type of solution would have been out of reach for just about every SMB. Now it can be set up in minutes with no up-front costs, making data analytics viable for even a single-person business. In fact, much of the functionality is available for free, without trial period restrictions.
Removing the price and technical hurdles means that many more small businesses will be able to capitalize on the value of analytics as a competitive tool and point of differentiation. Putting your data to use can give you a leg up on your competition. You’ll have real-time insights that allow you to adjust and adapt your business plan, so you can stay focused on what’s really driving results for your company. Basing your decisions on data not only helps you act strategically but allows you to be more in touch with your customer needs.
As an SMB, you have a lot on your plate already and exerting unnecessary time mining through endless data across multiple platforms doesn’t need to be one of them. Power BI makes your life easier and allows you to become more nimble and efficient, ultimately driving more results for your business.
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