ACRITAS

About Acritas

Acritas is a Newcastle-based market research agency delivering services to professional services, insurance and construction organisations. Primarily they focus on the legal sector and corporate global law firms. They do market research and analysis, and provide advisory services by interviewing relevant people within the sectors they work with. Companies purchase this analysis to refine their strategy and develop their plans to build future success.

Problems: Finding a better way of blending data and presenting findings back to

Acritas wanted to be more flexible and innovative to meet the demands of their customers. Their data is their product, so they wanted to improve customer satisfaction in the following ways:

• Adopt a BI platform that can process large amounts of disparate data
• Find a more user-friendly way of analysing data than with painstaking manual analysis of crosstabs in Excel
• Remove the need to copy and paste data from Excel into PowerPoint which was prone to human error
• Reduce the time taken to present data back to clients than with 200+ slide PowerPoint presentations

Solution: A Powerful Data Visualisation Platform and Solution Provider

When market research specific tools were found to be inadequate for their huge amounts of data, they started to look at general BI tools. Director of Research Operations at Acritas, Toni Taylor, says, “We came along to [Qlik Sense Tour at Cybit] and I saw Qlik Sense and thought I want this now, it’s brilliant. It made me realise that it could do all of the things that I hoped it would.”

Cybit upskill staff with personalised training

Acritas engaged with Cybit and together they began working to implement the chosen data visualisation solution, Qlik Sense. Toni says, “Cybit really supported us throughout the sales journey. They took the time to understand our business and what we wanted to get out of it, and they put together a solution that met our requirements.”

Cybit trained their teams on how to build dashboards and effortlessly explore data. Toni says, “Support and training from Cybit have been brilliant… All of the training that we’ve had has been tailored to the work that we do, rather than just a generic piece of data.”

Benefits: Empowering, self-service analysis and boosted productivity

Powerful, new analysis and increased efficiency

Acritas has new and interesting analysis that they had never had time to do before using Qlik’s intuitive and intelligent data visualisations. “We’re saving a lot of time compared to how we used to do things, the data is just there instantly. Because we are more efficient we’re going to be able to do a lot more interesting analysis that we simply didn’t have the time to do previously.”

Improving customer service with effortless data exploration

Clients have access to self-service dashboards to explore data. Dashboards are intuitive, and customers use them regularly. Toni says, “It becomes a no brainer for them to renew their subscription with us. We want them to be able to get what they want, when they want.”

Self-service BI to remove the bottleneck of IT

Qlik’s self-service functionality removed the reliance on third party suppliers preparing data and building dashboards. Cybit’s training upskilled the team with the knowledge needed to be independent and successful with Qlik. Toni says, “We have no IT experience whatsoever, but we’re keen to try and do as much of this as we can without involving our IT department because of the potential bottlenecks.”

Higher employee satisfaction and motivation

Toni’s team are noticeably more motivated as a result of using Qlik, which is increasing productivity and satisfaction. “Since we’ve adopted Qlik we’ve seen that the team have been energised and motivated. It’s really given our analyst teams a new challenge and they’re really excited to do that. The other week one of the other managers said, “I’ve never seen your team so engrossed, so happy and so motivated.” It’s worked out more positively than I would have expected.” Toni explains.

Blending disparate and external data sources

Now, they can extract and blend data from various external sources, such as published analysis and financial data, along with the data Acritas collects themselves. Toni says, “The deal breaker when choosing Qlik was the ability to bring in different data sources. It opens up a whole world of opportunity to us. We want to bring in all of that, look at the whole picture. That’s a huge selling point to us.”

Bonus benefit: Improving internal work processes

Acritas had only considered the ways Qlik would improve their external services and offerings to clients – not how it would positively impact their own company. Toni says, “When we’re doing interviews, what’s the best time to call people? Is it better to call mobiles? Is there a particular day when they tend not to turn up? We can use this data to become more efficient as a business.”