“We now work much more efficiently, giving us more time to take care of the derivations and insights from the data for the customers.”
Jens Falkenau, vice president of market research at Nielsen Sports, shared the market research firm’s reporting and automation challenges and explained how DataLion is helping him and his team.
Nielsen Sports is a leading insights specialist in the sports sector. The institute has been providing its clientele with data and insights from this sector for over 30 years. Its research focuses on the analysis of sports and fan target groups, as well as the impact of advertising and sponsorship in the context of sports. With extensive expertise in this discipline, Nielsen Sport implements around 300 individual projects each year for a wide range of clients including marketers, clubs, media, and the advertising industry.
Automating Nielsen Sports’ reporting of tracking projects
Insights specialist Nielsen Sports has long faced two challenges: First, the classic PowerPoint institute was constantly driven by its clients to provide data and insights in the form of interactive dashboards, especially for international tracking projects with large amounts of data. Additionally, the institute’s goal was to encourage its customers to work more with their data and to be able to do this themselves. The high amount of work involved in preparing the data and the large number of PowerPoint slides that had to be produced were to be reduced. Jens Falkenau reported on a typical situation before switching to DataLion dashboards: “A trauma for me was a customer request after receiving a comprehensive report of a 20-country study. He was very satisfied with the report and the preparation, but wanted to have each chart prepared “once again only below the surveyed women”. In the dashboard, one click of a button, as a PowerPoint, several days of work.”. A dashboard solution was intended to increase the added value of the analyses for the clients and, on the other hand, to minimize the workload of queries and new preparation of the data in PowerPoint.
“It’s a classic win-win situation: the customer gets value out of it, but so do we.”
The requirements for dashboarding software for market research
A vendor was sought that met the needs of market researchers. In particular, easy data integration, differentiated rights management options, and the ability to perform simple and quick data segmentations would facilitate reporting. Before coming across DataLion, Nielsen Sport tried several dashboard solutions, including those from market-leading vendors. The problem was always that these products were not focused on the needs of market researchers. The data integration was complex and the display and analysis options were too limited from a market research perspective. Aligning with the needs of market research was critical for Nielsen Sports in selecting DataLion as its dashboarding software.
“Finally, we could easily and effortlessly integrate our data into the dashboard and create engaging interfaces for our clients that offered all the statistical analysis capabilities they were accustomed to. And some exciting features on top of that.”
In particular, the ability to work with broad data sets with multiple responses that are typical for market research, without having to transform the data in advance in a time-consuming manner, helps the researchers from Nielsen Sports save time. In addition, the differentiated rights management options in DataLion are essential for the reporting of tracking projects.
Easy entry into automated reporting with DataLion
Nielsen Sports now uses DataLion for reporting for many projects of larger customers and forgoes the preparation in PowerPoint. The changeover was uncomplicated and without major hurdles: “Of course, we first had to build up the skills in the team for working with DataLion. But that went easier and faster than expected.”. Workshops by DataLion and later by internal specialists helped with this process. Jens Falkenau has one tip for institutes planning to implement their reporting with DataLion: Involve the project managers in the process at an early stage. This way, their creative potential can be fully exploited.
Customer loyalty and increased efficiency through DataLion dashboards
By switching to reporting with DataLion, the institute has reduced the workload for their international market research trackers many times over. “We now work much more efficiently and thus have more time to take care of the derivations and insights from the data for the customers,” reported Jens Falkenau. This helps both the institute and its clientele, he added.
“The improvements in reporting and the time saved are considerable.”
Customers can also work much more flexibly and independently with their own data using DataLion. The high level of customer satisfaction with the dashboards has another positive effect: “This also supports customer loyalty to our institute,” explained Jens Falkenau.