"Historically, our job is intermediation between individuals and building professionals," says François d'Arfeuille, CTO. "Our mission is therefore to both offer individuals the best professionals, and to feed orders to these professionals." Matching different types of work and available skills is based on relevance, an activity that is already working well as evidenced by the 800,000 projects implemented every year via Quotatis.

"The idea now is to go further, to also manage the transactions, especially for small jobs," says Mr. d'Arfeuille. The Quotatis platform manages projects of between €1,000 and €10,000, and designates projects of less than €1,500 small. As a result, matching projects to professionals had to gain in precision to ensure that, for example, the cost of plumbing services was covered by the offers made in each micro-market, each geographical area consisting of one or more cities.

For small jobs, micro-markets correspond to 300 types of work applied to 50,000 postal codes, illustrating why Quotatis had difficulties aggregating all the data and providing simple refunds to departments in charge of trade, customer relations, and acquisition.

"The tool in place allowed for simple histories, but for more advanced requests, or the addition of a new axis of analysis, it was necessary to rework setup and development, which entailed too many round trips with internal customers," says David Gazengel, data manager. The need to improve marketing campaign management triggered qualification of a new tool.

"Three tools were evaluated, and TIBCO Spotfire® was selected," says d'Arfeuille. "We weren't familiar with the tool yet, but internal feedback was good. The quality of the tool fully captured our attention, its ability for micro geographic analyses. It was a decisive criterion at a time when Quotatis would be targeting micro-markets."

Tested in June, the solution was acquired in August. "To familiarize ourselves with the solution, we started with a first general dashboard, which drew from pilot information details," says Mr. Gazengel. The information included the number of artisans supplied, average basket, number of projects sold, rate margin, the cost of buying leads, and their distribution by origin between search engine optimization, paid search, display advertising, and affiliation. "The data came from production databases, but also from web analytics and marketing automation tools."

Empowered Users, Better Data and Market Understanding, Efficiency Gains

After only a few months, the benefits are already tangible. "The obvious gain concerns the empowerment of users," observes Mr. d'Arfeuille. "Data and dashboards are available as self-service, and each user can handle them as they see fit. The data manager no longer has to manage requests on a case-by-case basis."

"We also benefited from using Spotfire to standardize our indicators," adds Mr. Gazengel. "Now the nomenclature is well shared, and the indicators are therefore comparable from one service or dashboard to another."

Precise Analysis Enabling Business Expansion

Another dashboard was built to take advantage of TIBCO Spotfire mapping capabilities. "We provide real-time views of the evolution of portfolios by micromarket in a geospatial way," explains Gazengel. "It gives us a precise geographical reading of the delta between the offer (the referenced craftsmen) and the demand (the leads)."

"In addition, the visual rendering is successful, which of course makes it easier for all users to understand," says d'Arfeuille. Visual quality, including geospatial data updates help analysis of potential new micromarkets.

"We are going to use the solution to enhance the value of leads and also to offer much more personalized dashboards," says Mr. d'Arfeuille. "Our first dashboards are transverse; now we’ll make dedicated dashboards for each service."