"We're focused on finding links between employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and sales so we can provide insights to our clients to help them improve their businesses," says Fred Gruhn, lead QA engineer. "A lot of companies can supply data, but we're really in the insight business. What action can our clients take so that they can improve their businesses?

"We've had to find new ways to interact with restaurant and retail customers. Our clients want to be able to make decisions based on what's going on in their environment now. They expect to be able to see survey data in real time. With our mobile app, we had an innovative way to engage. We were not only getting answers to questions, and in very real time, we were also getting behavioral data: their location, how long they were in stores, how far they drove to get there. The stories were relevant to our client key contacts, to executive teams, but also to regional and store managers, but we didn't have a great way of sharing that data with them.

"We were spending a ton of time preparing and creating quarterly reports. If we had some type of tool to share real-time data and have our clients work with us in a collaborative way, we could spend more of our resources improving the app instead of building an internal platform. If we weren't able to resolve this, the biggest impact would be that clients would have to wait to get the data that impacts how they do business. They needed the data right away to be able to take action.

"We support hundreds of brands from four offices throughout the world. We needed a platform that our clients and analysts could access whenever they wanted; understand what was happening in their locations during breakfast, lunch, dinner, and after-dinner; and react in real time.

"We needed the ability to create map-based visualizations because clients were demanding the ability to slice and dice their data at the designated market area (DMA) level. They needed to be able to compare how their locations were performing from one city to another and drill in to see performance, whether positive or negative.

"We began our relationship with TIBCO in an interesting way. We had a client come to us and say, 'We really like the data that you're providing, but we need it in this specific format so we can run it through TIBCO Spotfire®.' We weren't familiar with Spotfire at the time, so we investigated it and thought, 'Well, hey, if one client is asking for it, we could provide this service, create our own visualizations, and share it with our clients.'"

A Popular New Product and New Clients

"With Spotfire, we plot survey data on a map and break it down by DMA. This allows us to see, for example, that the Denver DMA has high satisfaction, but the Miami DMA does not. And what can we learn from that? We created a product called BrandGeek® that is powered by Spotfire. We came up with branded benchmarks that show clients how they rate against competitors. We were stunned at the adoption rate. Clients were craving this. We went from zero to 60 clients using the tool in one year.

Client Partnerships

"One of the things we've done with BrandGeek is partner with our clients. They ask us about our data, and we dive in and give them more detail. Clients were craving different types of metrics. The more we give them, the more they ask, and this has really strengthened the relationship. It's not just a client relationship, it's really the beginning of a true partnership.

Self-Ranking Client Capability

"With the visualizations we create with the Spotfire platform, clients can access real-time data, look at their performance and their customer satisfaction, and rank themselves, which is really a great advantage for them.

"Now that we have BrandGeek in the marketplace and have numerous clients using it, our next goal is to enhance the visualizations. We have some basic visualizations that provide great data, but now we want to enhance it and build drill-down visualizations, more maps, and look at predictive modeling, as well. That way, we're not looking at what's happened in the past, but more, if this action was taken, what would we see in the future?"