One of India’s biggest manufacturing houses wanted to institute a mechanism to monitor the performance of its 3-year old dealer loyalty programme. Key objectives included evaluation of the impact of the loyalty programme on sales, and measurement of the engagement levels of the dealers. Circumventing challenges caused by unavailability of sanitized structured data, an integrated visual analytics solution was designed & developed to enable business end users to monitor various facets of the manufacturer’s dealer loyalty programme. With a set of high-end statistical analysis powered dashboards in place, the client was able to analyse the effect of the loyalty programme on sales, measure engagement levels of dealers, uncover operational glitches, etc.
The client, one of India’s biggest manufacturing houses, wanted to monitor the performance of its dealer loyalty programme. The client sells its finished goods through a network of dedicated distributors, who in turn sell through dealers to reach the end customer. The dealers, who influence the end customers’ buying decisions, are not dedicated dealers for the client, and hence it is important to keep the dealers happy and loyal to the manufacturer’s brand.
To this end, the client had instituted a dealer loyalty programme to keep the dealers engaged and happy. Three years after the introduction of this dealer loyalty programme, the client wanted to evaluate the performance of the programme. Specifically, the client wanted to put in place a mechanism to monitor the operational efficiency of the dealer loyalty programme, the impact of the programme on the sales of finished goods, the effectiveness of the programme in enhancing the manufacturer’s engagement with the dealers, etc.
Being located across different parts of the country, the client wanted the loyalty programme monitoring mechanism to be accessible to business users across locations and on a near real-time basis. The client also wanted the solution to be visually appealing, so that is was easily understandable to and usable by a range of business end users
A key challenge was unavailability of sanitized structured data. Data was being sourced from disparate sources – sales data, loyalty points redemption data, gift items delivery data, etc. All available data were in the form of manually-filled spreadsheets, with no standard formatting and widespread instances of manual data entry errors. Accordingly, the data collected from the various sources was sanitized and converted into a standard data format.
After collecting the requirements for different business end users, the set of necessary analyses and reports were identified. In some situations, certain new performance metrics were identified and suggested to the business end users.
An interactive visual analytics dashboard was developed using Tableau. The integrated Dealer Loyalty Health-check solution comprised of five major dashboards. The Sales Performance Analysis dashboard monitored the overall effect of the dealer loyalty programme on the client’s product sales over the years. The Dealer Performance Analysis dashboard provided a more granular analysis on dealer-level sales to monitor impact of the loyalty programme on specific dealers. The Engagement Analysis dashboard measured the overall engagement of a dealer vis-à-vis the loyalty programme. The Operational Analysis dashboard tracked various operational metrics and identified challenges. The Voice of Customer Analysis dashboard captured the dealer feedback on the loyalty programme.
Each dashboard was designed to be visually appealing to a wide range of business end users. Behind the easy-to-use visual representation, various statistical analysis techniques were embedded to enhance the effectiveness of the dashboards as a monitoring mechanism. For instance, statistical process control (SPC) charts were deployed to identify abnormal variations in sales, business forecasting and time-series analysis techniques were used to predict future sales, box-plots was used to identify operational failures, etc.
With the Dealer Loyalty Health-check solution in place, the client had a one-stop view of the performance of its dealer loyalty programme. The integrated visually-interactive solution was accessible from anywhere, at any time, and via any type of gadget. The statistical-analysis powered dashboards informed the client not just about the current scenario, but also highlighted key development and identified areas of concern as well as opportunities.
