Selectra is a French company that was founded in 2007. It specializes in helping customers, mainly consumers, compare and move between energy providers. From this segment, the company has expanded into other segments, with the mission to make the managing of utility bills simpler, cheaper, and greener. The company has more than 2,000 employees and is active in 17 countries across Europe, APAC and America.
As Selectra’s business model is highly digital and fast moving, it requires strong, ideally real-time analytics capabilities to provide its services. Due to operating in different countries and different verticals, reporting processes have been based on Microsoft Excel, with these Excels differing across countries and even across verticals.
Castellanos says that Selectra had “3 different countries, each one with several verticals. And the reporting was Excel. We had Excel for everything. Each department had their own Excels, their own reports. And you had managers spending two, three hours each week to update all their reporting. If they had to create a new one, they could spend one week doing only that. People that were more valuable doing their actual managers roles or if they were working with interns. Okay, it was the intern. But the interns need to learn the real work and not just the reporting. So, we require something. Hey, let's automatize this. We are losing too much time. We are losing uh work hours uh each week just to keep up and it's not even that good because at the end you do it once a week.”
In short, Selectra urgently required an analytics solution to automate the reporting requirements.
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Selectra investigated a number of possible solutions including Power BI, Tableau and Metabase. Being a Zoho CRM customer the company ultimately settled on Zoho Analytics as it is well integrated and offers an easy-to-understand UI. In Castellanos words, “We had different options [like] PowerBI, Tableau; we were already using a little bit of Metabase the open-source BI tool. The engineers love it in the company, but it requires a lot of knowledge, and we choose Zoho for two reasons. First, the native integration with CRM, which has been our CRM since 2015 and was where the big majority of our data was stored. Well, the having a native integration with it made it great. It was one headache less and making transition really fast and implementation super-fast. And the second one was that the UI is not simple, but easy to understand. Drag and drop. Take it, put it, you have it everything.”
The positive working relationship with Zoho helped to make this decision, too. “We have always had the feeling that they hear our feedback, and they implement solutions for that, or in case they couldn't implement it because maybe it was too specific or whatever. At least they were interested in looking for workarounds and other options.”
Although the integration with Zoho CRM made the initial implementation easy and fast, Selectra encountered and overcame a number of issues during and after the implementation project. It was far from a slam dunk. Specifically, the replication of the CRM data into Zoho Analytics and the recreation of the existing reports took considerable time, which partly had to do with a lack of data standardization. This lack of standards became apparent during the recreation of the reports, when the team found out that different countries and verticals measured KPIs differently, which led to inconsistencies in the reporting. “When I started migrating reports and getting the external reports and trying to replicate them into Zoho, I failed terribly doing that because I was not matching the same data that those reports were providing and I realized that that was just because we didn't have a standard, we didn't have a standardization of KPIs and how to measure things, and each vertical each country was measuring in their own way. We had to actively establish the standard.”
Of course, this also led to trust issues, in addition to resistance to change. Overcoming them took some effort for training and documentation and, most of all, transparency and continuous communication.
The biggest problem emerged after about a year. With increasing reporting requirements, it became clear that the CRM data structures didn’t give the necessary granularity of data. “And what happened afterwards, like one year after, is that no one in the company was happy with Zoho. It was not providing the data that they required. We realized that our CRM data structure was really bare bones, and we needed something more. So, we went through this process of transformation; we are still in that process of transformation in some verticals because it's really difficult. It's a big project.”
Lastly, the increased use of Zoho Analytics showed that the management of the solution became an issue. With approximately 150 dashboards with between three and twenty different reports, it became difficult to maintain control over the workspace. This has been addressed with Zoho and is being solved.
The outcomes
Zoho Analytics is well in use now, in spite of its initial and ongoing challenges. The time to create new reports has gone down considerably and Selectra achieved a near-time reporting. This allows for faster and better decision making.
Due to the initial scope of the project, Selectra also gained an additional benefit due to the need of KPI standardization across regions. Zoho Analytics has become the single source of truth for Selectra.
Key takeaways
Selectra successfully transferred its reporting requirements from Excel to Zoho Analytics. Thanks to its native integration into Zoho CRM, the initial setup went fast.
It is important to plan and prepare the setup of an analytics solution very carefully, to ensure company-wide definitions of KPIs.
Analytics is only as good as the underlying data. An analytics project has an impact on the source systems. Increasing reporting requirements can make it necessary to have more complex source data structures.
Change management and user training are key activities. Constant communication, documentation, and user involvement are important for project success.
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