Data Democratisation - providing people with easy access to business information to help expedite decision making - is taking the world by storm. Whilst it appeared on Gartner’s list of the “Top 10 strategic technology trends in 2020”, according to McKinsey only 25% of senior executives feel their organizations are successful at sharing knowledge and insights across departments.
This growing global trend was identified as a competitive opportunity by the Research and Design team at the Westpac Group. The team knew the value of the insights they had and the impact they could have across the business’s six brands and nearly 2,000 stakeholders, if they could find a way to effectively distribute them.
The Research and Design team not only wanted to leverage, organize and share insights but also, create an avenue for stakeholders to efficiently brief in new insights projects that aligned to corporate needs.
According to Brendan Smith, Manager – Insights Innovation, Westpac Group...
“The biggest problem was that the Insight team was spending more time than desired answering requests for information across the business, as there was no central repository for knowledge. This came at a cost of analysis that solved business problems and investments in customer research that were already done previously. Nobody would know where exactly to go to for what information and our limited resources were being used up searching.”
To meet this need, the Westpac Group chose to partner with Potentiate to implement HX One within the business, creating a portal that enabled document storage, search and data visualisation in a centralised location.
The “Westpac Insights Hub” launched in 2019 and integrated all Westpac’s insights and competitive data into one platform, allowing stakeholders to make more informed decisions and freeing up the Research and Design team to invest their time in value driven initiatives, minimizing the amount of time spent searching for reports and data.
The Solution
The solution featured two key elements:
- A library for storing the wealth of knowledge and information within the business, along with a streamlined research request and briefing process; and
- An interactive dashboard including brand tracking and NPS data to track the Westpac Groups’ performance against competitors.
Upon launch, the Westpac Insights Hub had an immediate impact on the research effectiveness of the Westpac Research and Design team, with over 1,800 registrations across the group.
Employees were able to conduct key word searches across the 1,500+ pieces of data and insight previously purchased or initiated by Westpac over many years.
Furthermore, employees from Product, Digital, Payments and Corporate were conducting their own desk research before briefing in new work, and the need for further research (with its associated cost) was often negated or significantly reduced.
The data visualisation functionality also proved popular, allowing users to quickly view and compare the latest brand, loyalty, satisfaction and competitive data that was sourced from different agencies and groups across the brands.
The Results
As a direct result of the Insights Hub, the Research and Design team at Westpac Group now spends approximately 65 hours less per week searching for information and cut 1-2 hours per project searching for information - when running 300-400 projects per year giving them more time to focus on the impactful synthesis of data, leading to better business decisions.
The team is now able to avoid running unnecessary projects, with one team member alone being able to better redirect resources on five projects in 2020, due to reducing duplication, finessing objectives and connecting the dots between project teams.
“The Insights Hub has delivered for our team, it has improved the awareness of Insights across the group to a point that we now have users of research that we didn’t even know previously, asking for training on how to use The Hub and instead of commissioning more and more research they are taking time to look at the knowledge we already have and building on the learning” - Theresa Roiniotis, Chapter Lead, Research & Design, Westpac Group.
If you would like to know more about how Potentiate is helping integrate, visualise and share data across businesses, please contact us at hx@potentiate.com.
