Feb 13, 2025

Transforming Customer Insights with a Single Data Universe

A major telecommunications provider in New Zealand needed a more efficient way to access customer insights.

With a large customer base and multiple legacy systems, accessing key customer insights was time-consuming and inconsistent. They needed a streamlined solution to consolidate customer data and enhance decision-making within their existing Salesforce environment.

The Challenge

The client’s sales representatives faced significant inefficiencies due to customer data being stored across multiple platforms.

Gathering the necessary information required logging into different systems, often taking up to 30 minutes per query. This not only slowed down sales interactions but also led to inconsistent customer engagement and missed sales opportunities.

To address these issues, the organisation aimed to eliminate data silos and create a Single Data Universe (SDU) — a unified, real-time source of truth that would enable the sales team to access critical insights instantly and improve overall efficiency.

Our Approach

1 - Human-Centred Design: We started with workshops to identify pain points and understand what data was needed for meaningful customer interactions. Key findings revealed that sales teams primarily worked within Salesforce, making it the ideal place to integrate insights.

Power BI Dashboard Design: We designed an intuitive dashboard that could be embedded into Salesforce, iterating based on stakeholder feedback.
Data Requirements Brief: A comprehensive data blueprint ensured clarity on definitions and a trusted source of truth for all users.

2 - Data Audit & Architecture: Working within the client’s Snowflake environment, we assessed data quality and availability, then built a scalable data architecture to consolidate customer insights into a single source of truth.

3 - Seamless Dashboard Integration: We developed a Salesforce-embedded Power BI dashboard, providing a consolidated view of customer information, with deep-dive capabilities for:

Billing details from finance systems
Connections & data usage by customer
Products & services available to each customer

4 - Secure & Scalable Access: Using a service principal, we enabled seamless access through Salesforce with the necessary user controls.

5 - Training & Handover: We provided hands-on training and a structured handover to ensure adoption and long-term success.

The Outcome

With the new system in place, the sales team could instantly access all necessary customer details within Salesforce, reducing data retrieval time from 30 minutes to just under five minutes!

This allowed them to engage with more customers, improve the relevance of their interactions, and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities more efficiently. Within two months, the dashboard recorded nearly 4,000 unique views, demonstrating high engagement from end users.

Sales teams could now rely on a single, trusted data source, significantly improving their ability to serve customers effectively and make data-driven decisions.

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