Deliverables
- Establish a capability that enables agile, explorative, integration of data from any data source and supports a process for production deployment into the firm’s system (Cognos).
- Develop a holistic customer view that supports the delivery of client-centric insights for every area of the business.
- Develop statistical modelling to identify drivers for high-value work and high-value clients by analysing the data across the organisation.
- Leverage an external data set to provide insight into industry firmographics, enabling additional data points and metrics for modelling.
One of Australia’s large legal firms wanted to easily identify their high-value customers and needed to advance their data analytics capabilities to do so. The project involved defining what a high-value client meant for the organisation as well as understanding how to distinguish them from the remaining client base. The firm needed to move from instinctual classification to data-driven identification.
“We operate in an environment where we have information lying in many different systems held by different owners. What we really wanted to do is understand our clients and bring together lots of sources of information to get a clearer picture of what the true, 360-degree view of the client world was. We wanted to use this process to help inform strategic business decisions and business development around how we operate and service our high-value clients and grow our business,” says the firm’s Senior Manager of Innovation.
The challenge
Although the firm had a mature data and analytics capability, constant competing priorities, disparate data systems and a lack of any holistic way of defining high-value clients, meant that they needed guidance from skilled data experts to integrate their information.
“The business challenge was in consolidating disparate sources of data within our firm with the goal of being able to generate actionable insights, particularly from the business development perspective,” says the firm’s Head of Innovation.
Optivia were therefore tasked with making sense of the data from different systems to find the answers the firm needed. This included varied information, from financial margins and write-offs, to rules on how to resource a client engagement and looking at broader industry data.
The solution
Optivia delivered a useful client segmentation along with a predictive model that indicates the propensity of getting new work from a particular client and estimates the profit they could generate. This brought the focus to actionable insights that could lead to more profitable work, modelling to anticipate behaviours, and identifying issues and opportunities in real-time.
Optivia filled two crucial gaps within the firm – one being data expertise, and the other being the accelerated rate at which they could deliver on a complex data project.
“We really benefited from a skillset perspective with Optivia, particularly pertaining to data science. Being able to bring that to the table and apply their data-adept lens to the problems that we were trying to solve was instrumental,” says the Head of Innovation.
The firm is better equipped to define and identify profitable work from Optivia’s successful segmentation system. “Having the depth now afforded to us by this segmentation modelling is really beneficial because we can think of our clients differently to our industry competitors,” adds the Senior Manager of Innovation.
“Optivia provided a fresh perspective and independent voice that was coming from a place of expertise in data science to back up the business strategy. We are really grateful for their support, they were very accessible from end-to-end and what they have produced sets us up for the future. We’re excited about our ongoing work and the prospect to keep building on what we’ve achieved with Optivia”
The outcome
The firm now has the capabilities to better collate not just financial data, but also data from other areas to have a more complete view of their business, including marketing activity, customer interactions, timesheets, and business firmographics. This has led to great advancements in the firm’s decision-making processes, meaning people can have better, more meaningful conversations with their stakeholders.
“Just like in any business, we have to deliver value as we go. And being able to work with a team like Optivia meant we were getting wins along the way. A big win was collaboration because it was a project that really forced many stakeholders around the business to operate together. Optivia were definitely the facilitators of these discussions and the catalysts for critical thinking and the education around data analytics,” says the Senior Manager of Innovation.
“Having a 360-degree view of our customers helped deliver something that a business development professional or a partner could pick up and quickly grasp to inform their decisions on where we move or how we choose to grow. Optivia did this all at an accelerated pace, moving the project along in nine months where, without them, it could’ve taken us two years.”
“Optivia provided a fresh perspective and independent voice that was coming from a place of expertise in data science to back up the business strategy. We are really grateful for their support, they were very accessible from end-to-end and what they have produced sets us up for the future. We’re excited about our ongoing work and the prospect to keep building on what we’ve achieved with Optivia,” says the Head of Innovation.
''Optivia were definitely the facilitators of these discussions and the catalysts for critical thinking and the education around data analytics''