IBM - Sales Support Team of the Year
Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Support Team of the Year - Technology Industries
Nomination Title: The EMEA Data Analyst Team: Data Energy Unleashed
The EMEA Data Analyst (DA) team has been providing crucial sales support within the Quote-to-Cash agile organization since it was established back in 2017. Its core mission, originally focused on data analysis, metric generation, and squads’ support, has been growing at a fast pace expanding to new areas such as cognitive, predictions, automation, chatbots, now process mining. During the last year, many new projects have been launched and delivered, covering all EMEA Markets and Units, adding new insights on the existing metrics and facilitating the adoption of new ones, infusing tools and processes with innovative features, driving to unleash the energy behind the data and fuel the organization’s sales engine.
We all know this period has been a tough one under several aspects. The pandemic dramatically changed our lives and our way of working and challenged our certainties and habits; the organization changed with the onboarding of new functions and their processes, data sources, tools; high potential technologies continued to emerge and required exploration, learning, understanding, deployment.
From the other side, we all know that new challenges lead to new opportunities and the DA Team was ready to seize them!
The Data Analyst Team developed and drove several initiatives:
1. EMEA Q2C Advisor: To move away from static dashboards to customized visualizations supported by an embedded chatbot. It allows our squads to decide the visualizations they want to see and interact with the chatbot to directly get data. The yearly saving +8,000 hours.
2. Cycle time and throughput prediction: To predict the future trend and prescribe actions to improve results with faster support and better satisfaction from our internal clients. The model accuracy for EMEA Cycle Time reached 95%.
3. Cognitive Squads Insight: To monitor the utilization from +300 teams to balance workload and avoid long cycle time, reduction in client satisfaction, and employee mood. Leaders can quickly act on squads overutilized by moving workload where free capacity is; labour costs reduced by 3% (partial leavers’ replacement and overtime payments’ reduction).
4. NPS analysis: A one glance Python-based analysis into our internal Net Promoter Score with word clouds, trends, and quarterly insights to have an immediate view on our stakeholders’ satisfaction. +12K quarterly feedback submitted.
5. Automation: To remove our human intervention in the creation of recurring deliverables thanks to IBM RPA technology. Around 2,000 hours of workload savings were achieved, optimizing our support.
6. First Level Virtual Assistant: First Q2C chatbot supporting internal and external clients using IBM Watson technology. Direct answers from our continuously trained chatbot improve our client experience and reduce mail and call traffic. Implementation of the chatbot saves around 7,650 hours annualy.
In a very challenging period, with the pandemic spreading across the world and forcing people and companies to rapidly adapt to new emerging needs, our team was able to help our organization to improve YtY (2020 vs 2019) cycle time by 13% while supporting 7% more volumes and at the same time improving almost 2% the client satisfaction (internal NPS). The employee sentiment trend has been stable across the year around the ‘happy’ mood confirming that the right mix of technology, innovation, passion can drive not only the business results but also the people’s morale even under difficult circumstances. Our commitment and motivation, the strong connections among the different team members scattered across Europe and India, the continuous knowledge sharing have created an environment where new ideas are wanted and embraced. In the Agile spirit, every individual is self-empowered, but it’s the collaboration and iteration together that ensure our mission is delivered. As a result, our team mood is always above 4 (on a scale of 5) and our average NPS is 88%.
A sample of our stakeholders’ feedback:
“Fundamental to get vital and strategic insight. Difficult to envisage decision-taking process without DA's input and analysis”
“I like flexibility and ability to solve everything and explain also impact of the action.”
“Very helpful and always communicate clearly what I like the most. Definitely would recommend - Great Team!!!!”
“They provide great support. Self-driven, disciplined, professional, and delivers on commitment. Thanks for all great work”