Updating reporting templates with new data through automation
"Most companies have the best of intentions when it comes to providing a unified customer journey.” A recent article on Forbes covers the challenge of extracting the maximum insights from available customer data. No one wants to present information that doesn’t represent the whole story when it comes to how an audience is behaving, feeling and taking action. However, there’s just so much data out there, and new data coming in constantly, that the task can feel overwhelming.
Many solutions are out there that claim to solve inefficiencies and address specific challenges when it comes to getting data out of siloes, synthesizing it, and presenting more complete customer insights. However, many of these systems are complicated, cumbersome or not specifically designed for a market researchers’ needs.
The author of the Forbes article maintains that there are several steps for achieving the end goal of empowering “people to make informed and impactful decisions that keep customers happy and keep organizations in business.” Much of the advice is solid, such as taking a consumer centric approach and creating a data-centric culture, the practical path for getting there can prove complex - as many of us have found out the hard way.
Automation is a concept that is thrown around a lot when it comes to creating efficiencies in data processing, analyzation and reporting. But where to easily apply it in an environment that makes sense to the user is not always clear. If we just examine one step of the market research process, updating insights with new data, we can see how powerful automation can prove to be.
Despite what some people see as a love-hate relationship, the fact of the matter is that most people share information via a very familiar platform: Microsoft PowerPoint. It is easily shareable, everyone has it already installed and most people know how to use it. Not surprising: recent stats show that 500 million people use the program.
If you are sharing insights via PowerPoint slides, you can use automation to easily create new slides with the OfficeReports solution for fast reporting in multiple, shareable templates. After standardizing their reports and determining how specific variables should be reported, users can then use the OfficeReports Report Builder function to easily indicate which variables should be used in the tables and charts of the different slides. In some cases, these specifications can be made for multiple slides in just a few clicks.
From here, the Report Builder will automatically generate all the needed tables in Excel, and create a presentation that is directly linked to the results in Excel. The result is a finished report, which can be quickly and easily updated with new data.
This is just one example of how automation can be used in commonly understood programs, like PowerPoint and Excel, by using the OfficeReports solution.