Amway cultivates a data-driven culture using Heap

Finding the right tool for the job

As the world's largest direct selling company for health, beauty, and home care products, Amway Corporation is constantly looking for opportunities for optimization. But with seemingly endless options for what changes can be made, Amway knows that staying data-driven is key for prioritizing what will move the needle most.

“The world around us is undergoing a rapidly evolving digital transformation and to meet that change we need to be constantly innovating our digital products,” says Brandon Walsh, Amway's Customer & Product Analytics Manager. “To keep up that pace we needed to find an analytics tool that allowed us to quickly answer business questions and iterate our approach each and every day."

So when the Amway team was still finding running analytics too time- and resource-intensive despite having just completed a multiyear implementation for a new analytics tool, they didn’t settle and sought out a more agile solution. After researching their options, they decided to purchase Heap.

Being data-driven is a marathon, not a race

“Like training for a marathon, realizing business value through analytics is the culmination of many small wins consistently pursued over a long period of time. You don’t just do one big analytics project a year that completely changes the business, just like you don’t just wake up and run a whole marathon,” says Brandon.

“It’s all about small incremental daily improvements. But those weren’t possible when the burden of development time was slowing us down. Our implementations were expensive and cumbersome because they were dependent on engineering. Changes to user experience meant ongoing maintenance burden on engineering for manual tagging and tracking."

"It was difficult to just keep up, let alone do analysis and provide insight. We were spending all this time, money, and effort, but not getting to ask ‘Is this even effective?’ or ‘How should we make it better?’”

Going for the gold with Autocapture + Heap Illuminate

“Heap’s autocapture makes analysis flexible so we can iterate quickly instead of having to wait three months for something to be tagged. There are always unknowns that you don’t realize you’ll wish you had been capturing, and with Heap our analysts can now easily define and measure them retroactively while our engineers get back to building better digital products,” Brandon says.

“By removing the friction, Heap enables our analysts to make frequent data-informed decisions based on little nuggets of insights surfaced in just a few clicks. Not only that, but Heap Illuminate helps catch what they might have missed. Whether it be an insight that was overlooked or a missing step in a funnel, Heap’s proactive suggestions empower our analysts to remain persistent in their pursuit of improvement.”

From data to insights to action

“Heap’s ease of use has allowed us to roll it out for self-serve use by many more Amway employees,” says Brandon. “We have over 220 employees in Heap running over 44,000 queries on a monthly basis. With such broad adoption of the tool, Amway has been able to truly become a data-driven organization. We're able to quickly drive conversations forward from business questions to data-driven answers. By the end of the year Amway is going to hit a million Heap queries and from those insights we’ll hit new milestones in innovation for our customers.”