Management Consulting Company uses Heap to increase access to product data

Top management consulting company

This company is an international strategic management consulting firm headquartered in Boston that works with their clients to develop a competitive advantage based on their strengths as an organization, and assists in navigating the many challenges of the modern business world.

Founded with the mission of helping organizations unlock insights to create and drive transformation, the company works to give their clients a sustainable advantage in the ever-evolving landscape of business.

For them, having a robust product analytics tool is essential in the company’s modernization efforts and providing actionable insights to their product, IT, and marketing teams.

Product analytics and beyond

The company’s product teams build products to help their army of thousands of consultants be more efficient. The company leverages Heap for product analytics on these internal products to better understand which products and features are most valuable to their consultants.

The company’s marketing team uses Heap to understand user behavior across their site, give content teams access to data necessary to optimize their content roadmap, and build a 360 customer view to power personalization efforts.

The company’s IT team loves Heap’s lightweight nature and uses Heap as a driving force in modernizing their stack to build a 360 view of their customers, improve communication internally, and understand behaviors that drive product impact. They also use Heap to QA data in their marketing technology tools and increase access to behavioral data while reducing reporting requests the team experiences.

Modernization of the data stack

At nearly 25,000 employees, the process of collecting data properly was a complicated and time-consuming process at this consulting company. Before Heap, their team found themselves spending a significant portion of their time trying to predict which events to track upfront — a process that created bottlenecks, strained resources, and typically resulted in overlooked metrics.

Rather than spending time analyzing data and deriving meaningful insights, precious time was allocated towards hypothesizing which questions may be relevant in the future, waiting for teams to implement tracking code, waiting further for QA, and then finally analyzing the data to determine whether they were tracking the right events at all. For Martin, their Program Manager for Digital Technologies, this delayed process was especially frustrating.

“Using Heap out of the box lets you run all day. You can get a lot of insight into what users are doing and why, and whether your product is as optimized as it could be.”

Because Heap is built to take the guesswork out of determining what data to collect thanks to Autocapture, the company found themselves spending less time worrying about which metrics to track, and more time on deriving insights and the impact of their analyses.

“What I found was so interesting, and what got me kinda me hooked in, is that you don’t have to think about every single thing that you might want to track,” said Torrey, Director of Digital Marketing Technologies.

“There are other cases where we wanted to look at data we just didn’t have, and you can’t recreate that data.”

The retroactivity aspect of Heap made it simple for the team to get a complete picture of how users were interacting with their products, without needing to predict every event they wanted to track ahead of time. Having retroactively available data for any new event increased their ability to move quickly and respond to any changes in the business.

Increasing access: everyone can make decisions based on data, not guesswork

Part of the reason Heap was embraced enthusiastically across the company was the fact that it helped increase access to product analytics data, and provided different teams across the business more insight into how their users interacted with their products, website, and content.

With legacy analytics platforms, data was either not available or it took a long time to manually pull data, get a report built, or create a dashboard. As a result, individuals and teams often had to rely on best educated guesses to guide decisions.

“Before we started using Heap, we kind of would just make some guesses based on web best practices… But now we can go into Heap and see the data and know we should do this,” says Mary who leads the web content team.

With Heap, all the relevant data is collected and shared in one single place, making it easy for the organization to extract actionable insights. Instead of relying on a separate team to pull reports, employees like Mary can now access the insights they need in Heap within minutes.

“Heap can easily aggregate everything, whereas the other tools separate everything and then it makes it more manual for us, and a more crazy, not time-efficient process. Now I can go into Heap and get what I need within 5 minutes.”

Enabling data teams to be faster and more agile

While the team was immediately surprised by Heap’s ability to automatically capture behavioral data unlike legacy analytics tools, after using Heap they quickly became aware of how much faster they were able to complete team projects.

Prior to Heap, many projects that should have taken a week were pushed back into months, resulting in missed deadlines. These delays were caused by delays in the legacy event creation process: waiting for work to be slotted into a sprint, waiting for developers to complete the work, a QA cycle, and finally, start receiving data.

Heap makes their product analytics teams more agile. As Christian, who works in marketing analytics, shared, “If I want to get an event created in my other tool, I have to set up some time with their developers, explain to them exactly what we’re trying to do, then it goes to a sprint — which for them it doesn’t mean that it gets put in right away because they have a lot of things on their plate as well. So it could take anywhere from a few weeks to a month before I even see anything.”

Heap allowed the team to eliminate the time-consuming back and forth between teams, and quickly get the insights needed to drive decision making. The time saved on activities like tagging and data cleaning can now be devoted to revenue-generating activities, increasing their agility as a business.

“With our legacy analytics tool, we used to have to push out deadlines. Because of Heap and the flexibility to define events, we’ve been able to hit deadlines much sooner.”

World-class customer support

For this major consulting company, having high-quality enterprise support was a crucial requirement in their search for a modernized analytics solution partner.

Being able to get their questions answered quickly was essential in ensuring their ability to continually meet their demanding deadlines both internally and for their clients.

“The Heap team has been very helpful. Every time our organization contacts them, Heap has been very quick to respond,” said Christian.

Heap is built so that anyone can access and get use out of the data they need to make sound decisions. Heap’s enterprise partners receive long-term support, services, and management to ensure success using Heap.

“Really, I think — besides some of the technical solutions it has — the supportive team behind it is what makes it a bit of a game changer and makes it very different than some of the other analytics tools.” Torrey, Global Director of Digital Marketing Technologies, shared with the Heap team.

Wrapping it up

Ultimately this consulting company brought on Heap over more difficult-to-maintain legacy analytics platforms to push their data stack into the modern era, and drive digital transformation within the organization.

“For me, Heap being able to track every single thing that’s going on on the website, and then allowing us to utilize that data the way we need to in the future is just such a comforting feeling.”

While increasing access to data across product, analytics, and marketing teams is a core benefit the company has realized using Heap, the greatest value gained has been the added agility. Development teams are no longer bogged down by analytics requests or technical debt and have more time to devote to revenue-generating activities. Simultaneously, product teams are now enabled to make stronger product and technology decisions faster because they now have instant access to reliable behavioral data.