The Value of Data

Increasingly, data assets are the engine driving the total value and growth of modern organizations. As a result, building a framework to discover and realize the potential of your data is critical to increasing the value you provide to shareholders, and to optimizing the future success of your organization.

Many companies, however, fail to understand both the value of their existing data assets and the underlying levers that can increase data value. Many do not even know all of the data that they have, where it is, or what the quality of the data is. This can mean, in turn, that they miss out on the competitive advantages and shareholder value that their data assets can generate.

A PE firm brought Epochal in to work with one of their portfolio companies specializing in hosting on-demand and live video interviews, assisting candidates and students with interview preparation, and helping employers schedule and construct the best questions for interviews. They were on a journey to reimagine their product suite, with an eye toward decreasing costs, increasing revenues, and lowering customer churn. Epochal was originally tasked with conducting a full audit on its data resources and provide preliminary insights to help promote growth and profitability through data-backed changes to its platforms.

Due in part to reliance on decades-old legacy systems and multiple acquisitions, their data was larger and more complex than initially anticipated. Epochal compiled data dictionaries that provided a comprehensive roadmap for navigating internal data resources, dispersed across many hundreds of tables, four separate platforms and dozens of environments. Making use of proprietary software, we vetted the data across all platforms, using company-specific conditions to identify both basic and difficult-to-catch errors in their data. Epochal then used data-processing algorithms to automatically correct these errors where possible, ultimately bringing accuracy, consistency, and organization to the data and setting the stage for insight generation.

Making use of its newly improved data resources, Epochal Technologies produced answers to the company’s key questions about its user base and product suite. Epochal’s analysis segmented churn rates by region, industry and product. Epochal also broke down platform use by customer, helping identify the costs associated with hosting different customers on their platforms. Both of these insights helped identify the most profitable customers and customer types - and begin targeting accordingly. We also answered company-specific questions, such as the gaps between customer usage of their platforms versus the usage they were provisioned for, fine-tune forecasts and identify opportunities for cross selling.

Since the initial engagement we have continued to work with that portfolio company and others to create a variety of solutions for the PE firm, including creating a commercial revenue generating product based entirely on providing platform customers with insights into their data, how they compare in the market, how they can streamline operations, etc.