Q: What was the context in which you reached out to Perceptive Analytics?

Alyssa Quill: We decided we wanted to use Tableau to improve our dashboard reporting and access to information that we had in multiple formats.

We spent several months trying to create dashboards on our own and not making a lot of progress. None of us had used it before, we didn’t have anybody who was an expert in creating dashboards in Tableau, and we wanted to speed the process up to get all those reports created.

So we reached out to several companies. We were impressed in our conversations and the examples we saw of Perceptive Analytics’ work, and we started working together early this year.

Q: What progress did you make working with Perceptive Analytics?

Alyssa Quill: We keep expanding the scope of work. Our initial goals were accomplished months ago, and we keep seeing more opportunities.

As we have conversations with Perceptive Analytics, we keep thinking of new ways that we can use the data we have to analyze it and make good decisions.

We’ve been able to merge data from our accounting software, point-of-sale software, marketing information, Google Analytics, and reputation management. All of this important data from multiple places has been merged into one spot.

Now, all of our managers can look in one place to see how their stores and business are doing. We’ve created exception reports that are really awesome—they highlight issues much earlier than we would have caught before, things that we need to address and fix.

It’s really helping us identify positive and negative trends or unique situations that we need to correct right away.

Q: How was your experience with Perceptive Analytics?

Alyssa Quill: It’s been great. I’ll be honest—we were a little concerned, based on experience we’ve had with other companies in the past, that the geographic distance between our company and Perceptive would make it difficult to get in touch for communication, for quick follow-up.

And that has not been the case at all. We have regular twice-a-week meetings where we’re getting updated, answering questions, very regular. They’re never missed. If we have to reschedule, we reschedule. But even emails are responded to very quickly. We haven’t had any issues with communication at all.

So we’ve seen great communication and continual progress and really good ideas brought to the table from Perceptive.

The Perceptive team is really good at taking their experience from looking at data and dashboards from different types of companies that you’ve worked with in the past and different ways of reporting and looking at things and bringing those ideas to us. So they’re very good at challenging what we’re asking for and saying: “That’s great, I understand.”

Making sure they understand the end product—why we’re asking for what we’re asking for—and saying, “Sure we can do that, but we can also improve it by doing X, Y and Z.”

So that’s been very, very impressive. And actually, I think we were thinking that this year we’d add another head in our analytics team to be managing Tableau in the database.

What we’ve found is that by using Perceptive—a team that’s an expert in this—instead of hiring somebody that would have to learn it, and we try to manage it ourselves but we’re not experts, we’ve been able to get experts that aren’t physically here in our office but are working on this all the time for us.

Q: How is the team at Perceptive Analytics?

Alyssa Quill: The few individuals that we have worked with really understand our business, spend time to understand our business, and understand what we’re looking for, what we need.

And that’s made the relationship much stronger and it’s made it more successful I think.

Very diligent, very responsible, very reliable as well. No complaints.

Q: What would you tell someone who is considering Perceptive Analytics?

Alyssa Quill: I’d highly recommend Perceptive Analytics. The people that we’ve worked with have great knowledge, they’re experts in what they do, and they have delivered on all the promises that they’ve made. So they’ve helped us improve our reporting better than we would have done on our own. So absolutely would recommend them.

We have worked with other companies based in India in the past too, and the level of communication with you guys is far superior to any of the other companies that we’ve worked with. And I think that makes a huge difference. So good job to you.