blog | 5 min read

Customer Spotlight: Tausif Islam from Servco

November 25, 2020

Customer Spotlight Hero: Tausif Islam from Servco

Our customers are always inspiring us, and we love to catch up with them to learn more about how they work and play so we can share it with our community.

Tausif in Four:

  • Data Visualization and Analytics Director at Servco where he’s been for about 1.5 years. He also taught “Intro to Data Mining” at Bellevue College a few years ago!

  • Has built 5 dashboards using data from Amperity in Tableau and these dashboards are used by Digital Strategy, Auto Retail, Marketing and Service teams to run the Servco business.

  • Logs into the product and uses Amperity for direct access to customer data from all sources to power analytics. He also drives the integration of new data sources as they become available.

  • Enjoys going to Kailua Beach, making dad jokes and cooking. During Covid, Tausif has been experimenting with fermentation and is currently mastering the art of making kimchi.

You have an interesting title. How much of your job is analyzing versus visualizing data and what do you see as the difference? How has Amperity helped you with the visualization part of your job?

Visual analytics falls into the category of descriptive analytics, which is the simple interpretation of historical data – the “what happened.” When you analyze something, the goal is to communicate valuable insights that a simple chart can’t provide, which could fall into the diagnostic analytics category – the “why did this happen."

It’s hard to separate the two as I use my visualization tool to do my analysis most times. My goal is to always provide insightful reporting, so I’d like to hope that I’m doing even parts visualizing and analyzing.

By utilizing Amperity, we built some great dashboards that answer the “what happened.” What’s exciting is that Amperity is helping us answer the “why” as well. By tying together our customer interactions with the Amperity ID, we’ve been able to follow our customers' journeys and identify opportunities.

What’s really enabled our visualization platform is the Snowflake database Amperity implemented for us! With Tableau’s native Snowflake connectors, it’s never been easier nor faster to connect to the data we need to do deep analysis.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do with data for Servco?

I think the coolest thing we have been able to do with our data is utilizing it to develop a customer funnel. Before Amperity, to create even a simple customer funnel would have been a difficult task. Now we have a customer funnel dashboard that is refreshed daily. With this insight, we can adjust our email strategy mid-week or mid-month as we track customer leads and interactions.

Assuming you’ve saved time cleaning up and accessing data, what other projects or activities have you been able to do for Servco instead?

I’ve been working on this internal passion project of mine called the Analytics Retooling Program or Servco ARP for short. It’s an internal training program to give any Servco employee the data fundamentals and the tools necessary to analyze data. The training program starts with Excel, dives into SQL Server and Amperity, then ends with Tableau and Alteryx training. The goal isn’t to take someone and make them a BI engineer. The goal is to give them an understanding of databases and then provide the tools needed to analyze the data. Understanding our customer and how they interact with Servco is going to be very important as we pivot to a digitally enabled company. Amperity has provided a great data foundation for us to build on. This program is the next step to democratizing that data so everyone can make smart data driven decisions.

Since implementing your initial C360, V360, etc., what’s next? What do you want to do with your increased capabilities?

I’m excited to start utilizing the Householding table we created. Hawaii is an interesting market. What you will find here that is unique are the multigenerational households. You have grandmas, parents, aunts and uncles all under one roof. I’m excited to aggregate our funnel reporting and see what our metrics look like on average per household.

What is your favorite feature or capability in Amperity and what do you use it for?

My favorite feature of Amperity is how the dirty customer data is left at rest and clean tables are provisioned for marketing and reporting needs. The reality is that dirty data never really gets fully cleansed, nor does it ever stay clean. If you’re a scrappy team or even a mature company, you’ll find data in so many different sources and formats that cleaning or putting in operational checks could be mammoth task or what feels like a low ROI activity. Letting Amperity handle the stitching and transformation has been a great benefit. It allowed the Servco team to really focus on our digital transformation and not get bogged down with data wrangling.

Thanks Tausif!

And to our readers, stay tuned for more Customer Spotlight.

Tausif enjoying the great outdoors in his sweet ride, a blue truck

Tausif enjoying the great outdoors in his sweet ride