Telecom giant uses Tableau Pulse to drive analytics adoption

The beginning

Data-driven decision-making has been shown to spur faster growth than decisions made without the benefit of analytics. Consequently, the more employees that are empowered to make data-driven decisions with the proper tools and training, the faster an enterprise can increase revenue.

However, enterprises have struggled for decades to equip more than a quarter of their employees with the skills and technology to regularly use data analysis as part of their jobs.

Generative AI, which enables true natural language processing that reduces the need to write code and interpret data, is helping some enterprises expand their use of BI to more employees. But GenAI development is expensive and complicated, and users still need training to know how to effectively query and analyze data, so it's not yet a cure-all for enterprises that want to be completely data-driven.

The transformation began in late 2023.

Before that, those employees who were using data to inform decisions were doing so with a mix of Excel spreadsheets and any one of seven different BI platforms being deployed throughout Virgin Media 02's various departments.

The first step was developing a playbook that outlined the plan for expanding analytics use beyond a group of trained data experts.

"The key thing for us was having a strategy, and making sure it was scalable," said Abi Beaumont, Virgin Media O2's senior vice president of data strategy, culture and university, during the conference. "From the outset, everything we did was about how we can drive scale. We approached it in a certain way where we worked with certain parts of the business first, but having that scale in mind was important to make sure we can deliver what we need across all our employees."

The strategy included implementing a single self-service analytics platform in place of seven legacy BI systems and providing the training and technology to equip users with the skills to carry out self-service analytics through its Data University. In addition, it included creating a culture that fosters companywide buy-in to the idea that data-driven decisions are not merely beneficial but also necessary.

"To be truly successful, we believe that all of these capabilities need to come into play," Beaumont said. "There's not one thing that's going to make us successful. It's all of these things."

Perhaps most important, though, is creating the culture that leads to buy-in, she continued.

"People often think that's a one-off activity," Beaumont said. "It's not. That constant buy-in is really important because as the organization changes, as you mature, different things become important to different people. So that buy-in has to happen constantly. If you don't take note of where you are, you might go off track."

Taking action

After formulating a plan, Virgin Media O2 put it into action in late 2023.

Part of that plan was finding the right self-service analytics platform.

At the time that Virgin Media O2 determined it needed to change its analytics operations, data was isolated within its different departments, and those employees who were using advanced statistics to inform decisions were doing so on any one of seven legacy platforms, further isolating data. In addition, Virgin Media O2 had to pay for each of those seven platforms, creating unnecessary expense.

"It's really powerful to go to one platform because not only do we give people the best experience because they're not having to go to multiple analytics tools, but it's also fantastic from a cost-savings perspective," Beaumont said.

Before Virgin Media O2 decided on Tableau, which it ultimately began using in December 2023, it looked at various options, according to Bartlett. However, Tableau stood out because it's capable of working with massive amounts of data and, in late 2023, already had introduced AI-powered capabilities such as Pulse and Agent -- at the time called Einstein Copilot in Tableau -- in preview.

"Tableau was a no-brainer for us," Bartlett said.

Now, Virgin Media O2 is on Tableau Cloud and, even though it remains far short of its goal of all employees using Tableau, the company has one of the largest Tableau deployments in the U.K., with about 4,000 users. Of those users, about 3% have a creator license, just more than 10% have an explorer license and the rest are categorized as viewers.

However, despite Virgin Media O2's growing adoption of Tableau, there were challenges to its initial use that needed to be overcome and some that remained, according to Beaumont.

One was that most of the telecom giant's employees didn't have experience using analytics platforms and lacked the skills to quickly use Tableau. The platform is easier to use than some analytics systems designed more for data scientists than self-service users. However, though now transitioning to an AI-centric platform that reduces the need for data literacy and other knowledge historically needed to analyze data, Tableau still requires certain skills to use.

Training thousands of employees to use an unfamiliar system that requires unique skills takes time and has slowed Virgin Media O2's expansion of Tableau, according to Beaumont.

Also preventing Tableau's immediate use is the data migration work involved in consolidating the data stored in legacy systems into one. Only once the underlying data is available in Tableau can Virgin Media O2 more rapidly integrate Tableau into every employee's workflow.

"The adoption of Tableau hasn't necessarily been our priority because we've needed to focus on that underlying data," Beaumont said. "And we're still on the journey, making sure we have the right skills and knowledge. We still have people who need more Tableau training to really understand what we can do. There's a huge amount where we're still maturing."

Pulse as an accelerator

With buy-in just as critical to the ubiquitous use of analytics to inform decisions as choosing the right technology and providing the proper training, Virgin Media O2 launched a pilot program to show its employees what is possible with Tableau.

For the pilot program, the telecom giant used Pulse rather than more traditional data visualizations and reports that can be developed using Tableau.

First made generally available in February 2024, Tableau Pulse is a generative AI-powered insight generator.

The tool automatically monitors data, examining far more data than even teams of humans can. When it detects changes to business metrics and new trends, many of which humans might not be able to discover on their own, it sends an alert in natural language and provides accompanying visualizations and summaries to make the information digestible even for non-technical users.

In addition, the alerts are sent to users within their workflows in applications such as Teams, Slack and Salesforce, and can be embedded into other applications as well.

Virgin Media O2's pilot program with Tableau Pulse centered around Black Friday sales in November 2024. Even though Thanksgiving isn't celebrated in the U.K., the day is still a big retail event. Virgin Media O2, like many retailers, provides special offers to customers on the day and uses the data gathered from sales to discover buying trends.

"It gives us a lot of information about what our customers are doing," Bartlett said. "We can then apply more discounts where we want things to sell or adjust our sales strategies. When we look at this data, we want to be able to make changes proactively."

Virgin Media O2 used Tableau Pulse to focus on metrics such as comparing Black Friday sales in 2024 with previous years to glean which offers performed better than in past years and which ones performed worse.

"We wanted to use those metrics to focus on trends and outliers, and not use complex dashboards," Bartlett said. "We didn't want to invest the time in developing yet another dashboard that wasn't going to be used after Black Friday was over."

Tableau Pulse proved easy for users to understand without first requiring them to undergo data literacy training, according to Bartlett. In addition, it provided guided analytics that enabled users to be curious and ask questions beyond what is possible with a static dashboard or report.

"Even without mature skills, they were able to pick it up and use it," Bartlett said. "It let them be curious and dig in more into those insights and gave them the ability to dive in where they wanted to and derive more insights without us feeding it to them."

There were, however, minor problems with the pilot program.

For example, Tableau Pulse proved more effective for those users working with the tool in Microsoft Teams than for those using Salesforce's Slack, Bartlett said. In addition, the scheduling function for insight delivery defaulted to 4 a.m. local time, which meant that data was hours old by the time it was digested during a normal workday.

Still, the pilot program did what it was intended to do, she continued.

"The AI-powered insights were a real hit," she said. "People loved them and got excited about what Pulse was telling them, and because of that it got people talking to their colleagues, which is what we wanted to see. Now, they have that excitement, and we will explore more use cases for Tableau Pulse. It really makes them feel empowered."

Looking ahead

Since using Tableau Pulse to glean insights from Black Friday sales, Virgin Media O2 has already identified new applications for the AI tool that it hopes will drive further adoption of Tableau, according to Bartlett. Among them are fraud detection, which, when executed by humans, is reactive and time-consuming.

Meanwhile, instructing employees on using Tableau Pulse is now part of Virgin Media O2's Data University training program. The telecom giant is also exploring new Pulse features to incorporate them into its use of the tool.

"Tableau Pulse is fundamental in our journey to accelerate adoption," Bartlett said.

It is, however, only part of Virgin Media O2's growing adoption of Tableau, Beaumont added. It is instead part of a holistic plan that includes culture, training and technology, a piece of technology that the company is using to instill the culture that the telecom giant hopes will result in all of its employees using data to inform decisions.

"The ability for people to feel [its effectiveness] themselves makes a big difference," Beaumont said. "That whole word-of-mouth thing is great. It drives the enthusiasm, it drives the excitement, and that's what you want to achieve."

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.