How Displayr helps Vennli complete projects 5x faster

Challenge

Finding a faster, smarter alternative to Excel

As Vennli’s Director of Insights & Analytics, Erik Larsen is always on the lookout for new tools that can improve the services Vennli offers its clients.

He especially wanted to find a tool that could replace Excel, which slowed down his team’s workflow and offered only very basic options to create appealing visuals.

“When it comes to analysis and visualization, Excel is very limited,” Erik explains. “It’s very hard to get things to update automatically.”

Vennli’s clients have very tight deadlines, and Vennli often needs to deliver their insights within just a few days. Excel’s cumbersome manual process made these fast turnaround times challenging.

Sometimes we had to work through the night in order to meet deadlines for deliverables. It just wasn’t sustainable.

Working with manual systems to meet tight deadlines meant that Erik and his team couldn’t create impressive visual presentations for his clients, which bothered him.

“We wanted to show our clients results within a day or two, a lot of the work had to be done by hand,” Erik says. “The tools we used in Excel only offered very basic visuals.”

Erik needed to find a flexible tool that could speed up manual processes, create compelling visuals, and perform advanced analysis. He also wanted a tool that supported R and had an easy-to-use interface, so his team could make the switch from Excel easily.

Finding software that could deliver everything Erik needed was a tall order. But he knew there had to be a solution out there for him—he just needed to find it.

Solution

An all-in-one analysis and reporting solution with advanced automation and analytics

Surprisingly, Erik found Displayr by chance.

“I was wrestling with an R script, and in a moment of sheer frustration, I googled ‘R with an easy user interface,’” he explains, laughing. “And that’s how I discovered Displayr.”

At first, his team was reluctant to make the switch from Excel, the tool they were most familiar with. But as soon as they did, they were able to see the value Displayr offered.

“Within the first few days I was able to use Displayr to do cluster analysis and psychographic segmentation on a project for our biggest client, and they loved it,” Erik says.

If anyone at Vennli needed help to master the software, Displayr’s customer service team was ready to jump in.

“It’s honestly the best customer support I’ve ever dealt with,” Erik says. “Not only do they get back to you quickly, but they always give you very detailed responses. They’re great.”

Vennli’s clients loved the interactive dashboards and visualizations. And Erik and his team have found that they were able to do more advanced analysis as well, thanks to the tool’s automation capabilities.

“Using Displayr’s automated tools for advanced differentiation techniques like MaxDiff has really improved the quality of our work,” Erik says. “And then we can create beautiful visual representations of the results for our clients.”

One of Displayr’s most valuable features has been the semi-automated text analysis, which has allowed Vennli to analyze results of open-ended qualitative questions much more quickly than before.

“Going through the responses manually to pick out themes and encode them was difficult and very time-consuming,” Erik says. “Now with Displayr, we can code a few, and then the machine learning will kick in and give suggestions pertaining to those codes. It’s very accurate and has saved us a lot of time.”

Perhaps most importantly of all, Displayr’s interactive dashboards allow clients to perform their own data manipulations, which gives them more control.

“Leveraging Displayr’s interactive reporting tool has been a massive hit with our clients,” Erik adds. “They can see the charts that we included in our presentation, but they can also go in and do their own segmentation. They really appreciate it.”

Result

5x faster results, deeper analysis, and more autonomy for their clients

Thanks to the time they save with Displayr, Erik and his team can deliver better results in a fraction of the time they did before—which means they’ve stopped pulling all-nighters. He estimates they can now complete their work four to five times faster.

“My team and I can work normal hours again,” Erik says.

Displayr has made us so much faster. We can meet tight deadlines and deliver better insights without sacrificing work-life balance.

If clients come to him with a query, he can run a new report in seconds. That same task would have taken him several hours to complete in Excel before.

“With Displayr’s recent updates, now we can even upload new responses to the data set,” he adds.

But the biggest time saver has been Displayr’s interactive reports.

“The client can go in and filter the data themselves if they have a hypothesis they want to test,” he says. “That makes life easier for both us and the client.”

In addition to impressing their existing clients and saving time, having Displayr in their toolkit also helps set Vennli apart from the competition.

“We've been told by several potential clients that other research suppliers didn't provide them with the ability to explore the data themselves,” he says. “Bringing Displayr to a sales presentation improves the chances that we’ll get the contract.”

Today, neither Erik nor his team could ever imagine returning to the old days of Excel.

“I would recommend Displayr in a heartbeat,” Erik says. “It does all of your analysis, visualizations, and reporting in one place. Anyone who has dealt with different types of software can understand the value of that immediately.”