FNP democratises data access to drive efficiencies and business growth

FNP is the leading and most preferred gifting platform in India. With an extensive range of products and services that cater to diverse occasions and emotions, FNP ensures that every gift resonates with meaning and personal touch.

Seamlessly integrate data sources and empower teams with rich insights for a better customer experience

FNP focuses on wowing every customer every time with an innovation and technology-led approach. When the company forayed into gifting categories other than flowers, FNP realised that it would need to use data smartly to better understand customer preferences. Teams began to analyse data from multiple worksheets to continually enhance offerings and experiences.

However, as the customer base grew and data volumes exploded, this manual approach became a bottleneck. FNP sought a platform to harmonise data, automate reporting and empower business users with rich visualisation tools for easy use of data. The company chose market leader Tableau for its strong capability to connect previously siloed data for easy visualisation.

Democratising data empowers quick decision-making and streamlines daily activities, leading to a 30% increase in NPS

Initially, the company only had a few automated CXO-level reports that were delivered daily on Tableau. Today, the 15-strong business intelligence (BI) team led by Khatri has democratised data across functions.

Data flows into Tableau from more than eight sources, including the website, web analytics tools, marketing channels, inventory dashboards, worksheets, and the repository for call centre data. Here, it's organised and standardised for clear definitions, significantly improving its usability. This high-quality data is efficiently delivered to 150 users in teams across the company through relevant daily, weekly, and monthly metrics, reports, and 200 dashboards developed by the BI team.

• Sales users can easily track daily, weekly, and monthly sales, and monitor important festive season sales vis-a-vis historical data.
• Marketing users analyse data around promotions and track the impact of campaigns across the value-chain from inventory to conversions and RoI. They can also monitor the realtime impact of marketing events.
• Product teams keep a close eye on parameters like category performance.
• Operations teams can monitor delivery status and warehouse management in real time

This easy access to key data and insights helps all teams streamline activities and make better decisions. The leadership team, in turn, has tailored dashboards to oversee the business and take informed, strategic decisions. They regularly refer to 25 to 30 key business metrics on Tableau to set the strategic direction of the company.

The business impact is clear. Manual data entry for each analytics use case used to take up to 5 hours earlier, and has now been eliminated. Business teams can instead focus on understanding the data, identifying gaps, and responding agilely, improving manpower utilisation.

For instance, analysing trends running up to the Rakshabandhan festival every year involved many worksheets that took almost 50 hours to update. Today, relevant dashboards and reports drill down to the minutest detail and cover about 35 different cuts. These are available at a click and are refreshed every hour, giving teams access to realtime information for quicker actions and decisions, boosting efficiency and customer satisfaction during a key sales period.

An NPS dashboard also displays daily trends for metrics across all product categories. Teams have insight into regional variations, delivery times, complaint resolution, and product substitution, allowing for focused and action-oriented discussions. Such insights have resulted in a 30% jump in the overall NPS.

“Tableau offers us reliable, customised analysis and visualisations for all our business activities. We no longer have to rely on gut feel and can confidently take quick, responsive decisions based on accurate insights,” observes Pawan Gadia, Global CEO & Director at FNP.

“This makes us a truly data-driven business, and positively impacts customer satisfaction.”

Tableau’s ease of use and powerful features help the BI team respond efficiently to requests for customisations of existing assets, as well as new reports and dashboards. The BI team also builds advanced analytics such as product and customer scorecards and insight stories to support teams better.

Building a strong data culture for business growth

To ensure their dashboards remain relevant and valuable, the BI team proactively prioritises user needs. Explains Khatri, "If a dashboard goes unused for more than 90 days, we reach out to stakeholders to understand why. We then make any requested changes or remove the unused dashboard."

This user-centricity assures stakeholders that their changing requirements will be met, leading to 100% adoption of the dashboards for decision-making.

The BI team also coaches users on how they can better slice, dice, and interpret the data. This, along with the ease of use of Tableau dashboards has successfully built an affinity for data across the business. For example, the delivery operations team oversees FNP’s own warehouses and hubs and nearly 600 partners across India. Along with a 360 overview of the entire network and key data like real-time delivery statuses, the team needs to know what is happening at the territory and partner levels. Multiple data cuts are required to spot disruptions in advance and avert them. The delivery operations team now creates lenses that it needs independently, mining the insights faster for action.

To instill trust in the data, the BI team conducts comprehensive monthly and daily checks on the reports and dashboards, ensuring a robust 95% accuracy. It also uses Tableau’s secure features around data governance, ensuring compliance with data privacy norms and monitoring access rights.

Next: Taking data-driven success abroad and entrenching data culture deeper

FNP is in Singapore, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. This year, the BI team will replicate the data environments in overseas markets, with adjustments for regional differences and data privacy regulations. International, regional, and country-level sales are already being tracked.

Additionally, the FNP analytics landscape will improve as the BI team leverages more of Tableau's new features and familiarises users across the company with them.

FNP has always pursued growth while maintaining its customer-centricity. By standardising its data and reporting on Tableau, and democratising access and rich analysis for improved employee productivity and decision-making, it has grown exponentially and sharpened its customer-centricity.