Faced with more unpredictable customers, leaner staffs, and many new martech systems and channels to track, most marketing teams are finding it very difficult to be truly data-driven. There’s just too much data to make sense of – and it’s hard to really know every day what issues or opportunities are emerging. As a result, many leading marketers are reimagining their approach to data and analytics. The goal: quickly identifying the developments that matter most to their business and their customers – and knowing right away how to address them effectively.
SourceForge recently caught up with Mike Stone, CMO at Outlier AI, the leader in automated business analysis, to explore how leading brands are reorienting their data analytics approach and infrastructure to deliver easy-to-understand but powerful insights into unexpected or previously undetectable shifts in website traffic, paid campaign performance, e-commerce funnel performance, and product sales.
CMO at Outlier AI
We’re always fascinated by SaaS startup origin stories. How did Outlier get started and when did you start focusing on digital customer experience?
Outlier was founded in 2015 on the premise that the BI tools were not keeping pace with exponential data growth. Business leaders are frustrated because BI tools are too complex to easily identify the specific actions that they need to take. And even if they have a good analytics team, these expert users can really only answer a few specific questions at a time. Outlier took a different approach – using AI to automatically analyze all of a company’s data every night to identify unusual trends and relationships that require attention. Outlier uncovers the changes you should be seeing to maximize the customer experience and grow your business most effectively.
Though Outlier has been applied to many different types of data and business problems, we found that marketers are among those that benefit most from this ability to analyze huge data sets quickly. With the rapid pace of change, the huge number of channels and campaigns running at any given time, and all of the resources that are poured into each one – marketers see huge benefits from the timely insights that Outlier provides.
What exactly is automated business analysis, and how does Outlier work?
Automated business analysis is an emerging, fast-growing category in the larger analytics ecosystem. These systems use AI to run literally tens of millions of queries across huge data sets every day, discovering trends, spikes and relationships in that data that are outside of the normal range. The system selects just a few of these anomalies that have the most business impact and then communicates them to the business user in a simple feed or email briefing. There’s no logging in – no queries, just a simple explanation of what’s going on in your business. Each of these data “stories” includes links to the specific data causing the change if you want to look further into it, suggested additional questions for exploration, and the ability to instantly share and discuss the story with your team so that action is taken right away.
A big difference about Outlier is the sheer breadth of data it can analyze. By connecting to multiple data sets, it can identify trends and relationships across data silos – not just within each data set. This is a huge advantage for companies who want to track, say, the relationship between engagement metrics for a digital campaign and sales data that is captured in another system. The Outlier platform easily integrates with all major data sources—Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, other leading SQL databases, SAP HANA, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Adobe Analytics, Zendesk, SendGrid and more.
Can you tell us more about Outlier stories?
Outlier delivers a small set of curated stories to your inbox each morning. If you see a story of interest, you can click on it to view the story in the Outlier platform. Each story is part of a daily, weekly, or monthly feed. Stories come in different types: spike and drop, relationship, trend, milestone, funnel, and new normal are a few examples. These stories can span multiple data warehouses, data sets or tables. Each story has four components: a visual, the details, potential root causes, and suggestions for further investigation. Remember, the components of every single story including the graphs, natural language details, root cause analysis, and suggestions for further investigation, are created and delivered automatically each and every day by the Outlier platform. And they are designed to be usable for non-technical staff. You don’t need to be a data analyst or data scientist to understand and take action on an Outlier story.
How do line-of-business users take action on daily insights from their story feeds?
Outlier provides a simple and powerful insights workflow. Users can share stories with colleagues, start a conversation thread within a story, follow a story, and even download a story as an image or PDF if they need to circulate it within the larger organization.
How are marketers using Outlier to improve the customer experience?
While we have customers using Outlier across many use cases, we’ve seen incredible demand for our digital customer experience and supply chain solutions. Marketers at leading brands across multiple industries including retail, CPG, financial services, hospitality and travel, life sciences, and video games, have more data available to them than ever before, but they struggle to track and make use of it all. That data doesn’t just live in a single place: It lives in their website analytics platforms, e-commerce tools, digital advertising platforms, CRM, and multiple databases. Every single system used to run a business has become a fountain of valuable data.
The big challenge digital marketers face today is: How do they leverage all of that data—spread across a multitude of systems—to find their next great campaign, drive amazing customer experiences, and rapidly respond to changing trends and behaviors? One of my favorite examples involves a global fast food chain with thousands of locations that sells hundreds of items—so, we’re talking loads of data and millions of dimensions like product by store, by time, by location. With all of this data flowing in every day, it’s hard to catch anything unusual at a single store. It’s just too much data and too much detail for even the most seasoned analyst team to keep up with. But Outlier caught an interesting and very profitable development at one of the restaurant locations.
This is a big deal because fountain drinks have an incredibly high profit margin. When they drilled into that insight, they discovered fountain drink sales were pretty consistent and then suddenly spiked—and continued to grow—after what looked like a temporary store closure.
It turned out the store had closed for renovations after a flood—and during those renovations, the staff had moved the soda fountain closer to the cash register. That one small change had a big impact on soda sales, so the chain began updating store layouts in other locations across the globe to match. The big takeaway: That incredible insight would have gone unnoticed if the company hadn’t been using Outlier.
About Outlier AI
In the broadest sense, Outlier would be placed in the analytics and business intelligence market. More precisely the company is a leader in Augmented Analytics and at the forefront of the emerging Automated Business Analysis category. Outlier informs business leaders of the actions they need to take every day to improve customer experience and operations. Outlier automatically analyzes company databases every night and delivers easy-to-understand but powerful insights into unexpected shifts in data like website traffic, paid campaign performance, product sales, and supply chain performance. Without queries, dashboards, or reliance on an analyst team, non-technical managers can immediately identify and address emerging issues or new growth opportunities to build a truly data-driven and nimble business. Outlier is effectively used by many leading brands and has seen impressive adoption and sharing of their data insight stories by both non-technical users and analysts. Outlier has proven to be an indispensable tool for companies in the COVID era, enabling them to recognize and react to changes in their markets and operations ahead of their competitors. The solution has gone well beyond complex data science by creating simple and collaborative story formats and packaged integration points to ensure the impact of the technology is both rapid and broad. By proving value and impact, the company has attracted impressive new customers and effectively expanded across new organizations and use cases within their client base.
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