Challenge: Asure wanted to use data science to reduce customer churn and increase prospect conversion.

Solution: Asure worked with the Domo Data Science team to create a master data set and identify the models it needed to increase its understanding of customer turnover.

Impact: The company now has a thorough understanding of their data related to customer churn, including where important data are missing, how data classification has been managed in the past and needs to be managed in the future to support data science efforts, and how columns of data fit together to inform patterns in customer churn, helping it highly target prospects that are less likely to churn.

Asure uses data science to find its perfect customer with Domo.

Asure Software’s Human Capital Management (HCM) software gives more than 60,000 small business owners the data they need to spend their limited capital in the areas that best drive growth. As it helps its small business customers become more data-driven, Asure has also embarked on its own data journey.

“We wanted to move away from gut-feel decision-making and use analytics and data to drive decisions and create revenue opportunities for the company,” said Bruce Harris, Director of IT and Enterprise Business Applications at Asure.

As a Domo customer, Asure knew Domo would be the right tool to develop its nascent data science capabilities. The company had several goals for its data science initiative. First, Asure wanted to better understand its customer health by gaining a holistic, 360° view of each customer to reduce churn. Next, it wanted to improve its forecast accuracy. Finally, it wanted to be able to better identify and convert prospects.

Becoming a master of data.

Using Domo, Asure created a master data set it could use to power its data science efforts and meet each of its goals. “By creating a master data set that can be used by the whole company, there would be no more looking for data, wondering if it’s correct, or searching for disparate data sources,” said Harris.

Asure’s master data set includes data from across its different systems, including its CRM Salesforce, DealHub for quote creation, its Deal Software Integration platform for integrating transactions into their ERP NetSuite, Concur for expenses, Rockettrip for gamification of travel expenses, and an Excel-based corporate performance management tool.

The company also brings in outside data from Dun & Bradstreet to better understand prospect and customer behavior, data from its own customers’ use of its payroll and HR software products, macroeconomic data such as unemployment rates that may impact customer demand, and customer sentiment data from social networks and Zendesk.

Altogether, the company tracks more than 400 data points per customer per month, adding up to about half a million records overall. “All of this data is integrated in Domo, and because many of these applications already have built-in Domo connectors, the process of moving data to Domo is incredibly efficient and very cost-effective,” said Harris. “We have about five steps to join all that data, and it takes less than an hour to process all that data through those multiple steps.”

From amateur to ‘Aha!’

Once its master data set was built, Asure worked with Domo to find the right approach for its goals and business. “The Domo Data Science team took an in-depth look at our data, the sources for our data, how we’re using that data, and then made recommendations on which type of models we should use,” said Harris.

While Harris has a background in business applications, he had no formal analytics education. The Domo Data Science team made it easy to incorporate data science into his organization without requiring a deep bench of data science experience.

“The weekly calls were my favorite hour of the week because of how well the data science team knew what we needed to tackle, how you need to build these models from the ground up, and then what are the best concepts, best practices, what to do, what not to do,” said Harris.

Thanks to the Domo Data Science Suite, Asure has been able to build ideal customer profiles that allow the company to highly target prospects compared to its previous generic prospecting approach, giving it more qualified customers that are less likely to churn. “We now know our existing customer base very, very well,” said Harris. “As we keep entering actual opportunity closed-won/closed-lost feedback into the theoretical model, it keeps getting better over time.”