Ensemble Travel Group centralize analytics across the board with Zoho Analytics
- FOUNDED 1968
- country US
- Industry Travel
- Size Small
- Employees 50-200
- Presence Across US & Canada
- Other BI Solutions Evaluated Tableau, QlikView
- Data Sources Leading BI solutions
- Analytics RequirementOperational analytics
- 800+Users
- 1Source of truth
- IncreasedEngagement
"Zoho Analytics has given us a single source of truth for Ensemble Travel business. Earlier, each department had different interpretations of their data. With Zoho, every department is on one platform and moving towards our company goals."
Kim Mendes
Director of Information Services & IT, Ensemble Travel Group
About Ensemble Travel
Established in 1968 Ensemble Travel Group, is a member-owned organization of top-tier travel agencies throughout the U.S. and Canada. Through their membership, they offer added amenities, exclusive offers, unique hosted tours, and exceptional customer service through deep relationships with the world’s leading providers of travel products and services. Their US office is based in New York and the Canadian office is based in Toronto.
Challenges: Need for integrated, centralized analytics
Kim Mendes is the Director of Information Services and IT for the Ensemble Travel Group, and is charged with designing the strategy and structure of Ensemble’s new Data Monetization Center. Ensemble Travel works with a variety of travel agencies across the US and Canada, with individual travel agents selling travel products and packages to a diverse range of consumers and had rather custom requirements.
Mendes needed metrics and reporting at multiple levels, not to mention an analytics solution to track the performance of Ensemble business and their Member Agencies and keep track of various currencies and exchange rates.
She was in need of an overall picture to help:
- Show the end-to-end performance of the business
- Centralized and consolidated data management and reporting
- The ability to track performance and target opportunities for Ensemble Member Agencies.
- Understand the industry and trends
- Identify and action potential opportunities at all levels
Their existing technology was complex and had limited flexibility for such a diverse organization. Mendes began looking for an advanced BI platform that was simple, could integrate and blend data from various applications, drive predictive insights, and overall provide them with more control on the direction of the business.
Ensemble Travels wanted a solution to:
- Import and blend raw data from applications
- Get actionable insight through reports and dashboards
- Provide collaborative analytics with user-based permissions
Leading BI tools in the market were too complex
"Originally, we wanted a BI tool only to automate reporting. However, later we found the need to have more strategic conversations with members to identify new opportunities. We needed a tool that would help us track end-to-end business performance and help our members benchmark themselves with the industry."
Kim Mendes
Director of Information Services & IT, Ensemble Travel Group
Solution: One source of truth through Zoho Analytics
Ensemble Travel Group was using a leading BI tool for their analytical needs but found it to be very labor-intensive and limited for any enhancement.
The company considered various options for a simple, but robust BI solution. In 2016, Zoho Analytics was recommended by their developers and they started a trial.
After using the trial version with real-time company data, they presented it to their leadership team who were thrilled by its simplicity and visualizations. They were able to generate all kinds of reports for sales, member and supplier performance, trending and metrics, comparing the layered aspects of their business all in one place.
The company also white labeled Zoho Analytics as the Insights dashboard for full access to view, filter and export data by their members as part of their Member extranet portal.
Features of Zoho BI, including a variety of data visualizations, intuitive drag and drop functionality, seamless integration of data sources, collaboration, and interactive reports, were of great interest to Ms. Mendes.
Ensemble Travel Group has used Zoho Analytics to create dashboards for:
- Sales metrics: Including year-to-date sales compared to previous years and/or months, future sales trends, how much each member is selling monthly, volume of sales vs. member size, etc.
- Member related metrics: Including benchmarking performance across the membership and identifying areas to micro-target product and sales opportunities.
- Support metrics: Including the number of issues raised by each member, total issues solved, total open issues, etc.
One source of truth enabled by Zoho Analytics
"Zoho Analytics has helped us leverage the value of our information. Previously, we had spreadsheets and other BI systems, and each department had their own piece of reporting. With Zoho, we can now easily centralize analytics, have an overview of the company, and compare it against historical trends. Our members can also monitor their performance levels and potential opportunities with comparative reports of their agency data in relation to the rest of the industry. It also provided us an opportunity to have in depth conversations with our members by showing them detailed analytics on their agency’s potential and insight on how we are supporting their particular brand."
With Zoho Analytics, insight about company operations and member performance was made available, leading to one source of truth. This was critical in determining the performance of the members and benchmarking with the industry.
Zoho Analytics also enabled centralized analytics to give the Executive team an overview of the company, while maintaining department specific analytics.
The biggest impact of Zoho Analytics was on the increase in engagement among Ensemble Travel's employees and members in understanding the data, its importance, and deriving value. The company was so happy with Zoho Analytics that they upgraded to the Zoho One platform in 2020.
The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared with nearly 800+ users, including employees, members, department heads and management teams. Almost every employee and member have access to Zoho Analytics with fine-tuned user-based permissions.
Benefits & results
- Data is used predictively instead of reactively
- Increase in member engagement due to data analytics
- Increase in employee engagement on data and insights
- Enabled end-to-end operational insights
- Enabled one source of truth across the company
- Seamless collaboration across locations and devices
Increase in employee engagement on data and insights