How CTGlobal Quadrupled Brand Engagement Using Databox

Helping customers visualize and understand their IT data is about more than just saving time and money.

Being able to fully embrace data, avoid crashes, maintain security, and contextualize use can free up the resources necessary to drive growth and maximize ROI.

This becomes even more important as companies move into the cloud. 

CTGlobal is a leader in IT consultancy, serving enterprise clients with cloud, data center, and client management. They give their clients the tools and information needed to accomplish their goals, free from logjams like data outages, security risks, and resource bottlenecks.

The company has been providing consulting for industry leaders for over 20 years.

But to help clients embrace digitization and the power of data, CTGlobal needed to get a good handle on their own data and metrics.

The need for data fidelity and visualization led them to try Databox. Now, this robust team of engineers, salespeople, and specialists can work efficiently as they empower their clients to do the same. 

Databox helps meet these challenges in a variety of ways. CEO Peter Odgaard recently sat down with us to share some of the ways good data is making daily life easier and driving growth internally and externally.

Trustworthy Data

One of the biggest challenges when handling large datasets from diverse feeds is the ability to have faith in the data. This is especially true for companies that handle both internal and external data sources.

The complexity of this data influx makes trustworthy data vital to decision-making. Manual entry options simply cannot provide the breadth of context and information necessary to the task.

Because of the speed of business and the possibility for errors, “There was always a little concern in the back of our minds: Are we looking at updated data?” That led to a lot of checking to be sure.

This need for trustworthy data became more pressing in the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay-at-home orders rendered off-premise data vital for both CTGlobal and its clients.

Peter describes the necessary changes made to the daily rhythm in the management team, and how real-time, trustworthy data made the difference. 

“The ease of use of Databox has allowed us to maintain that rhythm for a lot longer than any other visualization tools that we’ve used,” explains Peter. Other tools “always required some of us to make sure the data was updated— to manually oversee that the data was updated.”

With Databox direct integrations, the team could operate remotely and support its clients through their own challenges successfully. 

Effective Visualization and Communication

After data fidelity has been solved, compiling that data into a highly useful, easily communicated narrative is the next priority.

Having control of your data, and being able to harness it for good decision making and goal-setting creates a competitive advantage in your business and allows all stakeholders to easily grasp—and make progress toward— established goals and objectives. 

This communication across a global team could be quite complex and prone to inefficiencies; however, sharing metrics and graphical data with Databox has removed much of the friction.

Peter is able to send information out to his management teams quickly and easily, bringing everyone on the same page.

“I rely on empowering my management teams. They are not financial people or engineers; they’re specialists in their own area of excellence. For me to ensure that they have the same map of the world I have, I rely heavily on solid visualization tools.” 

This visual storytelling is easy to provide through an integrated data approach, which helps managers to track important, revenue-generating metrics such as cloud utilization, consultant utilization, and more.

They can even parse the data by country, helping the management team ensure the numbers stay robust across the organization.

CTGlobal’s Top Integrations

The Marketing team uses Databox boards to track and pursue important KPIs weekly, closely following their progress on the social channels that drive engagement.

Because of the nature of their business, LinkedIn is at the heart of their marketing mix. Driving engagement on these channels through sharing excellent information and brand marketing has been greatly improved through valuable data insights.

Peter explains, “We can tell that the uptick in the number of internal shares from LinkedIn has significantly increased since we started sharing overviews with Databox visualizations.”

As the adage goes, what gets measured, gets managed. And with the ability to measure engagement, sharing, and conversion, “Marketing has seen a quite significant uptick in everything they monitor.” 

Most notably, the Marketing team has used the data insights uncovered in Databox to quadruple its internal brand engagement and foster brand ambassadors. 

Says Peter, being able to see the impact of the work is key to driving the engagement. “They can show and see the impact it has. And everybody likes to see their own impact on the results in the company they work for.”

Indeed, the marketing department has made use of the data to broadcast success, sharing progress on their marketing KPIs with everyone, both daily and on weekly all-hands calls.

Managers as well are relying on the communication power of well-visualized data to drive performance, taking screenshots of the Databoards and scorecards they use to share with everybody internally.

Time Savings

As in any organization, time is a most precious resource; therefore, the potential to save hours of manual labor in data preservation and reporting can have a significant impact on both budgets and revenue growth.

And with Databox, CTGlobal has been able to recover dozens of hours, putting them to use in ways that move the needle. Peter himself has seen the impact good data and visualization can have, reporting that at-a-glance charts, data, and templates have reduced the time he’s spent making graphs and visualizations by about two-thirds. 

This time-savings has a ripple effect throughout the organization, giving managers the power to convey information to teams quickly without the tedium of manually creating reports.

The reports themselves allow the team to make even better use of time.

“Being able to send out notifications on the main KPIs every morning at 7 am to everybody on my team—that is nice. It means that when we have our bi-daily calls, they come better prepared than before.”

Rather than spend time analyzing data, the teams can use their 30-minute standups to quickly cover the necessary ground, understand and adjust the approach to impact their KPIs, and get everyone back to their areas of specialization more quickly. 

Peter also uses the Metrics overview to streamline his own research and understanding of the data.

“I use this once a week, and the good thing about it is I have the bottom bar that’s either red or green. So it immediately draws my attention to areas that have gone differently from what I expected, or where I need to act on something… It’s like a heatmap almost. It highlights all the metrics I own, and it shows me the metrics others in my organization have set up.” 

All of these data advantages mean the team is spending less time while making a bigger impact on the business. “We simply make more qualified decisions, faster.”