How Davies Hickman used Displayr to Give their Clients more value with better reporting

Challenge

An industry-wide shift towards better reporting

As the Managing Director for the market research and data analysis firm Davies Hickman, Marcus Hickman is always focused on delivering the most value possible for his clients.

“I always want to keep our clients happy and satisfied with what we’re doing. But more than that, I want to ensure that what we do delivers value to them,” he says. “We’re very focused on ensuring that for every project we do for our clients, they can use the information we provided to make decisions that make a difference for their business.”

To deliver the best possible value, Marcus pays close attention to new developments in the market research and data analysis industries. And over the last few years, he’s seen an increased focus on data visualization for better reporting.

“Visualizations have obviously grown in importance,” he says. “They cut through the overload of information that most people have to deal with in their working lives. I think it helps make the data and information more noticeable.”

But creating in-depth, visual presentations in PowerPoint took time: Marcus’s team would spend hours formatting and updating data.

“A lot of the work was done very manually,” he explains. “Although there is some automation between data tables and PowerPoint, it tends to be quite clunky.”

And when a client wanted tracking or benchmarking studies, his team would have to run a whole new project.

Marcus also realized that their clients wanted more control over their data.

“We realized that adding a dashboard functionality would add some real value for our clients and for ourselves,” he adds. “Clients are getting used to manipulating their own data and accessing it through an online interface. We wanted to be able to give them access to their results, so we could work more collaboratively together.”

Marcus needed a way to give his clients everything they wanted: in-depth analysis that’s easy to understand visually, and that they could manipulate themselves. Now, he just needed to find a tool that could help him offer all this at once—without requiring hours of manual input for each project.

Solution

A fully-connected analysis and reporting solution for creating beautiful data presentations that are easy to update

Marcus had already been working with Q, another Displayr product, for several years. So when he began looking for visualization and dashboard solutions, he knew right away Displayr would be a good fit.

“For market research, Displayr offered the best combination of traditional statistical analysis of survey data, combined with new visualization tools and dashboard tools,” he says. “Those two things together were a very compelling proposition.”

When Marcus began using Displayr, he loved how much support he received from the entire team any time he had a question.

“The Displayr support team has been absolutely fabulous to work with,” he says. “One Saturday, we were working on a project quite early in the morning. I emailed the support team, and Tim Bock himself responded to my query. That was amazing, given he's the founder and head of the company.”

Now, creating and updating visual presentations is seamless. When a client requests more information on a project, Marcus can update the data and, PowerPoint presentations, and dashboards automatically, without having to run the entire analysis again.

If we have 10 different presentations for 10 different countries and we receive a new data file, with Displayr, we can update all 10 presentations automatically.

“Before, we had to go into each of the PowerPoint presentations and update the data in each individual chart. And if we had 50 slides in a PowerPoint presentation it could take hours or even days to update.” he says.

Marcus also found Displayr’s advanced analysis features invaluable: with their text analysis options, his team could ask open-ended questions and analyze the results in a fraction of the time.

“It’s really moved us beyond using things like simple word clouds,” he says. “Before, we would have had to code this manually. Now, we use the AI-powered automatic coding in Displayr to deliver much better, deeper analysis.”

Finally, Displayr allows Marcus to offer his clients easy-to-use dashboards that allow them to manipulate their data themselves.

“We’d often get clients asking us to cut the data in different ways, or they’d want to look at a different country or segment of the data,” he says. “Now, they have the ability to do that for themselves. It speeds things up for them, and it makes their work faster.”

Result

60% more time saved on data updates—which can be dedicated to finding more insights for clients instead

Thanks to Displayr, Marcus can offer his clients more: better visualizations, better insights, and more control over their own data, so that he and his team can focus on making recommendations that drive their clients’ business success.

“Displayr and using the visualization really forces you to think more clearly about what the true findings are and how best to communicate them for maximum impact,” he says. “That adds a lot of value to our clients, because they're really getting a view of the data, rather than just getting all the data for the sake of it.”
Marcus and his team can now focus on finding the most valuable insights for their clients.

“Displayr really helps us pull out the most interesting findings for clients and find the significant differences,” he says. “Our clients can be sure we’ll make recommendations that will drive their business success.”

He sees the biggest difference when he updates existing presentations: Displayr’s automation means he saves upwards of 60% of the time he used to spend on manual tasks. He uses that time to dive deeper into his clients’ data.

We have more time to do advanced data analysis, whether it’s text, driver, correspondence analysis, or a segmentation. Displayr saves us time, so we can reinvest that extra time to deliver more value to our clients.