Marianne Lee is the Director of Analytics & Financial Planning at Trend Micro and is based in Cork in Ireland. For some time Marianne had recognised that there was a need in the organisation to develop analytics skills within her technical team. While the team had strong business intelligence skills, Marianne wanted to make analytics a key part of the suite of services they could offer the business. Marianne read an interview that Aoife from Krisolis gave to the press about analytics and how it could help businesses and felt she would be the right person to help Trend Micro achieve this.

‘The first call with Aoife she got what we were trying to do and respected that we wanted her as a mentor on the side lines rather than doing the work for us,’ commented Marianne Lee, Director of Analytics & Financial Planning, Trend Micro. ‘She understood the importance to me and the business of developing talent inside the organisation. We really needed someone who would come in and help us build our analytics practice from the inside out. She got that from the start.’

‘I knew analytics was going to be a core competency of what we deliver to the business in the near future,’ said Marianne Lee, Director of Analytics & Financial Planning, Trend Micro. ‘Krisolis helped us to define our analytics strategy and our approach to establishing the team, the skill set we needed to train or hire and how to go about this.’

Krisolis initially began with a one-day workshop where Krisolis talked through, at a high level, how analytics could be used in the business, and the type of people they could use if they were to establish an analytics team. This was followed by a series of training courses in advanced analytics, and it was decided to take one of the team out of their day-to-day work and have them run a pilot analytics project for 6 months. For the duration of this pilot project, Krisolis mentored and coached this member of the team to ensure skills transfer and that the project was a success.

The first pilot project looked at customer churn: customers leaving Trend for a different provider.  Analysing data about customer churn allowed Trend Micro to understand their customers’ behaviour – why they leave and when they are likely to leave – and provided the business with insight so that the customer retention process could focus on those customers most likely to churn.

‘Selecting churn was an important decision as we wanted to look at a problem that was a known issue in the business, one that everyone knew was an issue,’ commented Marianne Lee, Director of Analytics & Financial Planning. ‘This was key to our success – we took a known issue and turned it on its head. We showed the power of analytics. Our presentation to the sales people was all based on fact, and that helped them to accept the findings and our suggestions for improvements.’

‘All in all it has been a great success. The main thing I wanted to do was to bring in the skills so our people could analyse the data – no one knows the data like we do,’ continued Marianne Lee, Director of Analytics & Financial Planning, Trend Micro. ‘Krisolis were brought in to bring skills to the team and help them think through the business problem using analytics. But my team knows the data inside out – and that matching of knowledge has worked really well.’

The team is growing and Krisolis continues to be involved in supporting, mentoring and advising Marianne and her team.

As a global leader in IT security, Trend Micro develops innovative security solutions that make the world safe for businesses and consumers to exchange digital information. With over 25 years of security expertise, they are recognised as the market leader in server security, cloud security, and small business content security.

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