Stories have always been hugely successful in entrancing, engaging, and enlightening the human mind. Telling the right story to your audience can help in generating the right response from them. Businesses have leveraged this critical element to craft insightful and intelligent stories to attract the attention of their stakeholders for generating growth.
Data Storytelling – Narrating the Business Growth
The principal character in all stories that helps organizations build their success quotient efficiently is their data.
Data storytelling, therefore is the process of employing vital business data intelligently with the help of innovative technology tools like Tableau. Through effective narration, organizations can build conversations and connections with their stakeholders in a more effective manner. It generates insights, influences the way decisions are made, and drives actionable results.
Tableau Consulting services are employed to help organizations leverage Data Storytelling in achieving the best business benefits. Some of its most effective business uses include:
Reports and Presentations
- One of the best ways in which Data stories can be shared with stakeholders is through reports and presentations. Using your data to create engaging stories helps to explain complex calculations and metrics. It is frequently used by sales, marketing, and research teams to increase awareness about their objectives, constraints, and achievements.
Customer Insights
- Building insights into customer behaviour is one of the most effective ways to generate growth for your business. Data Storytelling can help you reach there easily and engagingly. It helps in developing products, designing marketing campaigns, and ensuring positive customer engagement.
Financial performance analysis
- CFOs and financial analysts are increasingly realizing the benefits of using Data storytelling in building effective analyses of their firm’s financial performance. They use this excellent medium in communicating their financial metrics, investment decisions based on their budget variances with other stakeholders.
Supply Chain Optimization
- Data Storytelling also helps in the effective optimization of the supply chain management process. It helps businesses monitor inventory levels, check for order fulfilment processes, and manage transport logistics.
Human Resources Development
- Developing human capital is one of the most important aspects of business operations. Data Storytelling helps in understanding data for employee performance, turnover rates, and workforce diversity statistics.
Building Data Stories with Tableau
Tableau is a popular choice in helping you create data stories. Its capability to create data visualizations by integrating multiple data sources helps in generating critical insights.
It also promotes collaboration across organizations as business users can share the completed workbooks and dashboards on Tableau Servers or Tableau Online that can be accessed by users in external organizations. They can view and interact with the visualizations through their mobile devices or on their web browsers.
Tableau Consulting Services helps businesses leverage each of its unique features to build the perfect story that engages and enlightens all stakeholders.
Dashboard
The Dashboard functionality in Tableau helps to create interactive, multi-visual displays. Dashboards help to tell users a cohesive data-driven story by integrating different visualizations as one. It is a critical element in good storytelling.
Story Points
The story points feature in Tableau allows users to structure the story and maintain a logical flow in the narration. It facilitates the creation of sequences of the visualizations. Each sequence helps to guide the audience through the data story.
Labels and Annotations
Highlighting key insights is critical to embed the information in the mind of the audience. Also, well-defined labels help to add more context to the visualizations. Users can also add detailed descriptions to explain the story points. Tableau provides an exhaustive list of annotations and labels that can be used to make the story come alive.
Filters
Filters are an important functionality in Tableau. It helps viewers to focus on the data story being narrated. Different filter types can be used for specific purposes and help to promote interactive data exploration. Some of the most popularly used filters include:
- Quick Filters for interactively viewing the impact on visualizations when filter criteria are changed.
- Context Filters for building context for a worksheet or dashboard and can be used for complex filtering logic.
- Dimension Filters for applying filters on specific dimensions like region, date, or categories.
- Measure Filters for filtering data based on numeric values for greater than, less than, or between certain values.
Tell the Best Tale
Tableau helps you create stories with business data that are compelling. It provides ample options to help organizations guide their audiences through the data while highlighting the problem and helping them identify the solution. It is therefore important that organizations know some of the best practices to create this wonderful journey for their stakeholders to keep them engaged in their business mission.
Begin with a purpose
Every story needs to have a purpose. What are you trying to achieve by sharing the data points with the specific audience? If you are clear on that then it becomes easier to move ahead with the story structure.
Your purpose will also help you choose between seven different story types. These include:
- Change over Time
- Drill Down
- Zoom Out
- Contrast
- Intersections
- Factors
- Outliers
Also creating a rough draft of your story plan either on a piece of paper or on the whiteboard may help to get the team all on the same page.
Make your Data Relevant
Data is the hero in your story. However, overuse or use of redundant data may be overkill. Also, the use of irrelevant data may dilute the impact you want to create. Your storytelling must be crisp and accurate with pertinent and sufficient data to build up your case satisfactorily.
Be Simple, Interactive, and Consistent
Since you already have a heavy mission on hand to communicate, it is best to deliver it as simplistically and with as much consistency as possible. Also using the right amount of interactivity helps to deliver the message appropriately.
Consulting Services with Tableau
Helping organizations build new dialogues through their data stories is a feat that is best achieved in collaboration with the tableau experts.
Tableau Consulting Services can help businesses define new horizons for their growth. The experts display a well-rounded understanding of the product to look at the requirement from the customer’s perspective and provide appropriate solutions.
Their proficiency in Tableau Desktop, Server, and Tableau Online helps them to create and manage data visualizations, integrate dashboards, and generate reports within the Tableau environment with comfort and ease.
They have a thorough understanding of the data visualization principles. This makes it easy for them to know which chart type is the most suitable for building a specific data store.
Tableau experts possess in-depth knowledge of data analysis. They can also work towards cleansing and preparing data received from complex datasets for analysis to generate valuable insights.
As Tableau experts deal with data, they are confident in handling all types of data not only for analysis but also for building effective data structures. Modeling Data efficiently is another way to ensure the accuracy of the analysis.
Tableau specialists also move beyond technical capabilities. They have a deep understanding of the emotions that resonate well with audiences and weave that sense into their Data stories. This helps to make their narration come alive and not remain as mere figures on the screen.
Data Storytelling is much more than facts and figures. It is built with a purpose and Tableau consulting service professionals help to reflect that well through their effective narration of the data stories.
