Digitalization Will Come Sooner Or Later

Q: What opportunities does the Mexican market offer to a company like Manzara?

A: Manzara is a customer analytics consultancy. We work with data and transform it into actions to improve problems and address areas of opportunity within companies. We increasingly collect more and better data, which opens a door for smaller companies to bring intelligence into their companies, improve their processes and become better and more competitive businesses, no matter the size.

Q: Which sectors have been more receptive to the company’s offering?

A: Retail uses these services because of all the information companies gather from their transactions, but areas such as marketing, sales and human resources have also reached out to us. One of the main problems in analytics is the multiple opinions we have on very specific subjects. The problem with this is that opinions tend to be invalidated because they are considered perceptions instead of reality. To validate them, we design tailor-made quantitative processes, which allows us to create metrics for specific problems or goals. This results in value through numbers and data. We start measuring variables to make a quantitative assessment for diverse objectives and dilemmas across enterprises. Offering services to improve customer satisfaction allows us to help our clients transform their companies from the inside with data-driven insights. We believe the most important resource in a company is their people and we give them a voice through data. 

Q: How do you explain the value of your services to potential clients?

A: Manzara works with data, which is an intangible product. It is easier to define the value of a physical product rather than an intangible one, especially when we fail to understand what this is. Once we help our clients define their goals, we determine the kind of information we need and the analysis we will use to transform our insights into tangibles, such as actions or specific implementations to improve their operations.

We develop methodologies to define a client’s journey, understanding the touching points of the process and their satisfaction levels along this path. With all this information, we go further with data to explain what is really happening inside a company or a determined process. Improvements depend on the area, mainly because goals in human resources and marketing departments are wildly different, for example. It all comes down to the kind of enterprise and its objectives. Each action is backed up by information, becoming a key part in developing successful bustiness strategies. This is why the return on investment (ROI) on data is huge.

Q: How do you create a place for Manzara in such a competitive market?

A: Providing a more customized and focused service is our main differentiation against bigger companies that, more often than not, are geared towards other big companies and that tend to not tailor services to smaller businesses. We believe our services give more value to our clients this way. In Mexico, 90 percent of companies are SMEs and the industry is failing to provide adequate data solutions for them. There is a lot of good technological development in Mexico, we just need to understand how we can offer technological solutions to these companies, some of which may have financial restrictions to pay a transnational company for data analytics and other innovation services. Our window of opportunity lies in providing SMEs access to data and customer analytics.

Besides this, we found great strategic partners in a wide range of industries. We work side by side with this companies under the open innovation concept to offer stronger, better and more complete solutions. From international product launches to regional store openings, we get to work in a variety of projects thanks to our key partnerships.

Q: How open are SMEs to this kind of technology?

A: Understanding that analytics will help them solve their problems is key. Trusting this technology is fundamental. We are reaching a point in which companies will have to get on board with technology or they will cease to be competitive. There is still a gap in our country. However, we do believe that with constant efforts from public and private initiatives, specially to improve connectivity within the territory, sooner or later companies will have to join the digitalization trend. Technology also has to be standardized. The key is to solve a problem many companies have in a similar way so technology can be adopted depending on the market niche it is best suited for.

Manzara is a Mexican company that works on customer analytics and business analytics projects. The company uses descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analysis to exploit clients’ data