SHERRI ENGVALL, IT MANAGER @ DELTA DENTAL OF WASHINGTON.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the BI team and data analytics manager for Delta Dental of Washington, a dental-only insurer.
What challenge were you trying to address with Xyonix?
Our business was divided into group and individual pipelines. Our individual business posed a unique challenge in that we wanted to understand how individuals were using our services. We also wanted to track attrition, predict coverage termination, and understand the factors that affect such an event. Later on, when a new director came to our marketing department, we flipped the project and turned toward understanding the factors that convinced people to stick with their individual coverage.
What was the scope of their involvement?
Xyonix started with what they called the Pathfinder phase; they met with our stakeholders, leaders, and technical people to get a true understanding of the scope of work and our goals. After that, we gave them representative data about our pipelines. They determined whether we had the right data to move forward with our goals by analyzing the data set's type, quality, and breadth. This phase revolved around predicting coverage termination, and it lasted for two weeks. We switched to a new approach because our marketing team couldn’t demonstrate the value of their initial findings to our prospective clients.
During the second phase of the engagement, we gave them a larger, more representative data set. They determined whether our data provided “signals” that could help us achieve our business goals. This phase lasted for a few months as their team refined the data. We also provided additional sources that would be helpful in their analysis. Eventually, we delivered their findings to our leaders, who discussed their usefulness. This was crucial in our decision to engage them on a longer-term basis to create a production-ready model.
We’ve decided to move into an ongoing relationship with them so that we can partner up for other use cases. In our retainer contract, Xyonix is only maintaining the two data models they’ve already built. Meanwhile, our new marketing director is working with them to put together a business case that can demonstrate the value of their findings. If this is successful, we’ll go back to developing the data models.
What is the team composition?
We mainly work with Deep (Founder & CEO) and William (Senior Data Scientist).
How did you come to work with Xyonix?
We found them among the three companies that were referred to us. At that time, a lot was happening in the machine learning (ML) and AI space. As a result, it was difficult to find a company that was willing to take us on, especially since we wanted to move quickly.
Among the three companies, Xyonix followed up quickly with us and treated our business as important. Their team was also easy to work with from the get-go. By contrast, one of the other companies never even contacted us, while the other one had a backlog that wouldn’t allow them to do anything for us in a timely manner. As a result, we chose Xyonix.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in November 2019, and our relationship is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
While the first project didn’t succeed, the Xyonix team has produced stellar results for the second phase of the engagement. Our company has only dipped our toes into the world of data science and ML, so we don’t have specific success metrics other than the deliverables. So far, they’ve been able to achieve the 70% accuracy that we want to have. They also give us timely information about our progress along the way to ensure we’re not investing unwisely.
Further, they’re truly helpful in terms of educating me and my team on how to shape data for ML. We’ve done plenty of reporting and ad hoc analysis, but data science is different, so having Xyonix on our side has been invaluable to us. In fact, in our current contract, they’re going to help us interview and hire more data scientists internally. Still, we’ll continue using Xyonix to help our resources and teams to bring new data models into production.
How did Xyonix perform from a project management standpoint?
Their project management style is excellent. We’ve been meeting with them fairly regularly every 2–3 weeks to review our progress, answer questions, discuss findings, and make up plans on what they need to accomplish by our next meeting. In between such meetings, we have senior-level check-ins as we find information to bring forward.
Their materials are always well-prepared and easy to refer back to; the presentations have a high level of detail that makes them highly usable beyond our status meetings. Moreover, the team members are highly proactive, and we’ve never had issues setting up impromptu meetings when questions arose between status meetings.
Moreover, their team members are great at speaking with their audience. When talking to our technical team, they can get into the nitty-gritty of the process to help us learn. On top of that, they’re truly spot on when presenting to our senior leadership. According to one of our leaders, it’s easy to understand what Xyonix is doing and where they’re heading.
What did you find most impressive about Xyonix?
Xyonix’s most impressive characteristic is their passion for helping us solve our problems. They truly believe in what we’re trying to achieve — they’re excited about it. Their members see the value of our work and understand our vision.
Likewise, they want to engage us in a way that’s beneficial to our business. Their team is aware that whatever we build can be extended to our larger organization. In other words, they’re passionate about making our success accessible to others.
Are there any areas Xyonix could improve?
We’ve had mistakes on both sides. Early on, we learned that the marketing department should’ve been more involved in validating the type of business cases in which we’d use Xyonix’s findings. We shouldn’t have waited on the results of their analysis before deciding on such business cases. Their team could have articulated this point, and our team should have understood it, too.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Make sure that you have a clear vision and goal in mind. That being said, such visions can be broad, which makes it hard for you and them to focus on a more specific direction. As such, be prepared to speak about more precise goals that you want to achieve and clarify them upfront.