8 gasp-inducing features of Harmoni

Harmoni focuses on one thing: helping you make the most of market research data.

It organizes raw data, makes analysis simple, and helps share your findings with others.

I know. Blah. Blah blah blah blah, you have heard it before. But when we demonstrate Harmoni to real-life market researchers, audible gasps are heard.

That’s because Harmoni is explicitly designed for market researchers. It focuses on things that more general data management tools don’t even realize are important.

Not sure you believe me? Let me share eight of the curtain-call moments from our recent presentations.

 

1.    Heavyweight software with a light-as-a-feather user experience

When we first show Harmoni, lots of people think we’re showing some splash screen. They’re waiting for the pain of a typical data management dashboard. Where are the bewildering options? Where are the buttons with doom-laden names like “Dump Set” and “Clear Register”?

Instead, they see Harmoni. Everything is clear. All your data ranges and data sets are right there, labeled. You can drill into them, or to drag and drop to create ranges, comparisons, and segments. The underlying data is analyzed and presented, never altered.

It’s like comparing a 1980s green screen database to Facebook – and at that point, people begin to relax.

 

2.    Intuitive features help teams get functional faster

Every system has a learning curve. The steeper it is, the longer it takes for you, your team, and all future team members to get up to speed.

A clear, simple interface is an excellent start to flattening that curve, but Harmoni goes further. It thinks the way market researchers think. Harmoni is always there like a quietly helpful Jeeves. It offers you exactly the right options for what you want to do at that moment. From the collection to analysis, to the presentation, Harmoni makes it easy.

 

3.    Significance is not insignificant to market researchers

Movements in data can be interesting, but they’re not always important. When businesses make big decisions on those changes, the statistical significance is critical. Even more critical is showing that significance clearly before decision-makers start chasing unicorns. 

But that can mean a lot of calculations, and a lot of manual annotations on your presentation. When you compare data sets or drill down to specific subsets, it gets even more complicated.

Instead, Harmoni does it all for you. It gives you the exact significance score for each data point, even subsets of subsets. To rein in those unicorns, it shows the significance with notes, scores, or color. When you update the data set, Harmoni updates the significance scores for you.

Gasp!

 

4.    Data comes and goes, but data views are forever

Market research work falls into two broad areas. There’s the excitement of discovery and the day-to-day monitoring.

Discovery is all about using your intuition and data skills. Monitoring, not so much.

So Harmoni makes it easy, with data views. Think of them as live PowerPoint slides. You set up tables, charts, and even commentary on your standard presentation template. But unlike PowerPoint, Harmoni updates all your charts and tables if the data changes.

You can create unlimited data views, adjust and tweak them, and even share them in live dashboards.

You can spend more time on business-changing discoveries, instead of updating the dials on your dashboard admin.

 

5.    Turning live data feeds into live reporting streams

When your data comes from live feeds, people start to expect live analysis as well. With Harmoni, you can get close.

Harmoni connects to your data feeds and uses them to update your data views. It learns their labels and how to import them to your systems. It adjusts niggles (like changing “M” to “Male,” or vice versa, in a gender dataset) to keep data clean and homogeneous. It directs point data into “clumping categories” like age brackets or geographic regions. And it all just flows into your system, directly to your saved views and dashboards, ready for ongoing analysis.

 

6.    Creating automated alerts for significant changes

Live data lets you react to important changes fast. But those reactions can take time.

First, you need to notice the change, which means constant monitoring. Then you need to choose the right stakeholders, prepare a message, and send it.

Or you can use Harmoni, with its automated alerts.

Instead of keeping an eye on every metric, you can define notification triggers. They could be acceptable ranges, where anything under or over that range sparks an alert. It could be a target for a metric reaching a particular value. It could even be a data failure alert if a feed doesn’t provide the expected number of results.

When it spots a data incident, Harmoni responds immediately. It sends an SMS or email to the stakeholders you listed for that alert and copies you in. Everyone stays in the loop in real-time – and instead of watching the dials, you can set and forget.

 

7.    Exporting data views as native, editable PowerPoint objects

You know the feeling. You need to present your results in PowerPoint. You’ve exported and pasted all your tables and charts. And then you realize one of the charts is the wrong color. Or you need to highlight February to make a point. Or the data has included late results outside your timeframe.

Usually, these last-minute changes mean going back to the source. And of course, sometimes they're changes you just can’t make, like colors or figures.

Harmoni exports entire data views directly to PowerPoint as native Microsoft objects. You can adjust a chart’s color scheme or highlight a specific data point. You can format tables. You can even modify a chart’s underlying data and see the changes immediately.

In a perfect world, that would never be necessary. In real life, it’s an essential safety valve for delivering your results in time.

 

8.    Facing left-field questions head-on

When you’re preparing your presentations, you try to anticipate questions. But there’s always one or two that come from left field.

Harmoni lets you answer on the spot.

Imagine there’s a sales surge in a major city. Marketing asks, “How much of that growth is coming from 18-25-year-old females?”

Typically, you’d hold back the urge to sigh and promise the answer in a follow-up email.

But as you present on Harmoni, you just switch to the data view. You drag the datasets for age and gender on to sales and then filter that by city. A chart instantly appears showing sales by age and gender. Drag the date dataset onto it to see a time series of growth by segment, with significance for each data point.

No one likes curly questions in presentations - unless you can answer them.

 

Would you like to experience the Harmoni shock and awe presentation?

If you’d like to see what all the fuss is about – and if you can keep a good poker face in the face of these life-changing features – give us a shout.

 

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