Renu Energy Solutions empowers its business with AI-driven analytics and real-time insights
- FOUNDED 2010
- countryUSA
- Industry Energy
- Size Mid
- Employees 100-200+
- Presence USA
- Previous BI Tool MS Excel
- Data Sources Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, Google Sheets
- Analytics RequirementEnd-to-end business analytics
- 100+Users
- 3Data Sources
- 80 to 50 daysReduction in time spent on each project
"Zoho Analytics has drastically reduced the time gap from signing a deal to completing an installation from 80 days to under 50 days. This is because we were able to capture the turnaround time in each stage of the project, identify issues, and solve them. This is very impactful, especially for our customers who want to have their project completed as quickly as possible. We are now happy to provide that level of service, and this has helped lead to record growth for us in the last 5 years."
John Sheldon
Business Intelligence Manager, Renu Energy Solutions
About Renu Energy Solutions
Renu Energy Solutions provides high-quality solar power, energy storage and electric vehicle charger installations for Residential and Commercial properties, as well as full maintenance services. Based in Charlotte, NC since 2010, they have serviced over 4,100 homes and businesses across the Southeast. Renu's industry-leading expertise provides end-to-end customized solar solutions. Proven quality, trusted partnership, and customer-focused solutions are the values that Renu embodies as the strongest clean energy provider in the Southeast. The company has grown enormously in the last 5 years and was listed on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies list for 2021.
Challenges: A simple BI tool for analytics
John Sheldon is a business intelligence manager at Renu Energy Solutions. His role involves making sure that the business is streamlined and runs efficiently across various departments, like marketing, sales, finance, operations, warehouse, field and service. He uses data analysis and visualizations to get insights for strategizing and forecasting the performance of Renu's business.
Renu Energy Solutions uses multiple pieces of software, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects. They also sometimes have the need to manually upload data from Google Sheets and include an automatic sync. Sheldon was looking for a self-service BI platform that was simple, and that could unify and blend data to generate insights quickly.
He was in need of a 360° view of the overall business of the company—and because they didn't use any BI tool before, they were scouting for one with a low learning curve.
Renu Energy Solutions wanted a solution that could:
- Import and blend data from multiple sources
- Unify data to get actionable insights through reports and dashboards
- Collaborate and share with employees
Integration from multiple apps is a challenge
"We wanted a simple BI solution that unifies, blends, and analyzes data from our sales and project systems. The tool also needed to be simple, intuitive, and capable of integrating multiple tables, creating models and charts that could be shared seamlessly across teams."
John Sheldon
Business Intelligence Manager,Renu Energy Solutions
Solution: Unified Business Analytics with advanced AI capabilities
Sheldon was already a customer of Zoho. As part of its digital transformation efforts, the company started using Zoho CRM from 2017, and later got into using Zoho Projects. These two apps were working in silos and generating a substantial amount of data. That's when Sheldon started looking for an analytics solution.
After evaluating all leading BI solutions, Sheldon decided to go for Zoho Analytics, as its integration with Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects was seamless. He liked the simplicity of Zoho Analytics, and was impressed by its easy setup and prebuilt reports, along with easy sharing of reports and dashboards across multiple devices.
His main objective was to analyze data from the company's three segments—residential, commercial, and service. Each of these segments wanted to analyze their respective data. The company was able to integrate their marketing and sales data from Zoho CRM with operational data coming from Zoho Projects into Zoho Analytics using prebuilt reports for analysis. Sheldon was also able to customize reports to the specific segment’s needs.
The company uses Zoho Analytics to analyze data for each of its segments:
- Marketing & Sales: How many leads are from different sources and geographic areas, how many leads are being converted into appointments, which agent makes the highest conversions, conversion rate (from appointment to deal closing), deals by type, by revenue, forecast vs actuals, deal sizes vs segments, etc.
- Projects: How many new projects are taken up, what types of projects are they (solar energy, energy storage, EV charger, service), completion stages of projects, turnaround time for each of these stages, etc.
Unified business analytics is the key in Zoho Analytics
"The newly launched features of Zoho Analytics are top-notch. Zoho DataPrep allows me to cleanse the data that's brought in automatically from Google Sheets. The Ask Zia and Zia Insights features are also cool. I can ask for a specific agent name for their quarterly or monthly performance and get to see if their sales numbers are trending up or down, and from which geographic area their sales are coming from. I can also dive into why they can't close deals in other areas and try to replicate the successful ones. From Zia insights, I get which agent is doing the most amount of business and who is doing the least, and I can give their manager an update along with actionable insights—like which specific salesperson has a better understanding of customers on the coast rather than the mountains. They can then assign that rep to take care of the coast specifically. These insights give a clear picture of the performance of all our sales reps, and we had this discovery within minutes because of Zia Insights."
Sheldon was impressed with the latest features of Zoho Analytics, like Zoho DataPrep, which he often uses to cleanse the data from Google Sheets, and Zia Insights, for creating slideshows with insights and data stories that get displayed on TV screens around the company's headquarters.
Other features, like pivot tables, summary views, chart views, data visualizations, look-up functions, blending of data, the formula engine, interactive reports, and collaboration tools, were all of great value for the company.
With insights generated from Zoho Analytics on their project statuses, Renu Energy Solutions were able to reduce the number of days from deal signing to installation drastically—from 80 days to below 50 days for the full process. This was critical in improving the customer experience for the company, leading to an influx of 5 star ratings for Renu.
Sheldon also feels that Zoho Analytics changed the conversations in meetings with their management teams. Earlier, they used to discuss what they think and their perceptions, but now all their discussions and decisions are backed by solid insights.
The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared with all 100+ employees, primarily through personalized dashboards, scheduled reports, mobile apps, and slide shows on TV screens and across all devices, for quick insights anytime, anywhere.
Benefits & results
- Time taken from deal signing to completing installation was reduced to less than 50 days from 80 days
- Facilitated understanding of sales agent performance and strengths through insights
- Enabled segment-wise tracking and complete insights into the status of any project
- Enabled easy collaboration on reports across multiple devices, on the go.
Reduced time from deal signing to installation from 80 days to below 50 days