Meet the Member: Toucan Toco
A recent member of the FACC, Charles Migletti is the Paris-based CEO of
Toucan Toco. Founded in 2014, Toucan Toco now has offices across Europe and clients across the world. Their data visualization technology helps companies value and evaluate their data to make better decisions throughout the day.
FACC: Where does the name Toucan Toco come from?
CM: In a world of stark, gray, corporate solutions, Toucan Toco stands out for being quirky and fun. Not everyone that has to do with data, should name its brand data something, or Tableau or Qlik. The bird is also beautiful, colorful and geometrical, just like our data visualizations.
FACC: Toucan Toco provides data visualization. Some testimonials on your website come from marketing managers. Is your service used equally internally, to unify teams and drive decision making, as well as externally for pitches and case studies?
CM: Today people mostly use our tool for internal purpose. But we have more and more subjects that target a bigger audience externally. The last examples I have in mind are with
financial communication projects or
corporate social responsibility.
My favorite is an
open data subject where Euler Hermes (a B2B insurance company) gave away information, to evaluate the risk of nonpayment abroad. It is targeted for every business that wants to do business abroad. This is an interesting marketing approach where people give precious insights for free, to educate their target and sell something to them. It is data visualization as a mean to lead generation.
You could really say that the more companies will mature with their data and get creative on how to use it to generate business or awareness, and the more we will do public/external projects like those.
FACC: There are numerous tools available to marketers. How do the services of Toucan stand out from the competition and how do you analyze the needs of your clients?
CM: You've said it! There are indeed numerous tools available to marketers. We help them centralize all the key information available on these tools so they can communicate better in meetings or take better decision throughout the day.
We stand out from the competition because we don't have one. Usual business intelligence tools are great to analyze the data. They are great to explore information for very specific requests. And we don't challenge that. On another note, Toucan Toco is made for action. We focus on giving marketers key information that they need, to do a better job every day.
To analyze the need of our clients we have two strong methodologies
1. First one is the agile methodology, it creates a feedback loop with the client that will parameter the product with us. We parameter our product around their feedbacks. This feedback loop allows us to create a high rate of satisfaction and success with our project.
2. A "design first" methodology, where we don't focus on the data, but more on the selection of the right KPI's visualized the right way. Thanks to that our projects are very fast, they take on average between 2 weeks and 3 months. Because we don't have to handle the data right away.
FACC: Data has become somewhat of a buzzword recently. Besides adopting the data visualization tools of Toucan Toco, how do you advise companies to make the most of insights from their customers or stakeholders?
CM: What most people and companies do is focus too much on the technology, the hardware. They want to collect as much data as possible, with the best tools. But they forget the most important thing. No one cares about all the data you have if there is no need inside your company.
At toucan toco we think that companies that are late in the "data transformation era" are very lucky. Because now most companies realized that they don't need to spend millions in softwares, tools and hardware. They only need to focus on the right data for the right people. More often than not, the data is already there. Focus on the need not the means. That's what we say to all our clients. Do you need to have 60 KPIs or the best 10 will do the trick?
The switch that happened the past 5 years is that now companies like us are really being heard. Because we don't ONLY speak to IT people but to business people as well like HR managers, Marketing teams, Sales .... Softwares are now made to focus on the need of very operational people.
FACC: Have you observed differences in needs and uses between your European and American clients, due to cultural variations?
CM: Except for the fear of GDPR that is happening in Europe where we need to really educate people on what it means, I would say that what is always different is cultural variations between companies and not between countries. Of course people work differently, but they all have the same problem with data.
FACC: What is one piece of advice you would give to other FACC members?
CM: I always give the following advice to my clients. First, don't spend millions on softwares you don't need. Second is you should spend it all on Toucan Toco.
Haha just kidding, the second advice I would give is that data can really help everyone in the company communicate better and perform better. Sometimes you've done things for 10 years in a specific way and you realize with data, that you were wrong all along. It's hard to see but it makes your company much better.
Connect with Charles and the Toucan Toco team through the
FACC Member Directory.