Joseph Vu

As I begin my third year at Deloitte Analytics, I’ve taken the time to reflect upon the challenges and achievements along my journey, and have realised it will be a struggle to keep to 300 words!

I first started as a graduate knowing next to nothing about Data Analytics aside from a little bit of SQL scripting, as most of my prior experience had been around business analysis. Since then, I’ve learnt about self-organising maps, geospatial analysis, social network analytics, neural networks, random forests, database administration – the list goes on and on.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of interesting projects including one that sticks out for me in particular. Our role was to build a customer behavioural model for a large telecommunications company in order to help them understand their customer base, and to consider interventions which would increase the usage of online self-service by their customers, thereby reducing the company's cost to serve.

We collected a mammoth amount of data from the client; at last count our analytics environment contained nearly two terabytes of data. This data spanned the entire customer lifecycle – sales, usage, billing, churn and everything else in between. We took all of this data, transformed it to a customer ‘perspective’ and processed this into a self-organising map. This map helped us develop a deep understanding of customer behaviour and allowed for the extraction of customer lists for targeted interventions.

The last two years have been an amazing learning experience – the fact that I’ve been trusted to pick up these tools and techniques and start running with them on all sorts of projects has been instrumental to my learning. I certainly will look forward to challenges ahead in the next two years and beyond!