Rebecca Liggero talks to Davide Cervellin, Head of Europe Analytics for eBay as he discusses data and analytics and how it helps the business.

“First of all, we are very lucky because we have a lot of data since day one; everything has been tracked. What we basically do is we have designed an organization that empowers data to be at the center of the decision making process. Having analytics reporting into finance, which means there is a CFO, the highest visibility on metrics and every decision is made in finance on the business cases that were built. So really I think it’s down to creating the set up to empower the people to be visible to the leaders of he company and all the business cases and all the numbers visible so they can make an informed decision at what they do,” said Cervellin.

As per data about customers, Cervellin said the company created a customer centric view from the data gathered from what the users do on their website and sister companies’ website to fully understand buyer behavior, understand what they want and give something better to the buyer.  Have someone on staff who can evaluate what the buyers want and make sure this person participates in senior discussions, allowing them to paint the picture with numbers.

Cervellin also said that for gambling industry, the companies have to let go of the willingness to control the user. They have to design experiences that adapt themselves based on algorithms that they design and maintain and evolve so that they can feed the user with what they wanna know at the right time on the right device because this is what empower the business to go away from the strategy of men controlling everything into a strategy of man controlling the processes that the machine owns.