Delivering Customer Success with a Single Source of Truth - A SendGrid Case Study
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SendGrid, a rapidly growing email delivery service with 180,000 customers, faced challenges in customer success and reporting efficiency due to data residing in multiple systems. They implemented GoodData's full-stack cloud solution, which integrated various data sources and delivered analytics that empowered employees with a unified view of customer insights. This strategic move not only streamlined their reporting process but also enabled real-time decision-making across the organization, enhancing overall business performance.
Delivering Customer Success with a Single Source of Truth - A SendGrid Case Study
- 1. AT A GLANCE Delivering Customer Success with a Single Source of Truth Scaling Services to a Growing Customer Base When you’re experiencing more than 87% annual growth, you’d better have a data-informed plan in place for ensuring customer success. That’s the challenge SendGrid, a provider of cloud-based email delivery services for transactional email management, faced after 3 years of explosive growth. Launched in 2009 as a TechStars graduate, today SendGrid has 180,000 customers worldwide, including leading-edge service providers like Uber, Pandora, Pardot, Snapchat and foursquare. SendGrid’s proven email platform relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems, while helping them ensure that their email makes it into their audience’s inbox – delivering customer engagement and sales performance. SendGrid knew they needed a unified business intelligence strategy to support their top organizational goal: promoting customer success. In a rapidly changing business environment where requirements shift daily and with a full 95% of their customers being self-service, Joe Hamlet, Senior Manager of Business Systems at SendGrid, recognized that having a single view of the customer would help them gain better insight and react more quickly to deliver on that promise. At the same time, SendGrid’s Chief Financial Officer and his team were spending six to eight hours a month on revenue reporting in Excel spreadsheets. This kind of reporting had become a burden. Rather than spend time pulling reports manually, SendGrid wanted to free up their finance team to focus on growing the company. With information living in 5+ different systems, integrating all relevant data and giving the organization tools to analyze it would be no small task. SendGrid didn’t want “just a reporting tool.” They wanted a full-stack solution that included data warehousing and ETL, in addition to a robust reporting and visualization layer. It needed it to deliver scalability; extensible integrations; ease of use and flexibility; self-service administration and maintenance; speed and agility; and a low total cost of ownership – or as Joe put it “rainbows and unicorns.” As a veteran analytics professional, Joe had tried the traditional BI vendors and knew that the cloud would give SendGrid the agility and speed to value they needed. 1© 2014 GoodData Corporation. All rights reserved. Company: Email marketing, 150+ employees Customer Since: 2012 Solution: GoodData Platform Use Case: Customer and Operational Analytics Favorite Metric: Retention Rate Best Feature: Average daily customer acquisition and churn Results: ► 6 month implementation and time to value ► 5 data sources integrated and analyzed to date ► Advanced analytics used daily by executives Building a Relationship on Transparency and Results Joe evaluated more than 5 vendors during his search. Ultimately he chose GoodData because of the relationship and trust built early on. Unlike other vendors, GoodData showed complete transparency, and an unfaltering commitment to the same principles which SendGrid embraces – The Four “H’s”: Being Honest, Humble and Hungry and Happy.“ GoodData stood head and shoulders above competitors in terms of integrity G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D
- 2. “Speed to value is my primary goal. I don’t ever want to live through another ridiculously long BI project that doesn’t deliver value to the customer. I think we succeeded with GoodData.” Joe Hamlet Senior Manager, Business Systems, SendGrid team@gooddata.com 415-200-0186 @gooddataGet in touch. G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D and honesty in the sales process,” Joe said. “It was obvious that they were invested in the relationship. My whole experience at GoodData has continued to reinforce that.” In just six months, GoodData implemented a full-stack, cloud-based solution that pulled together data from Zuora and internal MySQL databases into one seamless analytics experience – later adding Salesforce, Google Analytics and Marketo. Zendesk, Jira, Splunk and other databases are on the roadmap for integration as SendGrid’s instance continues to evolve. “Being able to spin up a data warehouse, analytics and reporting in less than six months was unheard of,” Joe said. “The last data warehousing project I was on took three years.” Focusing on finance metrics first, the implementation was soon scaled to customer success applications – with each iterative release delivering quick wins to the organization. Other departments began to take notice and soon sales, marketing and other groups were using GoodData analytics to drive service improvements and business value. ...continued gooddata.com SendGrid Free-to-Paid Conversion Dashboard. All data has been genericized. Delivering a Single, Trustworthy Source of Truth Today, GoodData analytics have been adopted organization-wide, delivering a unified view of the customer and the business, while also helping SendGrid empower its employees with the information they need to make data-driven decisions. SendGrid’s executives use GoodData on a daily base for executive dashboarding, sales and marketing analytics. This allows them gain real-time visibility into bookings, customer acquisition, top customers and more – leveraging one single, trustworthy source of truth. SendGrid trusts the data so much that they use it to present to their board and other companies to demonstrate business performance. “Our CEO is our heaviest user,” says Joe Hamlet. As SendGrid’s founder, Isaac Saldana, put it, “The path to our goals is as importance as the goals themselves.” In GoodData, SendGrid found not just a provider of business intelligence solutions, but a partner in their journey. SendGrid