How a good data partner can save your bacon

Here’s a story I’m excited to share with you.

We got introduced to a small but rapidly growing online commerce platform for responsible shopping. Data is the lifeblood of their business and the main driver of their revenue. But they found themselves in a bind, because extracting value from their disparate data sources required a LOT of engineering, coding, and labor. Not only would it cost them around $2 million to effectively extract, transform, and load their data to make it actionable, but it would have taken them many months to get there.

Since they were a small company, the time and money required for this data journey was unfeasible. Equally, they couldn’t afford not to get started on tackling their data issue either. They were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Like most companies, they turned to what I call a “first-generation data automation solution.” The platform under consideration did a fine job of extracting, transforming, and loading their data, but it didn’t make the data useful for the business teams, which is to say, it didn’t allow them to make decisions with real-time insights. It just moved their data from point A to point B, but still inadequate to applying analytics and providing the actionable information they needed.

Finally, they found Switchboard. We showed them how our data automation and unification software provided them not just with normalized data, but the power to answer business-driven questions and get real-time insights for every aspect of their business. Most importantly, Switchboard’s model is scalable, so it could grow alongside the company.

Within six weeks of using Switchboard, the client created crucial dashboards with real-time data so their business users could drill into them and make business-driven decisions from the information. Today, good data enables all of their top business decisions and is the lifeblood of the company.

As we like to say it, Switchboard made this client truly data strong. Or, as the client quite literally said, “Switchboard saved my neck.”