The Solution
Creating a clean data layer
Customer data is messy. For Coalition, this data comes in from a variety of sources and formats, resulting in duplicate records. Rather than syncing raw, unusable data, Census allows the team at Coalition to clean up their data and sync only what’s valuable.
In addition to cleaning up raw data, Coalition also used Census to calculate new metrics. This gives their downstream teams insights that they can act on quickly.
“There’s a lot of data deduplication we have to do. Using Census, we’re able to take all of our production data, put it into one place, and know that it’s clean. Then, we can add on a bunch of statistics and values that we know are useful downstream.”
Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager
Limiting direct access to platform data
In any security-conscious company, deciding who gets access to systems is a big deal. Although Coalition has a robust internal platform for customer support, that platform grants more access than a salesperson needs. At the same time, salespeople need context for their interactions with customers — context that they didn’t have outside that internal platform.
Coalition solved this challenge using Census. Now, they pull out the customer information that Sales needs and sync it to Salesforce. They can continue to limit access to sensitive systems, but still get data to the team members who need it, balancing security and data access.
“One of the problems we were running into was actually our API usage. We were just absolutely blowing through our call limit with Salesforce. Syncing one sales opportunity could easily have used 10 API calls.”
Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager
Deploying smart integrations that make use of bulk API calls
Every API works differently. At a company like Coalition, there aren’t dedicated administrators for each of their tools. Investing a lot of time in learning the most efficient way to build a Salesforce integration simply didn’t make sense. Census, on the other hand, is all about data integrations. Coalition could trust that a Census connector for Salesforce or any of their other destinations would be efficient and well-designed. Even apart from their team’s time investment, Coalition saved money by not making extra API calls to Salesforce.
The outcomes
Valuable context for sales calls, right in Salesforce
Coalition has eliminated the need for salespeople to go back-and forth with Customer Support to get critical information. The Sales team at Coalition now has important customer data that it needs in the tool they use every day. With this data available, they’re able to talk directly to their customers’ and prospects’ needs, resulting in more effective sales calls.
“If an insurance broker on our platform binds a quote, our platform can very quickly know how many they bound in the last week. In our data layer, we can have all the stats readily available and send that data up to Salesforce. That’s really useful for our Sales team.”
Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager
No additional headcount to manage data pipelines
Census has helped Coalition keep its Business Systems team lean and efficient. Instead of needing an entire team to build and maintain the data pipeline, Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager at Coalition relies on Census to help him manage it himself. He receives regular, automatic updates from Census, helping him support many different use cases without constantly playing catch-up.
“I’m really happy with the feature that notifies me of all the sync statuses on a weekly basis — the round up. That type of high-level data allows me to keep an eye on things as an administrator. I don’t need to hire more people just to manage the data pipeline. I’m able to keep it in my purview.”
Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager
Flexibility to support data integration with new tools
In a fast-growing business like Coalition, teams need the ability to choose and implement tools quickly. Whether they’re just testing out some new software or migrating to a new system, agility matters. Without Census, the Business Systems team at Coalition would need to constantly confront the challenge of how they could build integrations with each new tool. With Census, that challenge is off their shoulders.
Recently, Coalition has been evaluating whether to continue with Intercom or move over to Zendesk. Knowing that Census could support data sync for both meant that they could instead focus on other factors for the decision.
“We’re trying to balance between allowing our teams to scale and using the tools that they want to use, but being realistic about whether we have the expertise to do this ourselves.”
Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager
Looking ahead
As Coalition grows, certain infrastructure will need improvements. One of those pieces is the search in their internal application. Today, Customer Support team members can’t always find the records they need because of limitations with search. Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager at Coalition is considering how Census could be part of their updated search solution. Using Census to push new data into their search index could minimize downtime and keep the search service performant, without expending engineering resources to build that sync from scratch.
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