“I can honestly say that we are now a data-driven company. Everyone has the information they need to deal with any customer problem quickly and efficiently, and we can focus on optimizing customer experiences. But, most of all, we’re focused on growth.”
— Mark Sussman, Head of Data Analytics, ItsaCheckmate
Key results:
- Built an entire data analytics framework in just a few months
- Schema drift handling saves the team time and headspace
- Online purchasing option made it easy to trial Fivetran
- ItsaCheckmate is able to take a proactive, systematic approach to customer integration issues, saving the operations team time and providing an exceptional customer experience
The Situation
The global Covid-19 pandemic forced restaurants worldwide to quickly pivot to delivery and take out services. ItsaCheckmate stepped up to the plate to help these restaurants consolidate orders from dozens of ordering apps directly into their existing Point of Sale (POS) systems — eliminating the need to manually transfer the orders to the POS and manage their menus on multiple platforms. With business booming, ItsaCheckmate decided it needed to use data to maintain quality experiences for its customers and enable the support staff to handle an increase in orders.
The Problem
“We knew we had an opportunity to pull in and manage our data centrally,” says Mark Sussman, Head of Data analytics at ItsaCheckmate. The data was there and available, but it was cost prohibitive for the company to organize and manage it in any meaningful way. Mark was brought in to change that.
“More than five million transactions occur on the ItsaCheckmate platform every month, but using the information generated from these 5 million transactions to drive internal operational efficiency was a manual process,” Mark says. “We knew that we needed to democratize data across the organization and get it into the hands of people who could use it to improve the product and speed time to resolution, and we needed to do it in a scalable, cost-effective manner.”
The ItsaCheckmate platform is powered by dozens of integrations with online ordering apps such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash, as well as with all the POS systems that large chains or small mom-and-pop restaurants may use. When an order cannot be processed properly, ItsaCheckmate can resolve each individual error in real-time, but analysts need to conduct a thorough and rapid post-event analysis to resolve the underlying issues that cause these errors to arise to begin with. Systematic analysis of this siloed data was a manual process, requiring analysts to pull a list of order errors into an Excel spreadsheet – a process that could take up to a day.
The Solution
With new customers coming on board every day, Mark knew that he needed to build a data analytics platform quickly – but it didn’t make business sense for ItsaCheckmate to pull vital engineering resources away from platform development to build the necessary data pipeline.
Instead, Mark heard about Fivetran, a data integration service with an extensive library of hundreds of connectors to Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms. He signed up for a two-week trial, ran some tests and realized he had struck gold.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Mark said. “Building an integration from scratch would have taken my team several weeks, and Fivetran was able to deliver it in just a few seconds. All I had to do was enter my credentials, and presto, I could pull in whatever data I needed.”
Fivetran’s Online Purchasing option was the perfect solution for ItsaCheckmate – a company unused to spending budget on analytics line items. The option to put down a company credit card gave Mark the ability to get a good sense for what the annual spend might look like and create a solid proof of concept for Fivetran to the C-suite before making a bigger commitment.
Key Fivetran features like schema drift handling have also been a huge time-save for Mark.
“We have six or seven google sheets that we’re pushing over to Fivetran – the fact that they're all in one schema has been invaluable,” he said. “Schema drift handling for the Salesforce connector has been seamless – it’s not something I have to think about any more.”
The Outcome
Fivetran allowed Mark to stand up an entire data analytics framework in just a few months with minimal engineering help. Most importantly, the framework is highly scalable and can meet ItsaCheckmate’s data needs as it continues to expand and grow.
“I can honestly say that we are now a data-driven company,” Mark said. “Information is far more readily available to deal with any customer problem quickly and efficiently, and we can focus on optimizing customer experiences. But, most of all, we’re focused on growth. Understanding our data is critical to understanding and serving our customers. We have the insights to grow intelligently by proactively managing and addressing our customer’s needs before they become a problem. The data collected by Fivetran is the key to answering those questions.”
An example of that business optimization is the company’s new customer onboarding process. According to Mark, there are several data systems required for the onboarding process that the ItsaCheckmate operations team needs to manage. Rather than manually reconcile these systems, ItsaCheckmate has streamlined on-boarding through automatic data discovery processes powered by Fivetran’s database connectors. When paired with data from Fivetran’s SQL and CRM connectors, support staff gain the visibility into each account they need to speed configuration, proactively address bottlenecks and, eventually, optimize the process.
And those order issues? Rather than waiting until the daily Excel spreadsheet is distributed to create additional insights into the underlying issues, ItsaCheckmate can now gather insights in a matter of minutes.
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