Executive summary:
Facing escalating data management challenges following the launch of its new product ACE, Mazama, an Oregon-based marketing technology company, turned to Funnel for a solution. By implementing Funnel, Mazama successfully automated its data integration process, leading to a remarkable 85% reduction in manual data handling and a 95% decrease in data-engineering workload. These efficiencies not only streamlined operations but also directly contributed to doubling Mazama's book of business within a year.
Key results:
- Within one year of implementing Funnel, Mazama doubled its book of business
- Reduced manual data collection and reporting by 85%.
- 95% reduction in data-engineering workload, allowing the development team to fully focus on optimizing the product.
Company profile:
Mazama is a marketing technology company based in Oregon, US. Originally founded in 2013 as a marketing agency, Mazama now specializes in sales and customer service automation software. The company's flagship product, ACE (Automated Customer Entry), serves a unique purpose by delivering free internet access to low-income Americans through the Affordable Connectivity Program.
The challenge: Successful product launch leads to data onslaught
In early 2022, Mazama rolled out a new automation product called ACE, software tailored for the telecommunication industry. ACE is a conversational bot that helps qualify applicants based on their input, drastically reducing the customer acquisition costs for the telecom companies it serves. The product proved an immediate success and the number of customers Mazama served grew steadily throughout 2022.
Not long after the launch, Mazama realized that it now had to handle a surge of product-related performance data which it was ill-equipped to handle. The nature of the ACE product is that paid advertising on social media like Facebook is used to drive traffic to the conversational bot which then takes the visitor through an application process. This means that in order to show the effectiveness of ACE, Mazama needed to piece together reporting data from ad platforms like Facebook, with the analytics data generated by ACE and sales data generated on the customer side. Initially reliant on spreadsheets for this challenging task, Mazama quickly encountered the limitations of this approach as ACE's rapid expansion outstripped the storage capacity and transformation functionality of such tools.
As a growing technology company with a new product in the market, it is crucial for Mazama to dedicate all its developer resources to improving the product experience for its users. The last thing they want to do is to dedicate data engineering or data analyst resources to building and maintaining reports but unfortunately, this is exactly what happened.
Adam Koller, CMO at Mazama, remembers how challenging it was when this additional workload was initially directed to his data analyst team: “It's difficult when you're growing as a small company and you're asking the data analyst to also be the ones in charge of pulling data together. And most analysts don't know how to do it and it’s just not their skill set.”
At this point, Mazama brought in Matt Wax as its Senior Financial Manager and upon seeing the painful process Mazama went through on a daily basis with its reporting, his first decision was to find a solution to it.
The solution: Building a solid reporting stack without developers
With ACE being a new product in the market, Mazama understood that it was crucial to be able to provide accurate, timely and automated reporting showing the performance and impact to its customers.
Listing out his challenges, Matt needed to find a solution that would allow him to:
- Import Facebook Ads data
- Import ACE Analytics data (delivered via files in emails)
- Import sales performance data from ACE customers
- Send the finalized data to Mazama’s data warehouse
- Visualize the data using Tableau
Having looked around for a solution that could fit this specific list of requirements, Matt zoned in on Funnel and started a trial. Matt was immediately impressed with how intuitive Funnel’s interface was, and the ease of which he was able to set up the entire process end-to-end by himself as a non-developer. Matt also recognized the added benefit that utilizing Funnel allowed Mazama to create a single source of truth in terms of data and metric definitions, which is crucial when speaking to stakeholders both internally and with customers:
“Before Funnel, there was no standard method for data analysis in our company, people would have different methodologies to combine data and calculate results. Now, Funnel provides us with a single source of truth, a consistent framework for data and metric definitions, making our data analysis more uniform and dependable across the board.”
The results: Mazama doubles its book of business
Within days of testing Funnel, Matt was able to fully automate a reporting process that had previously drained hours from Mazama’s data engineering and data analyst teams every day.
With a 15 year background in commercial banking, Matt had experienced first hand what it was like to build custom solutions in-house and reflected on his how it differed from his recent experiences with Funnel: “It takes time to get into their (data engineering) work queue, to get tables built and get the results that you need. With Funnel, we don't have to wait for that. We can build the entire reporting process and send data to our data warehouse literally within an hour, taking 1% of the time it would normally take a data engineer.”
Within one year from first starting to use Funnel, Mazama has now been able to double its book of business for ACE as a direct result of implementing Funnel and has set itself up for future success. Mazama is about to launch the next iteration of ACE in the coming year and will look to expand into new domains and verticals, which the team feels comfortable doing because they have such a strong reporting foundation to stand on. Reflecting on the successes so far, Matt notes: "Funnel has proven to be an absolute game-changer for our organization. Our experience and results underscore its importance, making us committed customers for life."
