Measuring the impact of marketing campaigns and the effects on customer satisfaction.
Avalara–a leading provider of cloud-based tax compliance solutions–was looking for a trusted technology partner to help solve a rather complex business challenge.
Helping over 20,000 businesses achieve compliance with transaction taxes coupled with employees headquartered in Seattle and offices throughout the world, their robust organization was looking to meld its dedication to customer service with the efforts made within its marketing department through data. The goals shared a direct correlation–revenue.
Together with InfoMagnus, Avalara was able to achieve a path forward by taking disparate databases in marketing, sales, finance and IT and unifying them under a new data warehouse using relevant data from both customer satisfaction efforts and marketing campaigns into one platform.
The business challenge: accurately measure marketing program effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
Avalara partnered with InfoMagnus to help solve a business challenge both internally within the organization and externally with their customers: marketing department’s wanted to measure the effectiveness of sales promotions, website content, and social media impact on sales performance, while adhering to company's culture of customer satisfaction.
At Avalara, entire departments and individual executives are rewarded based on the results of their customer satisfaction scorecard.
Although these challenges were diverse in nature, these two business goals are related through their effect on revenue; more effective marketing programs and higher customer satisfaction produce higher revenue in this software subscription model.
Accomplishing these business challenges proved to be even more difficult as the data was spread out among dozens of disparate databases in Marketing, Sales, Information Technology, and Finance. The data needed to be unified from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics GP (ERP) and multiple other systems in order to build analytics and reporting on top of it.
Real-Time Data Analysis: How Avalara and InfoMagnus Joined Forces to Create a Centralized Data Warehouse for Extracting, Transforming and Loading Data.
Avalara partnered with InfoMagnus to create a data warehouse where relevant data from all sources was extracted, transformed, and loaded into one platform. Together, we implemented Master Data Management (MDM) to ensure data integrity throughout the supported systems.
InfoMagnus automated all steps of extracting data from disparate sources, transforming, loading, and producing reports using the new data platform. We developed analytical and reporting solutions, both in a relational database as well as a big data environment, to demonstrate effectiveness of marketing and sales campaign.
Also, customer satisfaction dashboards could now be developed at the department and executive level.
Exploring the Potential of Big Data.
With more than 20,000 clients, 6.7 billion transactions processed, $30 billion prepared in taxes, 18 million tax documents managed, and 1,500 employees, the opportunities to capture and analyze customer satisfaction data are exponential and so are the opportunities to measure marketing program effectiveness on over $272 million in sales.
The Impact of Proactive Programs: Examining Avalara's Growth Since Implementing Strategies Five Years Ago.
Although difficult to measure the exact impact, it is important to note that Avalara has grown significantly since these programs were implemented almost 5 years ago.
Revenue grew from approximately $60 million in 2013 to over $272 million in 2018.