How Coalition uses reverse ETL to provide secure, clean access to data
With Ethan Rader, Senior Product Manager at Coalition
For Coalition, everything is about balance. Teams need access to customer data without risking data security. They need the flexibility to try out new tools and systems without costly custom integration work. Census helps them achieve that balance.
Coalition helps businesses address digital risk. In addition to insurance coverage, Coalition offers active monitoring and alerting to help businesses stay ahead of digital risks including ongoing scanning for vulnerabilities, personalized alerts, and 24/7 access to security experts.
That full policyholder platform generates plenty of customer usage data. The goal of their Business Systems team is to help teams access and make sense of that data in order to build excellent customer experiences.
Results
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Providing relevant and timely data to the Sales team
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Deploying new tools quickly
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Managing their data pipeline without additional headcount
The challenge
"It’s not as simple as syncing one database. There are different use cases and relationships between them. We were trying to sync everything directly and it got really complex and nasty, really fast."
With data coming in from a variety of sources, Coalition needed a way to clean and deduplicate data, as well as a way to sync data to the tools that each team used. This concern wasn’t only about the quality of data. Coalition also wanted to control costs associated with data integrations and avoid unnecessary API calls.
Security is another concern for Coalition: internal users need access to customer data in order to react to customer needs, but incorrect access to data poses a security risk. Simply opening up access to all customer data through their platform wasn’t an option – the relevant data, and only that data, needed to flow into other systems in order to provide appropriate access control.
The solutions
Create a clean data layer
"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."
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.
Limit direct access to platform data
"We don't allow everyone access to all parts of our systems internally. Our sales team might not have the context of conversations being had by other teams."
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.
Deploy smart integrations that make use of bulk API calls
"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."
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
"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."
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.
No additional headcount to manage the data pipeline
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."
Flexibility to support data integration with new tools
"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."
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.
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