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How Together uses Explo to provide self-service analytics to their customers while saving $65k annually

Customer story highlights

  • Together wanted to give customers access to user-friendly reports in-app, while not having to spend significant engineering time 
  • Together chose Explo over GoodData and Tableau due to Explo’s ease of use and primary focus on embedded analytics
  • Together is realizing over $65k annually in cost savings with Explo

The company

Together Software is a SaaS mentorship platform that helps organizations improve employee performance, onboarding, and collaboration. The platform uses an advanced algorithm that pairs employees by analyzing goals, interests, and strengths while providing researched-backed resources to ensure every mentoring relationship is successful. 

Together Mentoring Software is trusted by customers like Heineken, Kelloggs, Discovery Channel, and more to enable best-in-class mentoring programs. Together Mentoring Software is recognized as a leading end-to-end solution for mentoring and employee performance.

Problem

Over 150 companies trust Together to be at the core of their mentoring and learning programs. For their customers, data is critical, especially for the HR end-users of their platform. For their users, reporting is essential to understand the program's overall effectiveness and where there is an opportunity for improvement.

The Together Platform collects data about the health of a company’s mentoring program that includes; monthly active users, what topics & skills people are working on, and employee satisfaction across sessions and mentors. HR and administrative users are typically asked to produce monthly reports to communicate with company leadership.

Nathan Goldstein, a co-founder at Together, knew they needed to implement an embedded analytics solution that allowed their customers to access their own data without spending significant engineering time and resources to do so.

We wanted to give customers access to user-friendly reports in our app, while also moving very quickly and not having to spend engineering time creating a ticket for minor graphing changes.” 

In their evaluation of the next steps, Nathan and the Together engineering team were looking at two potential paths: 

#1 Build an in-app analytics experience with their own resources: In their analysis, both the cost and time to build were significant blockers in deciding to build in-house with their engineering team. Embedded analytics was not a core expertise for their team, and the preference was to keep the engineering team focused and time spent on reporting to a minimum. “We wanted to just write SQL queries and have nice dashboards for our customers to use”, said Nathan. “We also wanted to give our non-technical members the ability to make adjustments as needed for our customers without consulting engineers.”

#2 Purchase an out-of-the-box embedded analytics solution: Once it was determined that building in-house would not be a realistic option, Together started evaluating potential solutions to buy and implement. Together’s team evaluated GoodData, Tableau, and Explo, head to head. “We used to use GoodData, but it was way too complex to set up and maintain, and the documentation was bad”, said Nathan. “Tableau was very expensive and not primarily meant for embedding for SaaS companies.” Explo was ultimately chosen as the best option due to its price, ease of setup, and core functionality meeting Together’s customer end-user reporting needs.

Solution

Together chose to use Explo Architect, an embedded dashboard solution, to empower their customers to fulfill and customize their reporting needs. The solution enables Together’s customer end-users to customize dashboards with zero coding experience and get instant and secure access to the data they need for reporting. 

Working with the Explo team, Together was able to implement their first Explo dashboard in just one day. The initial deployment included:

  1. Set up access and integrate data. The data pulled into dashboards utilized simple SQL queries. Explo natively supports and connects to SQL and other various data sources so that dashboards can render real-time information within Together’s platform.
  2. Enable highly customizable dashboards. Together used Explo to provide five different embedded dashboard types that their end-users could; filter, group by, rearrange items on the dashboard, export, and look native to the Together platform. 
  3. Embed and deploy. In just one day, the Together team worked with Explo’s customer success team to build a proof of concept and complete their first dashboard implementation.

Together’s use cases for customer-facing analytics.

Together identified five initial dashboard types that would make it easier for their customer end-users to access and visualize insights. These included:

  • Program engagement analytics for mentors and mentees 
  • Program reporting by skills, departments, and locations
  • Insights into the sessions each member is having and context to the session
  • Line of sight into the percentage of employees that are paired - or what combinations of users are paired together

Results

Together’s implementation of Explo provided Nathan and the engineering team with tangible business value and the desired level of flexibility and speed they had envisioned, specifically:

Faster time to market: Together is able to create, test, and deploy new dashboards in just one day.

Cost and time savings: Total cost savings is estimated at $65,000 per year, while reducing engineering time to ⅓ of what they spent previously in pulling one-off reports for customers.

Dashboards their customers love: End-user engagement has shown Together’s customers enjoy and share dashboards frequently, improving overall customer satisfaction.

“Every app needs reporting these days and if your data is already in bigquery or a common database type, you can have a beta version out the same day [with Explo]. The Explo team is very responsive to our feature requests.”

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