Super Dispatch drives revenue impact with Fivetran and the modern data stack

“Without the Modern Data Stack, Super Dispatch would not be able to generate these insights and guide customer behavior. This is a direct result of being able to centralize our data and make it available to anyone who needs it--and it all starts with Fivetran easily and seamlessly pulling in the appropriate information to the company’s data warehouse.”
— Aman Malhotra, Head of Growth and Analytics, Super Dispatch

The Situation

Super Dispatch's auto transport platform is a one-stop-shop for everything carriers and shippers need to move cars faster, smarter and easier. Backed by cutting edge technology and best-in-class software, the Super Dispatch platform provides advanced carrier and shipper experiences that free up time, money and teams so customers can focus on moving more cars in less time using fewer resources. As a growth-stage startup, Super Dispatch needs to onboard as many new users and optimize the experiences for active users as fast as possible to gain momentum.

The Problem

Enter Aman Malhotra, a veteran in the marketing, sales and operations analysis industry. Aman was hired to help Super Dispatch improve user activation, retention and monetization through the use of data. Specifically, this meant collecting, cleaning and making sense of the company’s data in order to make business decisions or make processes more efficient.

Aman hit the ground running by conducting an audit of the company’s existing data architecture across its various digital properties, business systems and marketing tools. She quickly discovered that the company’s data was decentralized and cordoned off in separate silos across the organization.

“Website signups went into our CRM platform but nowhere else. Subscription data wasn’t centralized. Transaction email data wasn’t living in a place where you could analyze it across the customer journey,” Aman said. “It got me wondering how my colleagues were making critical decisions about the product, the user journey and the business as a whole without being able to really analyze the data.”

Employees were relying on spreadsheets that were shared around the company. Some for marketing. Some for billing. Some for sales. Users would download data from business systems in the data center or from Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms individually and try to make sense of the numbers in Excel. For Aman, it posed a huge opportunity for improvement.

The Solution

Aman set out to build a new data architecture for Super Dispatch from scratch. Making a checklist, she knew she needed a data pipeline that provided users with a single source of truth, was simple, provided accessibility to users across the company with varying levels of data analytics backgrounds, and was stored in a single location close to the company’s headquarters in Kansas City.

A key component of this new architecture is Fivetran, a data integration service with an extensive library of hundreds of connectors to Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms. Fivetran automatically pulls data from Salesforce, MailChimp, Sendgrid, Intercom, Webhooks and Braintree in near-real time, loading it into an Amazon Redshift data warehouse. From there, the company’s business intelligence tool (Tableau) is used to analyze the data and present it to business users in a way they can easily understand with real-time dashboards, charts, graphs and other visualizations.

Employees can then use the insights gleaned from this data to make decisions grounded in data — rather than hunches, experience or gut feel. Aman can also feed the insights back into the various platforms to inform on-going campaigns, optimizing outcomes while helping to drive customer behavior.

“I was able to centralize all our data in a modern data stack,” Aman said. “I can now let my team of analysts have at it and take it from there to deliver real measurable results across business units.”

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The Outcome

Insights derived from the data collected by Fivetran allow Aman and her team to deliver measurable value to every department across the company.

A product engagement project gives the product team a snapshot of how users are interacting with Super Dispatch’s ecosystem of digital assets, including the shipper app, the driver app and the carrier backend console. They can separate paid versus free users as well as active versus dormant users. They can then experiment with A/B testing across promotional emails and push notifications to determine the best way to turn dormant users into active users. One immediate result was that a single email campaign delivered a 6 percent lift — amazing value that directly translates into revenue.

Another project revolved around user activation. Insights into how “super users” behave allow the product team to push other users into taking certain actions that lead to a richer engagement. For example, super users tend to watch a training demo on the website’s homepage and are more likely to fill out their profile information. The product team can then send push notifications to other users to get them to complete those actions and continue on the desired engagement journey. The result was a 13 percent increase in activation rate — again, demonstrable value that leads to increased revenue.

“Without the Modern Data Stack, Super Dispatch would not be able to generate these insights and guide customer behavior,” Aman said. “This is a direct result of being able to centralize our data and make it available to anyone who needs it — and it all starts with Fivetran easily and seamlessly pulling in the appropriate information to the company’s data warehouse.”

Given the success of the analytics and growth program, Aman is inundated with data requests from her colleagues across the company. Everyone wants to get their hands on actionable data that they can use to make the right decision at the right time leading to positive, measurable results.