ScholarMatch, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, is dedicated to assisting low-income and first-generation students in their journey to college. The organization's mission is to help these students apply for, afford, and succeed in college. In 2016, their efforts resulted in 698 students attending college, with 97% of them on track to graduate. However, the organization faced a challenge in efficiently managing and responding to student feedback. They used an online feedback form via Gravity Forms to stay in touch with students' needs and gauge how well ScholarMatch was meeting their expectations. However, the process of sorting, viewing, and responding to this feedback was time-consuming and inefficient. The team needed a solution that would allow them to quickly and effectively process student feedback, enabling them to improve their services and support more students.

The Seattle Seahawks and Sounders FC, two teams with the same ownership group, are known for their passionate and vocal fan base. The management team of these teams wanted to ensure that they were effectively capturing and responding to fan feedback. However, the challenge was to manage and analyze the massive amount of feedback received from the fans, which was not limited to the game day but was a continuous process. The management team needed a system that could collect, organize, and summarize the feedback in a way that was easy to understand and actionable. The feedback was crucial for the teams as it played a significant role in their decision-making process, including team name selection and the potential removal of the general manager.

Stanford University's Computer Resource Consulting (CRC) team, a cost recovery service, was tasked with supporting a wide range of users including students, faculty, administrative units, labs, and other IT groups. Despite being a lean team, they were expected to deliver high-quality services while managing their resources efficiently. The team was using the app automation tool, Zapier, to track the number of appointments made. However, they realized the potential of Zapier's 'Zaps', workflows that connect different apps, to further streamline their operations. The challenge was to encourage the team to explore and learn Zapier and create their own Zaps to improve their workflows.

In the fast-paced world of startups, efficiency is key. Squared Up, an application mapping and monitoring solution, was no exception. The startup was faced with the challenge of scaling their processes without increasing their budget. The team was stretched thin, with everyone handling multiple roles, including sales. The main challenge was managing and nurturing new leads without a dedicated sales team. The company needed a solution that would allow them to automate their processes, particularly in managing new leads, issuing trial licenses, recording information, and sending nurturing emails throughout the trial period.

The Perk, a local coffee shop in Winter Park, Colorado, faced a significant challenge when the state instructed restaurants to switch to pick-up orders only due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Perk was not just a coffee shop but a gathering place for the community, offering a range of products from coffee beverages to whole beans and local Colorado craft beers. The sudden shift in the business model due to the pandemic restrictions posed a significant challenge to the coffee shop. They needed to quickly adapt to the new situation and find a way to continue serving their customers while adhering to the new regulations. The challenge was to set up an efficient online ordering system that would allow them to continue their operations and serve their customers without any physical interaction.

Justin Blase, a marketer with a keen interest in automation, wanted to build an eCommerce business that ran almost entirely on automation without compromising on the quality of the product or the uniqueness of the business. He was interested in print-on-demand services and loved the idea of not holding any inventory other than digital image files in the cloud. However, he lacked coding skills and needed a solution that would allow him to automate various aspects of his business, from product creation to post-purchase processes, without the need for a developer.

Unspun, a clothing brand specializing in custom-designed jeans, aimed to disrupt the wasteful cycle prevalent in the apparel industry where clothes are produced in bulk, shipped to stores, and often discarded if unsold. The company's unique selling proposition was its high-touch, personalized customer experience, where every pair of jeans is bespoke and made-to-measure for the individual customer. However, the challenge lay in scaling this highly personalized, seemingly unscalable process. The company needed to connect various tools and workflows to create and scale this unique customer experience. The challenge was to automate a process that felt unique, personal, and not scalable, and do it at scale. The company also needed to bridge the gap between the manufacturing world and the customer-facing world.

The case study focuses on two businesses, TinySuperheroes and Speak English with Vanessa, both founded by women entrepreneurs. TinySuperheroes, founded by Robyn Rosenberger, provides capes to children dealing with sickness and disabilities. The challenge for Robyn was the time-consuming process of order fulfillment and management. She had to manually create orders for every cape shipped, which was slowing down the business. Speak English with Vanessa, founded by Vanessa Prothe, is an online language teaching platform. Vanessa faced the challenge of managing her courses, payments, and emails manually. This was a significant roadblock for her, especially as she was not tech-savvy and her expertise lay in teaching English, not in coding or managing complex software systems.

Total CSR, a lean team offering a training program for insurance onboarding, found themselves overwhelmed with menial tasks that were drawing them away from their core work. As a small team of three, they were handling an expanding workload that included tasks such as building leads in a customer relationship manager (CRM), managing accounts from lead to client, and tracking and entering payments across different platforms. These tasks were not only time-consuming but also derailed their focus from critical work. The challenge was to find a solution that could automate these tasks, allowing the team to focus on their primary responsibilities and passion.

AppsFlyer, a leading mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform, was faced with the challenge of providing real-time access to raw datasets for over 100,000 users. The platform, which processes more than 80 billion events daily, was experiencing a 10% monthly growth in traffic. This rapid growth necessitated a service that could scale to match the exceptional demand. Additionally, AppsFlyer's internal teams required access to the raw data for analytics to inform various aspects such as product performance and research and development. The company needed a data warehouse that could scale quickly while providing real-time access to data with high availability.

Arek Oy, a Finnish company that builds and maintains information systems for pension insurance, was looking to modernize its infrastructure to improve efficiency and agility. The company wanted to adopt a hybrid approach, using a combination of private and public clouds, while ensuring data protection at all times. Arek was particularly interested in boosting capacity for its core applications that manage pension calculations and provide real-time results. However, the company faced challenges in scaling cost-effectively and quickly to support more users, which slowed its time to market for introducing customer services. Additionally, Arek aimed to eliminate outdated networks that could slow response times by as much as 30 seconds and reduce IT complexity to accelerate response times and gain better control over CPU use.

Ascend Money, one of South East Asia's largest fintech businesses, was facing challenges as it expanded its customer base and ventured into new markets. The company initially operated using physical infrastructure and on-premises workforce productivity applications. However, as the business grew, its technology leaders began to explore options to improve value for money, reduce the maintenance load on in-house team members, enhance data management and analysis, and foster more effective collaboration. The company was also looking for ways to reduce its infrastructure spending and become more efficient and cost-effective. Ascend Money needed a solution that would allow it to optimize its operations, lower costs, and improve performance.

The Athena Breast Health Network, a collaboration of breast cancer experts, healthcare providers, researchers, and patient advocates, was conducting the WISDOM Study, a clinical trial comparing personalized breast cancer screening to standard annual screening in 100,000 women. The study aimed to determine whether personalized screening that incorporates individual risk assessments is as safe and effective as the standard approach. However, the team faced a challenge in securely and conveniently providing access to mammograms and other breast health information. Additionally, they needed to improve study recruitment and retention, as the process of requesting records by phone or mail was inconvenient for participants.

Auto Trader, the UK’s largest digital automotive marketplace, faced a significant challenge when transitioning from print to digital. The company wanted to empower its employees to make data-driven decisions and provide insights to their retailers and consumers. The shift to digital generated a massive amount of data from various online interactions, which everyone, from internal teams to automotive retailers to consumers, was eager to access and use for better decision-making. In 2018, Auto Trader embarked on a journey to modernize their tech stack, centralize data, and provide self-service access to trusted metrics. The company needed to satisfy the data demands of both their internal stakeholders and external users. Retailers wanted to understand how much their cars were worth to consumers and how their ads were performing. Consumers wanted to find the right products by being served up ads relevant to their search. However, the existing data management system became a bottleneck, and new issues arose around how to make personally identifiable information (PII) secure and compliant.

Autogrill, a leading provider of food and beverage services for travelers, operates in 31 countries with over 60,000 employees and an annual turnover of €5 billion. The company operates 4,000 points of sale worldwide in 1,000 locations, including concessions of well-known brands such as Starbucks and KFC. With around 400,000 transactions and up to 1 million receipt lines a day in Italy alone, tracking the performance of individual concessions was a significant challenge. The company needed a solution to monitor in-store sales more closely and react faster to sales trends. The existing system provided sales updates on a daily basis, but with a day’s delay, making it difficult to react quickly to changes in consumer behavior and trial new promotions effectively.

AZ Delta, one of Belgium’s largest hospitals, was faced with the challenge of leveraging its vast amount of medical data to generate insights and improve healthcare. The data was digitally available but not in a single location and was difficult to work with at scale. The hospital's on-premises IT infrastructure was not capable of powering large scale data analytics. The data was complex and varied, with a single patient’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) containing thousands of data points. With over 650,000 patient consultations a year, storing, processing, and analyzing this data was a significant challenge. The data needed to be processed and normalized before it could be mined. Manual queries took up to 15 minutes to run due to the scale of the project, limiting the hospital's ability to efficiently utilize the data.

Banco ABC Brasil, a modern bank with over 33 years of operation, was facing challenges in managing and analyzing both financial data and customer behavior information. As the bank's operations increased, it became evident that the decision-making process needed to be improved and automated to support new service models and cater to diverse financial needs of customers. The bank aimed to develop a data-driven culture and leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to gain a competitive edge. However, the existing on-premises data platform was not equipped to support these strategic goals. The bank needed a robust solution to modernize its data platform, enhance data governance, and facilitate the creation of a data-driven culture.

Bharat Light & Power Pvt Ltd (BLP), a leading renewable energy generation and technology company in India, faced significant challenges in ensuring the availability of wind turbines that powered utility-scale wind power generation across the country. The failure of even the smallest component could shut down an entire wind turbine, compromising efficient operation. For instance, a $5,000 battery failure could shut down a $2.5 million piece of equipment. As the business expanded, it began to extend beyond its core 'AI for industry' mission. It recruited an IoT team to help factory owners and operators enable the programmable logic controllers (PLC) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that run disparate equipment and machines to communicate with each other and provide usable data and insights. However, BLP's initial cloud service provider could not provide an architecture that made sense for an industry-focused solution.

John Gilmore, the Sales Operations Manager at ClassHero, a startup, was tasked with identifying opportunities for product improvement and ensuring conversions were happening as expected. However, he noticed a significant drop in the onboarding rates on the site, from 75% to 39%, a 48% drop. This was a major concern as users who didn't complete onboarding in their first session rarely returned to the app. The drop in conversions was alarming, and the cause was unknown due to recent product changes. John needed to identify the problem quickly to prevent further loss in sales. He turned to Hotjar, a tool he had installed a few months earlier, to analyze session recordings and identify the issue.

Materials Market, a UK-based online platform connecting construction material suppliers with customers, was facing a significant challenge with their website's conversion rate. Despite the company's rapid growth and impressive sales figures, the site's conversion rate was a mere 0.5%. Andrew, the Operations Director, identified three key areas of concern through Hotjar, a user interaction tracking tool. These included a confusing call to action (CTA), issues in the checkout flow leading to higher than expected drop-offs, and a problematic cookie policy causing visitors to bounce. The CTAs were obscured on mobile and confusing on desktop, and the checkout process was cumbersome and lengthy, causing one in every four visitors to abandon their purchase. The cookie policy was also causing confusion among users, leading to a high bounce rate.

NerdCow, a premium web design agency, was faced with the challenge of improving conversions on a client's ecommerce site, The Transport Library. The Transport Library, a large online shop selling images of rail and bus photos, was struggling with low sales despite its extensive product database of over 140,000 items. The main issues identified were a complicated search bar, difficulty in finding new products, and users not completing their purchases. The search bar was particularly challenging for the site's user base, primarily aged 55 to 65+ and not tech-savvy, due to its multiple fields with filters and joining statements. Users were also spending hours scrolling through the site's product database without clicking into any actual products, indicating a struggle to find new items. Lastly, despite adding products to their carts, users were not finalizing their purchases.

The Good, a leading Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) agency, was tasked with improving the conversion rates for Swiss Gear, a company selling a variety of goods including high-quality backpacks, luggage, travel accessories, and watches. Swiss Gear's website had been producing strong sales numbers, particularly during the holiday season. However, the company wanted to maintain these sales numbers year-round and convert existing traffic into buyers at a higher rate. The challenge was to identify areas for improvement on the website to enhance the user experience and increase conversions. The Good needed to understand the users' needs and behaviors on the website, without letting their own biases and knowledge guide their decisions on what to test.

Intertop, a well-established shoe retailer in Ukraine with 114 stores in 25 cities and an online operation that attracts 3.5 million monthly visits, was facing challenges with its ecommerce model. Despite its high growth and rapidly increasing traffic, the company was struggling to simplify the customer journey on its website, increase conversion rates, speed up the introduction of user experience changes, and mitigate risks of damaging the site experience. To address these issues, Intertop engaged CRO and UX agency Turum-burum. The agency initiated their Conversion Rate Optimization program based on step-by-step interface enhancements, a model they call ESR: Evolutionary Site Redesign. The goal was to anchor all proposed website changes on analytical proof and confirm them through A/B testing, a proven way of minimizing risk of rolling out changes that impact the shopping experience.

Vimcar, Germany’s leading fleet management software, was experiencing rapid growth and needed to rebrand their regional websites for Germany and the UK to keep up with their expanding product and feature list. However, they were concerned that the changes might disrupt their funnels, leading to a temporary reduction in page views, leads, and sales. The site’s heavy focus on product and features was suspected to be making it harder for users to book a demo and get started. The team wanted to make the experience more customer-centric but needed hard data to identify what elements to change. The slow pace of traffic from its B2B customers made A/B testing a slow process, taking up to three months to gather enough data to act. They needed solutions in place right away.

Gavin, the founder of Yatter, a lead generation agency, faced several challenges in improving the conversion rates of various websites. One of the main issues was with his personal site, myfunnelacademy.com, where after switching from Clickfunnels to WordPress for more flexibility, the conversions dropped significantly. Another challenge was with an ecommerce store for car parts. Despite the Facebook ads for the store generating a 5x ROI, Gavin suspected the landing page was not fully optimized. He also worked on a stem cell therapy website, where despite having high-value visitors, the conversion rate was low. Lastly, he faced a challenge with a personal training and nutrition planning website, faultlessfitness.com, where too many options were causing choice paralysis.

Brandfolder, a Denver-based company offering digital asset management (DAM) solutions, was seeking to enhance its service offerings to provide high-impact customer experiences and increase its competitive edge. The company was looking to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Key to meeting customers' unique business needs and competing in the fast-moving DAM industry was the integration of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). However, Brandfolder needed a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost-effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies. After trying two other cloud providers, Brandfolder decided to standardize on Google Cloud.

Brandwatch, a digital consumer insights company, was facing a significant challenge in its business intelligence (BI) operations. The company needed to understand and support its clients' needs by analyzing trends and patterns in the way its platform was used. To achieve this, Brandwatch combined service usage data from Mixpanel with customer data in Salesforce. However, its existing infrastructure was not supportive of this integration. The data lived in disparate silos that required manual, time-consuming aggregation, making the insights less useful by the time the data was pulled together for analysis. The company was unable to analyze customer information together with data on how customers used its platform. This meant that the BI team had to manually combine both types of information on spreadsheets to create reports. The process was not only time-consuming but also inflexible, limiting the analysis Brandwatch could do.

Mata Capital, a French real estate fund management company, was facing challenges in distributing fund shares and maintaining its investor registry. The traditional processes were cumbersome, costly, and relied heavily on paper-based systems. The company was also grappling with substantial administrative costs, especially for small investment tickets for Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and registration activities. This resulted in high minimum investment subscription amounts, limiting the pool of potential investors. Furthermore, investors had limited access to secondary markets, making it difficult for them to trade assets as required by their portfolio allocation strategies. Mata Capital sought to modernize and optimize these processes, with a long-term vision to reduce minimum investor subscription amounts from €100,000 to €1, thereby attracting a wider and more diverse pool of investors to real estate asset investments.

The fantasy gaming industry, a multi-billion dollar market, is dominated by a few large companies such as ESPN, Yahoo, FanDuel, and DraftKings. These platforms allow fans to select players, form teams, join leagues, and compete against other users. However, the value generated by these games largely remains with these big companies, with users and athletes having limited opportunities to monetize their participation. Furthermore, users have no real impact on the performance of their roster. This situation presented an opportunity for innovation and disruption, which is what Cydisys aimed to achieve when they partnered with Kaleido to create AnteFame, a blockchain-backed play-to-earn game centered around Formula 1.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, in partnership with Nationwide, Prudential Financial, and Securian Financial, faced the challenge of efficiently processing death benefits and claims. The existing process was inefficient and manual, requiring comprehensive decedent information for verification and validation of death claims. However, no single source had emerged to fill this need. The challenge was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the timely closure of life insurance and annuity claims more critical than ever. The lack of a centralized, secure, and transparent system for sharing decedent information among insurance carriers posed a significant challenge.