Data plays a huge role in the everyday operations of most businesses today. The utilization of data has helped some of the biggest, most successful corporations like Facebook and Google come to fruition.
There is no way to scale your business without strong data behind you. From your interactions with customers on social media, to how users are responding to your email blasts, you need hard numbers to back your business decisions.
These metrics can provide valuable insights into who your target audience is and where your products or services perform best. They can also show you in what areas your company needs to improve.
Nowadays, data is an important asset in practically every sector in the world, including politics, education, medicine, and science. When it comes to business, this information can greatly impact your overall sales and growth.
An Overview of ETL
One way that businesses today manage their data is through a process known as ETL, or “extract, transform, load.” Within this integrative process, data is sourced, automated, and stored for optimal usage.
Just as the name suggests, this process takes effect in three steps: first, the data is extracted from different sources, then, it is transformed to fit the system it’s being loaded on, and lastly, it is loaded onto a storage space like a data warehouse.
On the other hand, Reverse ETL is the same process, but backward. With reverse ETL, the data is sourced straight from a warehouse. Then, it is transformed and formatted directly within the warehouse. With traditional ETL, the data is transformed on a secondary processing server.
But how does this process actually help companies manage their business? Well, there are a ton of different applications for reverse ETL.
Meaningful Customer Experiences
For one, this data integration technology greatly enhances the customer experience. Reverse ETL allows users to extract important information and meet the data formatting requirements of third-party systems.
That means you can integrate your data in platforms like Salesforce and Hubspot. These SaaS tools automate your data, allowing you to see key trends and patterns.
Having all your data on a third party platform makes it easier for employees of your company to access this data and use it for their work. Moreover, this process helps organize this data cleanly.
In effect, your company will be able to improve upon their products and services they can offer their customers. They can also make adjustments to their website, social media pages, or advertisements based on this data by getting to hire SEO expert.
Operational Analytics
Operational analytics is used to prepare data for customer-based operations like sales, customer service, support, and logistics. It automates this data and allows it to be accessed by different members of an organization.
Reverse ETL essentially turns your data into operational analytics. By automating and organizing your data, practically every task for your employees becomes simplified.
For instance, if a member of your sales team is trying to figure out which month of the year deserves the biggest marketing budget, they can easily access this data on a SaaS platform and incorporate it into their decision.
Once your data is facilitated through this process, it is made actionable and ready to use.
Besides making data analysis easier, reverse ETL also helps you to keep your data accurate. By eliminating human error, you no longer have to worry about mental mistakes occurring while organizing data.
Use Cases
Now, let’s discuss how this process is actually applied in practical situations. There are many different ways reverse ETL can be used, but it is most commonly used to analyze data and draw trends from it.
For instance, a member of your sales team may use it to find clients that your business is at risk of losing. By looking at the data, they can strongly upsell these clients, while cross-selling other potential candidates.
This information will help them decide which clients to nurture and which ones to not waste resources on. Best of all, all of this data is provided in real-time. Therefore, this worker would be able to respond to the issue immediately.
Imagine this scenario: one of your support agents needs access to customer records to resolve an issue for a specific client. They want the client’s previous chat conversations and billing history.
Reverse ETL provides data synchronization with the data warehouse and ensures that only the most accurate, recent data is shown.
If you’re trying to execute a personalized marketing campaign, reverse ETL is also very helpful. Various types of data can be utilized through this process, from product usage data, to a client’s location, job title, and tenure as a customer.
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