They have a central team of data analysts that provide technical infrastructure and data modeling expertise, while the analytics teams within each brand answer business questions through dashboards or ad-hoc analysis. They use a data stack comprising Hevo, Snowflake, and Tableau.
Currently, they operate this stack for their three key brands - Mijndomein (shared hosting services), MyWheels (shared mobility), and EnergyZero (energy-as-a-service), and will be expanding over the whole group.
Remco Verheijen, a seasoned management consultant at our consulting partner X-Equipment, has been collaborating with The Sharing Group for many years, helping them become more data-driven. He shares how they use data to scale their businesses efficiently.
Problem
For The Sharing Group (TSG) brands to become market leaders in their respective categories, they must master two crucial ingredients - maintaining competitive margins and maximizing customer growth while minimizing customer churn.
They collect a wealth of customer data through a variety of touchpoints. Each business line has its operational software, and the data is generated in MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and S3 buckets. They heavily rely on cloud software for various operations such as Zendesk for customer support and Hubspot for their marketing automation. Furthermore, they also consume several (statistical) datasets from external data providers. Each source provides its own valuable data set, making it a crucial piece in understanding customers and business.
Despite collecting vast customer data, TSG faced a challenge in turning that data into actionable insights to control margins and churn. Each business unit had unique needs - the mobility business f.e. needed insights on where to allocate their shared cars to maximize utilization. At the same time, the domain hosting business wanted to better understand customer renewals and product switches.
TSG aspired to become more data-driven and provide each business unit with the necessary data and insights to drive business growth while controlling margins. To achieve this goal, TSG partnered with Remco to establish efficient data practices that deliver quick and accurate insights to each business unit.
With Snowflake as their chosen data platform, they set out to find a tool that takes care of the movement of data into their Snowflake data lake without any hassle and unlocks the value of their data.
Solution
The Sharing Group embraced the power of cloud technology and started evaluating cloud ELT tools to automate their pipelines; building in-house pipelines was not a preferred option. After an extensive tool selection process, they chose Hevo Data for its easy-to-use interface and exceptional customer service.
During the product evaluation of Hevo, the collaboration with Hevo’s customer service team was seen as very positive by TSG and provided a clear picture of how Hevo could be used to address their customer-specific needs and challenges.
The plug-and-play connectors with a simple 3-click data pipeline setup and prompt resolution of queries by Hevo's quality customer support made Hevo a clear winner.
With Hevo Data, it became a breeze to set up automated data pipelines for all their sources, including MySQL, PostgeSQL, S3, Zendesk, and Hubspot, thus, centralizing all their data on Snowflake for analysis. They use dbt to run models to prepare that data for analysis and derive insights, delivering those insights to the end-users via Tableau. Currently, they're running 35 active pipelines on Hevo to move more than 450 million events every month.
With the help of centralized data and analytical base models, each business line can now access the tools and insights needed to improve themselves and achieve their ambitions continuously.
MyWheels (shared mobility) can now strategically position their vehicles based on data about locations with high customer potential. Mijndomein (shared hosting services) can now better analyze customers’ upgrade and downgrade behavior and predict potential churn. EnergyZero (energy-as-a-service) gains in-depth insights into the differences between estimated and actual energy consumption, the advance payments received, and the actual costs paid to purchase energy.
Additionally, the group-level business teams comprehensively view the company's overall performance, including revenue, margin, customer volume, and value.
Impact
Armed with all the necessary insights, each brand and business team is making efficient decisions and streamlining processes to keep margins up while achieving strong customer growth.
TSG has experienced exceptional growth over the last few years, with an increase in customer volume of over 400% in some business lines. This massive influx of data was effortlessly managed through Hevo and Snowflake's scalable platform, ensuring a steady flow of insights even as the data volumes grew. According to Jim, having a scalable ingestion and modeling platform was crucial to respond to new business questions and changing needs for insights during such a period of growth.
Even with the growth we see in both the number of source systems and data volumes, Hevo allows us to build and manage these data pipelines without needing any full-time data engineers. This ensures that data ingestion will not become a bottleneck for new data projects.
With Hevo Data and Snowflake, The Sharing Group has successfully transformed into a more data-driven organization marked by improved margins, reduced churn, and significant progress toward becoming a top-three player across categories. MyWheels, the shared mobility service, has become the market leader in its space in the Netherlands.
Remco highly recommends Hevo Data to other data professionals. Using Hevo’s hassle-free and easy-to-use data pipeline platform enables them to focus their time and attention on data analysis and generating compelling, powerful new, surprising insights.
About X-Equipment
X-Equipment is a small consulting firm with a typical Rotterdam no-nonsense mentality. They help organizations to disrupt the status quo, out-innovating their competition through powerful new and surprising insights. Operating in highly competitive and data-rich market segments, the ability to analyze vast amounts of data is the difference between victory and defeat. X-Equipment is a partner of Hevo and uses Hevo’s hassle-free and easy to use end-to-end data pipeline platform to focus purely on helping their customers to become best in class and keep competitive advantages.
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