“Bringing in Delegate as a team of external experts, who can say here is what is not working and here is how we can make it better, was very valuable. It gave us more momentum to get this across the line.” – Emma Auscher
Founded in 2013, Lob automates direct mail for the digital age, giving businesses greater flexibility, visibility, and control over offline communications. Enterprise companies use Lob’s suite of APIs to mail fully dynamic and personalized customer communications with print media. As the company expanded, they needed a solution that was going to serve as the central source of truth.
Untangling the Web of Data and Tools
As Lob’s team grew, they struggled to centralize their business insights and data – information critical to their ability to support their customers. When Emma Auscher, Head of Customer Experience started at Lob a year and a half ago, the team’s data was disparate and unorganized. Her first project was to get data together, but they didn’t have in-house resources. While they looked at internal options, it became clear they needed third-party support.
At the time, Lob was operating through seventeen different tools. The sales team was using Salesforce, support was using Zendesk, Marketing was using Marketo, and so on. All of this caused miscommunication and challenges when it came to getting the full and clear picture of their customers.
“We were all looking at the same customer but not using consistent data. There was no visibility, no transparency, we were not communicating as well as we could have been. My main goal was to unify that experience.”
Auscher and her team had to build the foundations of a healthy data infrastructure. They needed one source of truth, and that was Salesforce. However, she only had one person in revenue ops, so they needed a technical resource to spear-head the best way to feed all data to Salesforce.
Maintaining a Culture of Agility, Openness, and Trust
Auscher and her team needed to integrate tools, get rid of ones they didn’t need, and ensure data was cleaned up, enriched, all in one place and available to all customer teams
“I wanted a unified customer experience. In order to do that the main problem to solve was a unified user experience for the team. We needed one source of truth. That was the most important thing.”
She began interviewing firms and consultants for support when she was introduced to Delegate. Redesigning the data infrastructure was just one of her projects at the time so the ease in which Delegate delivered was highly valuable.
“They just made it super easy. The Monday and Friday meetings were pleasant, everyone was in good spirits and enjoyed the work, even though it was a difficult project.”
“The team was super personable, available, and answered all the questions we needed. We were meant to spend six months together so we needed partners we could work well with.”
Unifying Information and Systems to Increase Operational Efficiency
With being in a new role and needing to quickly get internal buy-in from her team, Auscher found it valuable to have Delegate on her side to help get things done.
“We needed to identify the problem, but also make people aware of the problem. Me offering insight was one thing, but bringing in Delegate as a team of external experts, who can say here is what is not working and here is how we can make it better, was very valuable. It gave us more momentum to get this across the line.”
With Delegate as a partner, Auscher was able to build awareness across the team and understand how important it is to have data in one place and have it be visible and transparent for everyone. The team was also able to create more efficiency across departments.
“Our reporting is much more accurate and consistent. We are literally saving hours by not having to call for information, look in a hundred places, Slack multiple people to get information.”
Delegate was able to help Lob solve an organizational structure issue and operations was able to get back to focusing on strategy while Delegate oversaw the technical work.
The team is also able to be more accurate and drive better data-driven decisions.
“We now have insights and can actually use it in our daily decision making.”