Operational Efficiency with Stitch? Best. Gift. Ever.

It’s the ultimate Catch-22. As businesses grow, executives need to keep a close watch on operations — but that growth itself can blur visibility. Multiple teams, data sources, and silos of information can create challenges in determining who is doing what, where inefficiencies exist, and what improvements should be made.

Prezzee, a fast-growing international enterprise based in Australia, found a way to simplify and integrate its operational tracking. Using Talend Stitch and Amazon Redshift, the company automated reporting, monitoring, and alerting across all platforms, its production database (AWS), and its customer data platform. Now any authorized person in the organization can have complete, accurate, up-to-date visibility into every business process.

The double-edged sword of success

Prezzee’s innovative digital gift cards allow consumers and businesses to buy, send, store, and redeem gift cards instantly — online or on their phones — and swap them among hundreds of top retailers. “We make gift cards easy and fun,” explains Anthony Wakulicz, Head of Data at Prezzee. “But as we grew, providing operational transparency was not so easy or fun.”

Driven by the viral success of its gift cards, the company’s workforce grew from just 30 in 2020 to more than 150 today. “Our leadership team and executives wanted better transparency into what every team was doing,” said Wakulicz. “We needed to maximize efficiency as we grew. That meant eliminating silos of data to ensure that everyone had the same information, and automating as much as possible so our teams could focus on spotlighting our differentiators rather than executing tedious tasks.”

More specifically, Prezzee wanted to integrate three types of data to increase visibility into business processes: 

• Application data from production, including all the databases that back the applications written by engineering and product teams
• Customer and user behavior data showing how long people spend on certain web pages, what buttons they’re clicking, how they’re interacting with mobile apps, etc., so that analytics can be applied to generate fresh insights
• Business operational data that enables sales teams, product teams, and executives to see and respond to operational practices that impact the customer experience and sales results 

One source of truth, many advantages 

Using the Stitch platform, Prezzee moved all of its disparate data into a centralized data warehouse (Amazon Redshift), cleaned and optimized the data, and exposed it to the company’s business intelligence platform, Looker.

“With this solution we are able to see everything in one place, we have governance over 14 different Stitch sources across four global regions, and we have more than 90 scheduled reports set up in Looker that go out internally and externally,” said Mr. Wakulicz.

These new data capabilities have given groups throughout the company exciting options, including:  

• Operations and finance teams can see and compare better data to make better decisions. For example, they can compare ad spending on Facebook, Microsoft, and other platforms with actual sales figures to optimize ad budget allocations. 
• Product teams can see which new features and functionality resonate with customers and where new innovations should be focused. 
• Customer care teams can see how long it takes for incoming Zendesk tickets to be addressed, compare that to how many Prezzee cards are being sold in different regions, see credit card dispute numbers, compare them to production data, and optimize the dispute resolution process.  

• Marketing teams can track customer engagement with their latest messaging and campaigns — and refine them accordingly. 
• Business leaders can support the company’s mission of reinventing the gift card industry by targeting new opportunities with precision, predicting and responding to new trends faster, and planning for future growth with greater accuracy. 

There was also one unexpected result to the new technology: “It gets our teams that are less technical to iron out processes definitions and their flows,” said Mr. Wakulicz. “Because if you want to automate something you have to define it precisely. So going through the exercise of automating these things is quite helpful.”

A gift that keeps on giving 

A key reason Prezzee has been so successful in increasing its operational visibility is the simplicity, ease of use, and flexibility of the Stitch platform, according to Mr. Wakulicz.

“It took two team members to set it up,” he said. “Now it saves team members countless hours of work—and it’s the kind of work everyone hates to do. The automation also helps us eliminate human error in copying data. That also saves money, of course, because you don’t need as many data entry employees.”

With Stitch and AWS, anyone in an organization can attain important visibility throughout their entire busines operations. That lets companies like Prezzee “keep growing fast without compromising on operational efficiency, product quality, or ongoing innovation.”