How to turn integrated data into an integrated experience

By Pam Sogge
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Talend has a lot in common with our customers. We collect a whole lot of data. We take pride in how we use that data. And we’re always looking for new ways to drive better business outcomes with our data.

That is why Talend recently launched the Digital Touchpoint Model (DTM) initiative to create an exceptional, data-driven, “One Talend” support experience for customers, using our own products and innovative best practices. You’ll soon see the results in your interactions with us — and perhaps you’ll also see a new opportunity to transform your own data into more engaged, satisfied customers.

Prescriptive, proactive support — automatically

Through the DTM initiative, we’re integrating multiple sources of our customer support data so that we can be more helpful in every customer interaction, every step of the way. With DTM, we can provide prescriptive support through automated processes, so you get the support you need when and how you need it. Here are a few examples of the new capabilities DTM enables: 

  • In our communications with customers, we want to be sure we’re checking in at all key points in the journey, starting with onboarding. Through DTM, we can automate our email communications so they arrive as each new phase begins, and we can layer them with surveys to continuously measure engagement and participation. You get timely information at each phase, and you see that we care about your experience.
  • If we discover that a customer is dissatisfied about any aspect of the experience, we can proactively contact the customer and provide additional support to rectify the situation.
  • Using behavior-based rules, we can determine whether a customer has actually stopped using our products or discontinued their participation in Talend Academy or other support channels — so we can step in and find out whether there’s an issue, understand their situation, and make recommendations to serve the customer better. 

Overall, the observability data and KPIs we collect and monitor — ranging from cloud usage and engagement level to registration for support events and overall sentiment about the experience DTM — make it possible for us to track and graphically display the overall health of each customer’s implementation. This includes the ability to view account health at a glance as shown below — a visual snapshot showing overall health and trends, usage and engagement levels, and both support and sales metrics.

recreation of dashboard for account health that measures overall health & trends, usage levels, engagement levels, support metrics, and sales metricsrecreation of dashboard for account health that measures overall health & trends, usage levels, engagement levels, support metrics, and sales metrics

Integrated solutions and data

Through DTM, we leverage a complex mixture of products and solutions from multiple vendors, but the ultimate goal is to simplify data integration and usage both for Talend and other companies interested in executing a similar initiative.  

Specifically, we’re using Snowflake as a single source of truth and funneling the data back into operational systems such as Gainsight via pipelines we created with Pipeline Designer (our lightweight, cloud-native data integration tool).

Talend ingests and integrates data from disparate sources into Snowflake. Once data has landed, a variety of teams collaborate within Talend’s comprehensive platform to leverage that data in many ways. For example, a group of customer success architects has been hard at work alongside our IT department. While our data engineer was technical and used Talend Studio to create the most complex and data-intensive pipelines, the customer success architects used Talend Pipeline Designer to build simpler data pipelines on their own, in a self-service manner. This allows for the creation of KPIs that fulfill the needs of our business users.

The DTM initiative also integrates data from third-party platforms such as Salesforce and ServiceNow. Together, these solutions have made it possible to ensure the KPIs are meaningful and that each customer gets the assistance they need, when they need it.

Now and next: the status of DTM

Today the core capabilities of the DTM initiative are live: lifecycle communications with customer surveys, onboarding and adoption behavior rules for digital customers, automated group onboarding, actionable early phase customer health assessment measures, automated milestone measurements, and much more.

Initially, the DTM project was aimed at our digital customers — but halfway through, we recognized that DTM’s benefits should be extended to include all customers.

The broader service capabilities and more engaged customer base enabled by the DTM initiative translates to greater loyalty and growth for Talend, lower TCO and maintenance costs, and the ability to showcase our platform and its capabilities. For customers, an integrated digital lifecycle engagement experience means better support every step of the way — from initial contact with Talend and onboarding to product deployment and ongoing support services.

Learn more — and take digital transformation up a level

The DTM initiative is just one example of how companies can use data integration to create an integrated, transformative customer experience, but we’ve got more — and great ideas should be shared. Contact us for additional details about DTM, or to discuss other ideas about taking digital transformation to a higher level.