Enhancing The Customer Experience with a Modern Data Stack – Drata

Before:

A Need for Scalable and Efficient Data Structures

The hyper-growth compliance automation company had recently achieved unicorn status and was moving at the speed of light. They wanted to build an end-to-end data program, including a cutting-edge modern data stack and a multi-disciplinary in-house data team.

Drata also has a 5-star satisfaction rating and wanted to maintain its excellent reputation throughout its growth. They wanted to dive into demand generation to help optimize spending and reduce customer acquisition costs.

Solution:

Building a Robust Data Infrastructure and Visualizing Key Metrics

Data Clymer, a Spaulding Ridge company, joined Drata as a data and analytics consultant. When we began working with the organization, the key priorities were centered on building a data stack, integrating data across various applications, and streamlining processes within Drata’s data architecture.

The data architecture was designed to use self-managed tools that wouldn’t require extensive infrastructure management. This enabled the fast-growing startup to prioritize speed and business enablement while also maintaining a high level of data security and compliance.

We identified data sources, designed the data pipelines, and ingested the data into Snowflake. Using Sigma as its visualization tool, the team built a customer engagement dashboard that provides a visual representation of KPIs like product usage metrics, customer feedback, and customer satisfaction scores.

We connected all marketing campaign data, modeled it with dbt, and built a dashboard in Sigma. For the first time, Drata’s marketers could see valuable insights beyond overall campaign performance. For example, they could see what types of customers different campaigns acquired and how they impacted the sales pipeline. They could also measure the full sales pipeline through each stage of the sales lifecycle, from demo to lead to qualified lead to closed/won.

The leadership team can now compare targets versus actuals and use the insights to make timely, informed decisions about hiring, spending, and business operations.

To help customers see compliance improvements, we developed a model for historical compliance scores directly within Snowflake. Now, Drata can demonstrate their value to customers and prospects by showing measurable compliance improvements.

We engaged in design decisions, documentation, data modeling, and rollout. The team did everything from drawing the data architecture and developing core data models to building continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows and deploying dbt.

Areas of focus included:

• Data Modeling: Drata has thousands of databases delivering data on a daily basis. We had the deep dbt expertise required to optimize all those daily jobs and unify all that data in one model.
• Data Governance: Drata wanted to have a strong governance on the platform with a clear understanding of accessibility and roles. We helped build the model so CSMs and other employees could access data in a very secure, governed way.
• Documentation: We helped gather information and document everything so that when everyone came back to the data room, they knew what to focus on and the best way to roll it out.

Overall, Drata’s new modern data stack includes:

• Snowflake Cloud Data Platform
• Fivetran to extract and load the data
• dbt for data transformation
• Census for reverse ETL and data activation
• Sigma Computing for business intelligence (BI) analytics and visualizations
• Monte Carlo for data observability