Bold Penguin cuts support response times by 98% with Fivetran and Census

“We rely on Fivetran to get our data into the warehouse. Census fits like a glove on the other end of the flow.”
— Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management at Bold Penguin

Bold Penguin is an insurtech company supporting commercial insurance carriers and agents. They offer a quoting platform paired with a commercial insurance exchange that helps agents match businesses with “the right quote in record time.”

At Bold Penguin, the Business Intelligence (BI) unit supports teams like marketing and customer success by getting them the data they need to operate effectively. As the organization grew, it needed efficient ways to move and manipulate data. The company, which aims to reduce friction in procuring commercial insurance, was experiencing significant friction with making its data accessible to the teams who needed it.

The challenge: Building a resilient data pipeline

Bold Penguin’s BI team was spending too much time maintaining tooling to move data out of its warehouse. Changes happened frequently on both warehouse and operational tools, so the team frequently needed to update configuration on both sides of the flow.

This left the team with some challenges:

• Maintaining custom scripts was cumbersome and diverting precious BI analyst resources from other projects.
• Business users frequently had to request updates to get the latest metrics in their tool of choice.
• Inefficient data processes — such as manually tagging customer segments in Intercom — slowed teams down.

Why Bold Penguin chose Census (a Fivetran company)

Easy implementation

Bold Penguin’s BI team needed to get rolling without a big implementation project. They found that Census was easy enough to set up that they could do it themselves — quickly.

“If you are comfortable writing SQL, you’re up and running the same day [with Census],” says Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management at Bold Penguin.

Accessible for teams outside of BI

It was important to the BI team that other groups be able to access data and set up new connections themselves. They’d seen requests to the team become a bottleneck and wanted data access to be as self-serve as possible.

JustWorks™

Bold Penguin values Census’ ease of use and reliability, especially since they are trusting Census to sync business-critical data to teams who depend on it. “We've asked for a couple of feature enhancements here and there, but it just works with almost no support,” Bloedorn adds.

Fair pricing for mid-sized companies

The pricing for other tools didn’t work for a mid-sized company like Bold Penguin. They weren’t quite big enough for enterprise pricing to make sense, rather needing more seats and connectors than were available with non-enterprise plans.

The solution: Data activation powers proactive customer engagement

Creating timely alerts for sales and customer success

When a client doesn’t get a perfect outcome on the Bold Penguin platform, the customer success and sales teams need to act quickly.

Before using Census, the sales team relied on a weekly report from Stripe to find out about a subscription renewal issue or incomplete invoice. Bold Penguin’s Product team can now set up live operational alerts in Slack based on logs in the data warehouse. When a payment fails, account managers automatically receive a Slack notification so they can follow up and resolve the issue.

It wasn’t just the sales team that benefited; customer success also gets an alert for Agent Terminal errors. By finding and resolving issues in near-real time, Bold Penguin can ensure top-notch customer satisfaction.

Targeting marketing campaigns for different verticals

Bold Penguin serves clients across many different verticals — the audience for cyber insurance isn’t the same as commercial auto. By syncing product usage and partner data to enrich user profiles, they can create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific types of clients.

Segmenting users based on product usage

Pulling together product usage data from both its insurance quoting platform and its insurance exchange, Bold Penguin can segment users based on their level of activity and the type of business they’re doing. Feeding those insights to Intercom allows the team to send more relevant content and messaging to users. Bloedorn explains, "You can go into our Intercom instance and say ‘for people with this level of activity, let's send this content. And people below that threshold are going to get different content. Census enables us to easily vary content across a variety of factors.”

The outcomes: Better customer support, self-serve insights, and automated segmentation

Cut support times from 24 hours to 30 minutes

As Bold Penguin scaled its Agent Terminal platform, getting accurate data to customer success quickly became critical. Some issues could take up to 24 hours to resolve, and much of that time was spent not having the right data, in the right hands, at the right time. With operational Slack alerts to team members, Bold Penguin has cut that response time to just 30 minutes — a 98% reduction.

“[With Census], we’ve seen our ratio of support cases to customer drop, and our average response time drop pretty substantially.”
— Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management at Bold Penguin

Reduced time to insight and more accessible data

Business users can now set up their own data activations, feeding data from the warehouse into their tools. With self-serve data, they no longer need to wait for someone to build them a pipeline, reducing the time before they can take action on that data. With Census, business users can adapt their processes to new data sets on the fly.

“We’ve been able to train folks who traditionally would write out a request form, send it to the BI team, and wait a few days to get their data. Now we’ve got analysts outside of the BI team, folks who aren’t comfortable writing code or merging changes into our BI repo, that can set up their own connections to feed their operations tools out of our warehouse.”
— Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management at Bold Penguin

Fully automated user segmentation for marketing

With user segmentation done automatically using SQL, there’s no more tedious manual data entry or cleanup. The marketing team is freed up to focus on campaigns, not tagging customer records in a CRM.

“People were manually marking hundreds of customers as Group A, Group B, etc. Those customers are now tagged as their behavior changes and automatically segmented. No one has to touch anything. That’s been a huge time saver for us.”
— Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management at Bold Penguin

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