Rakuten Ready Rallies Around the Customer

The business operations data team at Rakuten Ready was strapped. The entire organization, from customer success to product teams, depended on three analysts to support their data requests. They were working with Excel to analyze and create visualizations for internal use, but the volume of data, and data requests, was overwhelming the capabilities of the spreadsheet tool.

Lily Wu, an analyst on the biz ops data team, explains, “You can’t create datasets with millions of rows in Excel, so you don’t have all the data you need for a visualization, and it runs really slow.“

The customer success team was also struggling to wrangle and format raw Excel spreadsheets to pass along to their clients. They needed a better, more efficient way to showcase product value and create better customer experiences with data.

Analysts used Mode's advanced analytics capabilities to build parameterized reports and visualizations with live data. The customer success team then used the intuitive drag-and-drop interface to delve deeper or highlight specific insights for their customers.

Mode’s all-in-one-platform served the dual needs of analysts and domain experts in the organization. Mode’s familiarity and cloud-based architecture made it simple for analysts to get up and running quickly to build reports and report templates that the customer success team could use over and over again. Rakuten’s analysts loved that Mode was SQL-first; they were able to jump right in.

Meanwhile, Mode’s drag-and-drop capabilities, such as the Explorations feature, made it easy for the customer success team to understand the data, drill down in reports, and create their own dashboards.

Since their migration to Helix, Mode’s instant in-memory data engine, Rakuten Ready has taken advantage of added flexibility and extensibility. Because Helix is able to process very large datasets quickly, the data team can create all-encompassing reports and datasets, and then repurpose them simply by using parameters and filters, which saves a great deal of time. Says Hasham, “You just write the code once and reuse it for whatever you need. Lily has created a standard template and report and now the customer success team only has to manage 1 link, rather than 20 links for 20 clients.”

Implementing Mode and taking advantage of the Helix data engine has enabled a stronger partnership between business operations and customer success. Not only has the data collaboration between these two groups improved the customers experience for Rakuten clients, but analysts and customer success managers are also working much more efficiently.

Hasham says, “Pre-Helix, our biz opps analyst, Lily, was the go-to person to create individual reports for every client. Now, Steven, our Head of Customer Success, is able to pull the data himself, come up with different iterations, and get what he needs. That’s helping tremendously.”

The collaborative analytics process made possible by Mode has worked so well in customer success that Hasham plans to roll out similar processes across the company. “The long-term approach is that the business operations team will start creating datasets that will allow everyone to become a bit more independent at their own reporting.”

This data independence will allow all teams across Rakuten Ready to make better, faster decisions.