Companies leverage actionable insights to make informed business decisions. In fact, actionable data insights enable companies to take action and drive value.
But in order to garner actionable insights and generate value, one has to carefully extract, transform, and load complex customer data, which is indeed a challenge.
It requires the full-time support of data engineers to develop and maintain the scripts to keep the data flowing. That’s both time-consuming and error-prone. Every time there’s a change in schemas or APIs, the engineers have to update the scripts to accommodate them, which results in downtime and operational overheads. The step of implementing source-to-target data mappings to drive data transformation presents another challenge. Problems like missing information and duplicate data become common. Incorrect data mappings ultimately risk companies’ ability to deliver actionable insights and make decisions, leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue.
Many such problems can be solved using self-service. That is to say, companies can transform the way they extract, transform, and load customer data through self-service. But how exactly self-service ETL does that? How does it add value to businesses?
Three Ways Self-service ETL Can Add Value
Self-service-powered ETL technology enables non-technical business users to extract, transform, and load complex, bi-directional customer data streams easily, quickly, and securely. Companies, as a result, can garner actionable insights which can be used in making better decisions.
For a better understanding, let’s understand how self-service ETL solutions add value to businesses.
1. Empower Non-Technical Business Users: Self-service ETL technology enables non-technical business users to run the ETL processes – at speed and scale. So, non-techie business users can extract, transform, and load data without needing IT to write custom scripts or perform extensive EDI mappings. At the same time, IT becomes free to focus on more high-value tasks.
2. Speed Up Onboarding by 80 Percent: Self-service-powered solutions enable non-technical business users to onboard customer data by up to 80 percent faster. In other words, users can point and click through easy screens to implement onboarding connections in minutes instead of months of calendar time. Next, users can perform related data integration steps much more quickly. Because users can create robust connections with customers sooner, they can address their needs and deliver the value promised to those customers without delay. That fuels customer delight and satisfaction. Such happy customers are more likely to buy more products or services from the company, creating new revenue streams for the business.
3. Free Up IT Headcount: When business users implement new business connections, IT users become free to take up the governance role and focus on other priority business projects. This means that the backlog of projects can be reduced and IT workers also have less risk of facing burnout because they will be working on more interesting projects instead of tedious and time-consuming onboarding.
Self-service ETL solutions play an important role in bringing non-technical users to the business forefront and reassigning IT to drive more strategic tasks. Users can connect with customers, analyze their data streams, and garner actionable insights quickly and securely. The actionable insights can be leveraged to make informed business decisions. Ultimately, companies can improve their ease of doing business and grow new revenue streams. Overall, self-service ETL solutions enable companies to make effective decisions, deliver the value promised to customers, and accelerate revenue growth.