Redbooth

Increasing productivity through collaborative financial software.

Their technical team was delivering features at a great pace, but as their customer base grew, so did the needs of every other part of the business, including sales and customer support. At this point, they had a growing backlog of internal projects that were crucial for the other teams to catch up with the rapid growth.

Together with the client's technical leadership, we agreed on the right architecture and began working. Over the course of the project, we delivered four key integrations.

Redbooth is an ambitious communication and collaboration platform. Targeting businesses of all sizes, they offer a comprehensive solution for teams ranging from project management to collaboration and videoconferencing.

On one hand, the sales team being slowed down by unreliable data —after we fixed the integration with Salesforce and improved on it, they got back on track. On the other, the customer support team were struggling with unreliable data too, and lacking a lot of context when dealing with requests. We integrated their platform, Zendesk, with existing customer data to provide a comprehensive picture whenever a request came in, helping improve both quality and speed of their operations.

Redbooth
  • Productivity
  • Collaboration
San Francisco, USA
  • Data Engineering
  • Software Architecture
  • Development

We established a business metrics system to support the product department.

We also tackled some user experience issues with payments and invoicing, migrating all paying customers to the new pricing structure on a completely new platform, with zero downtime. By doing that, we were able to improve the way end users accessed their invoice data and connect it to the CRM for the sales team to analyze.

Finally, we set up a data pipeline for business metrics, which enabled product owners to make better decisions on a complex and growing product, before handing over the project with excellent documentation and technical talks delivered to the existing developer team.

Thanks to the success of their product and their expansion to the vibrant US market through San Francisco, Redbooth was growing by leaps and bounds. Customers were demanding new features, and their development team was delivering them as fast as they possibly could.

Having disconnected data is normal at an early stage startup — having a few manual processes and relying on vision and gut feeling for developing a good product is often enough. However, when you start growing, the real challenges begin.

The sales team had unreliable data from a faulty integration with Salesforce —having to periodically cross-check with other sources, which was a major slowdown. Whenever a support ticket was filed, the customer support team had to spend precious time chasing down customer data to get enough context to fulfill the request. On top of this, an old payment system was preventing from switching to a new pricing structure and integrating a lot of financial data with the other parts of the company.

But all this disconnected data affected the product team too —without detailed business metrics, understanding how users were using the product and the impact of certain features had become a lot harder over time.

The pains of growth

After we fully migrated all paying customers over to Chargify with zero downtime, the new structure was live and customers were delighted.

After discussing with the CTO which architectural choices were better suited for the needs they had, we began by establishing a business metrics system to support the product department.

Tackling the data integrations was the next priority. We enhancing a faulty Zendesk integration and brought in customer data from their CRM, so that every support ticket had the necessary context to be dispatched more quickly and effectively.

Then we realized that their old payment system was holding them back from rolling out their new pricing structure, and at the same time it made it hard for their customers to access their own invoices. After we fully migrated all paying customers over to Chargify with zero downtime, the new structure was live and customers were delighted. Additionally it made it easier for us to integrate the newly available financial data with the CRM for the sales department —they were happy to get an even richer picture of their paying customers.

Along the way, whenever we needed to refactor or adapt part of the original codebase to improve integrations, working with their team was frictionless, thanks to the fact that there was a good alignment in terms of development methodology. Occasionally, we would review their code and share some best practices.

To ensure a smooth hand-over, not only we delivered comprehensive technical documentation, but also technical talks to their team, walking them through the architecture of the new systems and their extensibility points.

Supporting each and every department

With all these data integrations and support tools complete, every department was much better equipped to deal with the growth of their customer base.

The product team got better insights into how features are being used, the sales team was operating more smoothly and with a lot more data to support them, and the customer support team could attend more requests, with richer context.

And most importantly, happy users continue to be the driver of sustained growth at Redbooth.

A metrics-driven business with an extraordinary growth

With all these data integrations and support tools complete, every department was much better equipped to deal with the growth of their customer base.

Each department became more productive and effective thanks to the new reliable integrations and business metrics system, having a multiplying effect in Redbooth's ability to scale as a business.