Healthcare Staffing Company saves $1M in marketing spend with Hightouch, Snowflake, and Fivetran

The Results

• Over $1M saved annually in marketing spend
• $520,000 per year in cost savings
• 360% YOY growth between 2020 and 2021
• Engineering time reduced from weeks to days
• Controlled experiments per year increased from ~6 to 50+
• Increased new nurse retention rate by 70%
• Reduced canceled shifts from new nurses by 25%
• Prevented COVID-19 transmission among nurses and patients
• Eliminated CSV files

The Challenge

• Improving query performance, establishing a single source of truth, and unlocking data access
• Delivering personalized experiences to thousands of users to drive engagement and ongoing satisfaction
• Building a data stack that could meet the elastic and growing requirements of various business teams
• Optimizing facility/nurse matching based on changing demands and covid symptoms

The first five to ten shifts for a new customer are extremely important. A single bad experience can result in losing a customer indefinitely. Since the availability and market demand of nurses are constantly changing, prices and shifts need to update in real-time within the app. Through Covid, data accuracy was paramount.

The Solution

Snowflake

With a decentralized data stack built on top of various MySQL databases, the data team was struggling with analytics performance. A single query could create production-level incidents or even bring down the company’s reporting tool.

They needed a centralized platform to consolidate all of its disparate data sources into a single location. In search of a scalable solution that could meet the company's needs, the team implemented Snowflake.

With Snowflake, the data team is no longer at risk of damaging application databases and the analytics team can run large queries without butting heads against the engineering team. Snowflake saves the engineers countless maintenance hours–which translates into an estimated $520,000 in cost savings annually.

Using dbt with Snowflake, the engineers have also been able to create an analytics backend that is searchable, tested, thoroughly documented, and obeys a strict set of naming conventions so that data is easy for end users to find and understand. Every dashboard and algorithm goes through the dbt curated tables so that data-quality issues are monitored and easy to remediate.

The fact that all of this data is readily available in Snowflake, means that the company can generate optimal prices and shifts based on changing market dynamics in real-time and this is only possible with Snowflake.

Fivetran

However, there are some datasets that are really tricky due to third-party API constraints. Rather than spending countless hours trying to figure out how to pipe this data into Snowflake, the team uses Fivetran’s fully managed connectors to ingest data from Marketo, Pendo, and SurveyMonkey.

Fivetran not only saves the engineers months of engineering time but it also makes it easy for the data team to join various tables and datasets together. With Fivetran, the data can scale as needed every time the company adds a new data source.

Hightouch

With so much detailed customer data now available in Snowflake, the business teams wanted to activate that data in downstream business tools, build personalized experiences, and mitigate the risk of Covid for both nurses and facilities. Sending data downstream, however, was challenging, and building Reverse ETL pipelines was no easy feat.

Before Hightouch, every time the marketing team had a question, they had to request a manual CSV file. Sending personalized emails in Marketo was basically impossible and retargeting users in ad platforms was a nightmare. Using Hightouch Audiences, a visual segmentation builder, the business teams are able to self-serve and build/manage cohorts in a non-technical way.

The app is the lifeblood of the business, so building personalized experiences for each individual is key to keeping users on the app. Using Hightouch to power popups and surveys has helped to increase controlled experiments by 700 percent and encourage more nurses to complete shifts.

The company also uses Hightouch to power real-time Slack notifications to notify channel members so they can intervene faster.

Hightouch has eliminated the manual process of uploading CSVs to Salesforce. Hightouch also allows the company to get the most out of their predictive algorithms. The data team maintains models for predicting customer lifetime value, cancellation events, churn likelihood, and local demand and supply metrics.

What’s Next?

The company is always working to improve and maintain their data infrastructure. The past year has paved the way for some huge improvements, but there’s always more to do. Thanks to Hightouch, Snowflake, and Fivetran, this healthcare company is able to surface more insights, and the company has many green-field projects slotted to mitigate clinical risk, optimize shift-related marketing, and make it easier for nurses to find shifts that match their interest.