Feature
A San Francisco-based customer data platform startup wants to help organizations measure customer experience beyond websites and mobile apps.
The company, Segment, just released today a tool called Sources, which allows users to load data from a variety of systems including CRM, email and payments.
Specifically, it integrates Segment's platform with Salesforce, Zendesk, Stripe, SendGrid, MailChimp, Mandrill, Intercom, HubSpot and Twilio straight into Amazon Redshift or PostgreSQL without writing a line of code. Officials promised future integrations with Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Postgres, MySQL and more.
"Until now we've offered a valuable but narrow data set," said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of three-year-old, 80-employee Segment.
"We offered website and mobile app data but now you can expand to all other assets of the customer experience: CRM, email service providers, payment systems. We want to pull data in from all other customer touch points and put into the data warehouse so you can get a look at the complete customer experience."
All in Numbers
Reinhardt founded the company with college buddies Ilya Volodarsky and Calvin French-Owen. Ian Storm Taylor also co-founded. For each of them, Segment is their first major professional gig, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Here's the scoop on their company:
- Founded in December of 2012 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
- 25 hires in the first quarter of this year. 80 employees now
- 11,000 engineers, analysts and marketers using the product at 7,000 companies. A year ago, Segment had 2,000 to 3,000 customers
- 200 technology partners
- 25 billion user interactions a month sent to 50,000 different tool connections
The company is capitalizing on the growing need for customer data management platforms. TrustRadius highlighted the growth of such platforms last year through increased funding.
Segment itself has raised investor capital in two rounds: $15 million in a Series A in October 2014 and $27 million in a Series B in October 2015.
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"You can collect data on customers and route it wherever it's needed," Reinhardt told CMSWire. "Blending that data (by yourself) is super hard, messy and unreliable. The alternative to Segment is building your own data collection pipeline. Most companies have an internal team building assets. It's a data engineering team, and that is not a valuable use of that team's time. We can free them up to build things on top of the data, to build better experiences on top of that data."
Inside Sources
With Segment Sources, customers can go beyond the limitations of particular tool’s dashboards with data in a flexible SQL format, company officials promised.
They can also:
- Combine this data with traditional analytics data from websites, mobile apps and servers
- Retrieve a list of interactions with marketing, sales and support for a particular customer in a single query
- Learn how interactions with support affect customer activation and conversion
Segment manages the entire infrastructure so customers don't have to support the code to move all its data.
"You can't do anything with sales data stuck in Salesforce," Reinhardt said. "We're un-siloing all this data for a 360-degree view of the customer."
