Spreadsheet data plays an essential role in the skills management industry. Many companies initially manage their skills using Excel, but as these companies grow in employee count, offer more training, or need to comply with regulations, they require a professional solution to manage this increasing complexity. That’s where AG5’s skills management software comes in. AG5 provides clear, concise, and audit-proof skills matrices that make workforce management easy and convenient.
However, for AG5 to onboard its clients around the globe, it must first migrate the diverse spreadsheet data that its clients previously used. This was a heavy lift for both the customer-facing teams and the development team.
“We used to perform a lot of custom imports to onboard our customers’ data. With the implementation of nuvo, we don't need to do them anymore,” says Koen Bleijenberg, Software Engineer at AG5, with a smile.
Let’s explore how they achieved it.
Before adopting AG5's skills management software, each new client had their own unique system for managing skills. These systems often involved complex matrix structures and color-coded formats, necessitating customization by AG5 before integration.
To onboard these complex client files into AG5’s system, they had set up a two-step process. AG5 invested in training their customer onboarding team to proficiently use Power Query, which allowed them to pre-process these files before passing them to the development team. Nevertheless, even with the pre-processing, the development team still needed to perform a custom import for each client's data set.
Additionally, this process often faced challenges due to poor data quality, leading to extensive back-and-forth between the customer-facing teams and the developers to resolve issues of missing or incorrect data.
The data onboarding significantly impacted the overall onboarding process. AG5 typically told new customers that onboarding simple files would take around five working days, while more complex ones could take up to ten days. “Even maintaining that timeline was difficult due to the extensive manual effort required to onboard these files,” Wais Pirzad, VP of Customer Success at AG5, acknowledges the difficulties.
As AG5 continued to grow, regularly adding multiple new clients each week, the backlog of data imports became increasingly problematic, tying up significant resources from both the customer-facing and development teams. It became clear that resolving the bottleneck in data imports was essential to sustain efficient operations and accommodate the company's expanding client base.
In software projects, a common dilemma is whether to build a solution in-house or to buy an external one. For Koen Bleijenberg, the decision was straightforward. "Building an importer in-house was not an option for us. It would simply take too much time, and we'd end up with another tool to maintain," he explains.
When the development team began assessing data importers available on the market, they encountered a significant concern: many solutions required data to be processed through external servers, which was not acceptable to them. They were pleased to discover nuvo's unique front-end processing architecture, which allows all sensitive data to remain within the browser throughout the import process.
The team was also impressed by the flexibility of nuvo's Data Importer SDK. Its ability to handle a wide variety of data formats and structures, along with automating complex data transformations, really stood out. This ensures that client data is accurately mapped, validated, and cleaned – eliminating the need for manual work. Additionally, the team valued nuvo's intuitive user interface, recognizing its potential for enabling customer self-service imports for certain functions in the future.
Another key factor was nuvo’s exceptional customer support. The high level of responsiveness and clear communication greatly influenced their choice to partner with nuvo.
Implementing nuvo has brought significant advantages, particularly in handling global rollouts for AG5's enterprise clients with ease. Before nuvo, onboarding an enterprise client with 25 locations worldwide would have been a data-handling nightmare. Wais Pirzad, VP of Customer Success at AG5, highlights the impact on their growth: “With nuvo, we've gained the confidence to discuss global rollouts with our enterprise clients in a timely manner.”
A notable improvement is in the efficiency of the team. Previously, processing and creating an import script for a single file took a full day. Now, with nuvo, the data onboarding time has been cut by 50%. More importantly, the customer-facing teams have gained autonomy. “We used to be heavily dependent on the development team for importing customer data. Now, we can manage them independently!” exclaims Wais Pirzad, VP of Customer Success.
He further adds, “Data imports are no longer a bottleneck. They no longer block internal resources or delay the onboarding of customers.” This efficiency has translated into tangible benefits for both the teams and the clients. The customer onboarding and success teams can now communicate significantly shorter data onboarding times, which allows them to concentrate more on value-added services and enhancing client experience. As for the development team, they are relieved to have left the task of writing custom scripts for data imports behind.
Do you receive complex data from your customers? Book a call with our team and let’s find out how AI-powered data mapping and cleaning can streamline your data onboarding operations.
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