Data Importing Doesn't Have to Be a Hassle

Data management has never been such an important aspect of business as it is today. To maintain a strong market presence, businesses need to ensure that

• Customers and their data should be onboarded fast, otherwise, you’re blocking your internal resources and making your customers wait. 
• Product and tech teams can focus on pushing the core business forward so that new customers choose you over your competition.
• Your existing customers are happy with your product offering and you’re preventing churn.

In this post, we’ll discuss the biggest challenges businesses face when importing data. We’ll also showcase a few solutions to these issues.

What does complex data look like?

The complexity of data onboarding comes in many shapes and forms. If you’re onboarding customers’ data, how can you transform it into a format that your system requires? What if you have many vendors, each of whom has a different file format and structure? How can you handle this unpredictable data?

Also, how complex are those sheets? Do you have sub-headers and hundreds of thousands of lines? If you want your customers to adhere to your schema, how long does it take for you to onboard them? Weeks, months? Why not enable them to onboard faster?

Let’s look at one of nuvo’s customers, Lano, a SaaS platform for 2000+ companies in 170+ countries that onboards and pays a global workforce via their EOR and payroll solutions. Their work requires them to consolidate varying and sensitive data, each with unique formats and processes depending on the client.

Here’s an example of a sheet with a very complex structure, and all the data is in French. We’re talking about thousands of sheets like this that they need to incorporate into their database.

‍

‍

Working with numerous sheets similar to this one that must be consolidated into a single database is not an easy task, and it took Lano hours of manual labor to ensure the high quality of data.

Traditional ways to solve data onboarding issues

As the company grows, the data piles up, and the format becomes even more diverse, making the whole data handling process complex.

Sometimes, product teams develop procedures or create data importing templates, all of which require extensive manual work.

This usually leads to hiring more people to do the procedure faster, which results in spending money on expanding the team. Soon, everyone realizes that this is a very time-consuming problem that isn’t going to be resolved smoothly, and in the case of onboarding customer data, time is of the essence.

‍

‍

Often, the tech team jumps on making custom scripts or building a custom data importer. However, that tool must be updated with every new use case, or is a headache to maintain overall. Instead of working on new features, developers spend hours improving the importer they’ve built.

Even though one team alleviates some pressure, it gets passed on to another team. The issue just jumps from one department to another, affecting the business nevertheless.

Here’s how poor data importing and onboarding practices impact an average business:

Sales team → Has issues selling the product because of the high switching costs for the customer. Cannot onboard new people fast enough.

Tech team → Too much maintenance work on internal tooling takes over their roadmap, and they can’t add new features to increase the product value and keep up with competitors.

Customer success → The time-to-value is high, and there’s a lot of back-and-forth during the onboarding process. Data onboarding is cumbersome for both the company and the customer.

Customer support → It handles a high load of complaints because of faulty data imports and customer satisfaction scores drop.

Over time, the business loses its agility, wastes human-hours on manual work, and reduces the speed of innovation.

Modern solutions to data onboarding issues - meet nuvo

Automation is the key to solving the issues of everyone involved in this data onboarding process. With nuvo, you’re benefiting from the latest achievements in the machine learning domain. Our AI algorithms will be there to save your time and help with data mapping, validation, and cleaning.

Let’s look at this tool from a Customer Success/Support point of view. Instead of talking to customers and getting all these different sheets from them, how about having a client portal where they could upload these sheets themselves?

Don’t waste your resources ensuring that the data is valid, make sure that the data you get is already validated and cleaned.

‍

From the Product Manager or CTO standpoint, you’re offloading your tech team. Introduce them to an AI importer that automatically handles all the mapping, cleaning, and complex logic. Don’t customize your in-house importer every time, let nuvo’s Importer SDK do all the heavy lifting for you. Focus on your product and building features you want to offer to your users.

Unpredictable and complex data imports will never again be a headache for your business or your team. With nuvo’s Importer SDK, you can be sure that:

• You’ll be onboarding complex data with the speed of light and with maximum accuracy. No more tedious manual formatting.
• The AI part gets to understand your needs after the first import, and subsequently reduces the amount of manual labor to just a few clicks.
• nuvo is easy to use and implement, and we offer direct tech support to your developers.
• Your data is safe and secure. No sensitive data passes through nuvo’s servers. The imported data is managed in the browser on the end-user side until the import process is completed.

Summary

You need to have a flexible process that can handle different types of data, with different structures, which you need to map, validate, and clean in accordance with the internal data system that you have.

To find out how to achieve this book a call with us and check out what nuvo has to offer.