Aircall streamlines data integration and reduces costs by switching to RudderStack

Highlights

• Efficiently migrated to RudderStack from previous CDP thanks to excellent support and API compatibility
• Used RudderStack Event Stream to seamlessly collect event data from web, mobile, and server-side sources and route it to their entire customer data stack, including their Amazon Redshift data warehouse
• Improved data tracking and analysis capabilities, enabling data-driven decision-making across product, sales, and customer support
• Simplified and streamlined data integration, reducing the time to implement new events from two months to just one week

Overview

Aircall is the business communication and engagement platform for sales and customer support teams. As an entirely cloud-based voice solution, Aircall helps scaling businesses drive productivity and turn customer and employee satisfaction into key growth drivers. The company integrates with a wide range of CRMs and critical business tools, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom, Slack, Zendesk, and Gong, to streamline workflows and enhance customer interactions.

Challenge: Rising costs and limited customization with previous CDP

Aircall relied on their previous CDP to collect and manage event data from various sources to understand user behavior and make data-driven decisions. The product analytics team uses customer data to understand feature adoption and stickiness, assess funnel completion, and ultimately inform product development. Customer-facing teams use the data to enrich tools like Salesforce and Totango, providing sales and customer success with valuable information to drive more meaningful conversations with leads and customers.

When their prior CDP provider announced a new pricing plan that significantly increased annual fees, Aircall decided to explore alternative solutions that could offer similar or better functionality at a more competitive price point. In truth, it was a welcome catalyst because their prior CDP was limiting Aircall’s ability to turn their customer data into competitive advantage. It had limited customization options and lacked important compliance and altering features.

With a growing need for efficient data utilization across their organization, Aircall sought a more flexible and feature-rich CDP solution. They needed a cost-effective solution to meet evolving requirements and enable product, customer success, and sales teams to easily leverage customer data to make better decisions and work more efficiently.

Solution: Migrating to RudderStack unlocks enhanced capabilities and reduces costs

To help with their CDP evaluation process, Aircall developed a comprehensive set of criteria to assess each potential solution. The requirements included user identification, compliance with data regulations, value-added features, cost-effectiveness, ease of use, and customer support.

After evaluating several platforms, Aircall chose RudderStack. “We looked at many tools but narrowed it down to Snowplow, Rudderstack, and our prior CDP. Putting even pricing aside, RudderStack came out on top.” RudderStack met all of Aircall's requirements and offered additional benefits such as data transformations and better tracking capabilities, making it the clear choice for Aircall.

“RudderStack ticked all the boxes. The massive box that it ticked was how easy it was to migrate from our prior CDP to RudderStack.”

One key factor that separated RudderStack from the competition was their willingness to develop custom features tailored to Aircall's needs. Louis Herr-Fender highlighted this: “An integration statismeter didn't exist in RudderStack, but their team told us, 'We can develop it and deliver the feature before you launch.' And they did. It showed us that the RudderStack team would be easier to collaborate with and implement features tailored to our needs.” This commitment to understanding and addressing Aircall's unique requirements demonstrated RudderStack's customer-centric approach and played a significant role in Aircall's decision to switch.

The migration process from their previous CDP to RudderStack was remarkably smooth, thanks to RudderStack’s API compatibility and the exceptional support provided by the RudderStack team. For Aircall's engineering team, migrating to RudderStack was as simple as changing a URL. The setup process was easy, with tables, columns, and naming conventions closely matching those in their previous CDP. Aircall was able to migrate their old tables to new ones using a simple Python script, completing the entire migration in one swift move.

Aircall fully migrated to RudderStack in one month, but the total working time spent was only three days. The software engineering team spent six hours, while the data team invested nine hours.

"Migrating to Rudderstack was a no-brainer. We found it to be the better tool, it was cheaper, and the migration was so easy,” said Louis.

Results: Improved ease of use and reduced event implementation time

Since migrating to RudderStack, Aircall has simplified first-party data collection from and significantly reduced the data team’s reliance on software engineering for event instrumentation. Before RudderStack, it took the Aircall team up to two months to set up a new server-side event. Now, they can do it within one week. RudderStack allows them to capture standardized data from every source with a single SDK and send it to their entire stack in real time. Plus, Aircall’s data team uses RudderStack’s Transformations feature to modify and enrich payloads in flight.

With RudderStack’s powerful tools and enhanced ease of use, Aircall is now able to capture more data to build a deeper understanding of their customers. Their product team can now identify where users abandon funnels and determine how sticky different features are. Aircall is also able to enrich the tools their customer-facing teams use, like Salesforce and Totango (a customer success tool), with key information around feature adoption. These teams use the data to drive more effective conversations, enhance onboarding, increase customer satisfaction, and move leads through the pipeline to final sale.

“For example, our CSMs can detect when a customer starts leveraging SMS; that’s an interesting conversation we can now have with the customer to understand if we can expand their usage of Aircall. Or, the sales team might see that an interesting lead has started installing an integration - which is quite important in our product - but did not complete it. By having this information, our sales team can contact the lead to understand what went wrong and help them through the process,” said Louis.

“All of this is now possible because we have event tracking through RudderStack.”

Looking ahead: Expanding event tracking and exploring new features

As Aircall continues to grow and evolve, they plan to explore new ways to leverage RudderStack. Simplifying and streamlining data collection and integration while ensuring data quality was step one. Moving forward, Aircall plans to explore RudderStack’s data activation capabilities to turn their warehouse data into competitive advantage. With RudderStack, Aircall is building a solid data foundation that positions them to power use cases for every team and continue driving productivity, customer satisfaction, and growth.

Aircall Data Stack

Destinations: Amazon Kinesis, Google Tag Manager, SatisMeter, Gainsight
Sources: Android, iOS, Javascript, Node
Data Cloud: Amazon Redshift