Marchex Expands Connectivity across Data Systems Using Nexla
About Marchex
Marchex, Inc. (Marchex) is a conversation analytics company that delivers sales insights by analyzing business-customer interaction data using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Integrations between client databases, CRM tools, and all other endpoint entities are the building blocks of Marchex’s seamless analytics process. As Marchex expands its service offerings, it relies on Nexla to implement a data fabric wherein data is accessible and flows between internal and external systems without interruptions.
The Challenge
Integrating data from diverse sources such as databases and verticalized CRMs is critical to customer acquisition and strategic expansion at Marchex. Prioritizing resources to support all of these in-house ongoing integration projects is difficult. To address this, Marchex needed a solution to expedite both internal and external critical data integrations to ensure service quality and lower the customer churn rate.
The Solution
Nexla’s flexible and customizable solution enables Marchex to quickly build solid foundations for strategic acquisitions and partnerships by automating data exchange. Nexla bridges the gaps between Marchex’s conversation analytics platform and the diverse CRM endpoints specific to niche industries.
The Impact
“We’ve been able to save about 60% of the time that we would have spent on integrations. It has had a big impact on our business and our efficiency. ” — Ryan Polley, COO, Marchex, Inc.
Diverse Integrations with One Tool
Customer data integration is key to providing Marchex’s AI-powered analytics services. Marchex must first ingest and transform data from different CRM systems and customers’ own data management systems. Since there are many niche industry-specific CRM systems, there was no one-size-fits-all solution, which put immense pressure on the engineering team to develop integration solutions between as many as over one hundred endpoints.
On the internal side, Marchex’s ongoing strategic expansion objectives call for company acquisitions. Adding a different entity to Marchex’s existing analytics process required merging data and streamlining data management on different platforms. To aggregate and analyze an entire customer journey, Marchex must connect the acquired company’s legacy data pipelines to its own system, which would have required months of engineering effort and resources without Nexla.
“If integration was not out of the box,” said Ryan Polley, COO at Marchex, “it would take significant time for us to deliver.” During Marchex’s strategic expansion, prioritizing the use of engineering resources was extremely challenging. Customer satisfaction and deal success were at stake. In search of a scalable solution, Marchex turned to integrating data through Nexla.
Nexla’s universal connectors allow Marchex to automate data integration with both internal and external entities, reducing the overall integration time by 60%. As Ryan said, “our engineer can now focus on the highest priority customer-facing solution instead of building pipelines.”
Proof of Concept Ready to Go
“Nexla gave us a Swiss army knife for any integration. Our sales and sales engineering are able to shorten that timeline between initial conversation to actual revenue.” — Ryan Polley, COO, Marchex, Inc.
One of Marchex’s core strategies is to build an integration hub wherein Marchex can show the catalog of companies and systems with which it can integrate. This way, Marchex can expand its market opportunities by being listed in more marketplaces and providing prototypes for customers at a much faster pace. Before Nexla, building a prototype for a new customer required months, and the actual integration phase would stretch the pre-billing period even longer.
Now, with Nexla’s help, Marchex is looking to establish a robust integration hub, which will allow potential customers to discover and recognize Marchex’s compatibility through different marketplaces. With the prototype period greatly shortened, Marchex can now confidently present working solutions to customers and quickly advance to the next stage of sales.
The Go-to Problem Solver
“I would highly recommend Nexla. We didn’t see any other solution where we could partner at the level where we were integrating into a lot of the core systems to deliver against our needs, both from a security perspective, but also from a feature and functionality perspective.” — Ryan Polley, COO, Marchex, Inc.
Nexla’s configuration-based solutions, collaborative platform, and versatility make it the ultimate choice for anything related to data management and data integration.
Nexla’s low-code feature and automated data monitoring ensure minimum coding, which helps the engineering team avoid human errors in data pipeline building and ownership transitioning. Nexla allows engineers to configure out-of-box tools, piece those tools together, and apply configurations to different use cases using only clicks and snippets of code.
“It’s also enabled us to allow automation work being done by non-engineers,” said Ryan. Nexla’s intuitive interface and collaborative platform make it convenient for data engineers to collaborate with data users and customers. With only a few clicks, a change can be made without involving the engineering team. As a result, onerous back-and-forth communication between data engineers and data users is largely eliminated.
Summary
Marchex faced challenges due to high integration demands and limited engineering resources. This led to a long POC delivery timeline and impeded Marchex’s product offering expansion. Nexla’s universal connectors, collaborative features, and versatility helped prevent customer churn and freed 60% of the company’s engineering capacity. As Marchex continues to apply Nexla to new use cases, it sees Nexla as an essential enabler for its data-powered future.