Our client, a South African company dealing with the settlement of various securities, had invested in an on-premises data lake as a single, reliable source for data-driven decision making. Despite significant investment, the client was unable to achieve the desired agility and scalability. The data lake’s infrastructure presented several challenges including inability to scale, high infrastructure and maintenance costs, and lack of cloud-based computing. Its monolithic architecture was unable to handle the client’s increasing data storage and analytics needs. The absence of cloud-based services resulted in underutilization of the data lake by business users. It was inaccessible by many, lacked real-time services, and was regarded as an unreliable source, leading to significant revenue leakages.

Kinetic Vision, a Cincinnati-based design, engineering, and development firm, is a one-stop-shop for innovators looking to transform their ideas into real products. The company offers a wide range of services, including industrial design, mechanical and electrical design and engineering, hardware and software development, machine learning, visual communication media, prototyping, and sometimes even short-run production. However, finding the right tools for PCB design had been a challenge for them over the years. They needed a solution that could support the production of smart products that incorporate electronics, PCBs, and communications chipsets. The solution needed to be versatile enough to handle all of their projects, from the simplest to the most advanced.

The Fortune 50 company, one of the largest technology corporations in the world, was seeking to develop a new core customer 360 record system. This system was intended to offer a product recommendation system and entity resolution feature. The goal was to create accurate customer profiles that displayed hierarchical relationships, thereby delivering an exceptional customer experience when customers interacted with their centralized database for various functions such as purchasing products or requesting services. The company also desired a system that was scalable and more efficient than their previous one. This operational function for their customer 360 was deemed critical to their competitive advantage in the market. The system was to consist of a centralized data source that would serve as the core of the customer data platform.

SunPower, a leading residential and commercial renewable energy company, monitors over 286,000 systems and 6 million devices in the United States. The company aimed to differentiate itself by creating a software offering for consumers that pairs with their SunPower Equinox® solar and SunVault™ storage systems. This software would provide consumers with rich access to their own energy usage data, control over their SunVault™ system, and allow SunPower to optimize its service and offerings. However, this required SunPower to collect, aggregate, and provide access to real-time data from 6 million devices, a task that was beyond the capabilities of its legacy system. SunPower wanted to utilize the vast amount of data it generated on energy usage across its existing fleet to build more efficient products, make data more accessible and actionable by different parts of the business, and offer customers a more instantaneous energy management experience.

The Fortune 100 technology company faced a significant challenge in managing its diverse portfolio of over 500 facilities worldwide, which ranged from standard office buildings to energy-intensive labs and data centers. The company required a software solution that could effectively manage energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, integrate and analyze sustainability and energy metrics, and report results from energy and emissions mitigation projects for its annual sustainability report and the Carbon Disclosure Project. The company also needed to perform detailed interval analysis on thousands of opaque energy-consuming racks of equipment, identify and analyze energy efficiency opportunities, and manage a global portfolio of low-cost, capital-intensive energy efficiency and emissions mitigation projects.

The company wanted to revamp its IT and infrastructure operations strategy. It wanted to bring the functions of the hosting group in charge of computing, storage, and middleware operations under closer in-house management.However, the provider didn’t have the necessary visibility into its operations to determine the scope of these critical processes, which when disrupted would result in huge revenue losses and negatively impact its technology strategy.External management of the provider’s IT infrastructure also left users dependent on manual delivery and provisioning mechanisms, rather than benefitting from automated and self-service processes.

Wave Financial, a company offering a suite of products and services for small business owners, faced a significant challenge in managing customer experience (CX). With over half of their staff dedicated to customer support, they experienced a massive spike in customer support volumes during the first quarter of the year, often increasing by 200-300%. In the early days, they managed this by pulling in employees from different departments and having agents work overtime, but this was unsustainable as the company grew. The demand for higher standards for both customer and employee experience became more urgent. They needed a solution that could reduce wait times, negative customer interactions, and missed revenue opportunities. They had two options: hire more support staff to handle the volumes during the busy season, which would require more investment in hiring and training, or find a more efficient, automated approach to their CX that provides customers with immediate and reliable access and resolution.

Banco Solidario, a leading microfinance bank in Ecuador, was facing challenges in keeping up with the evolving demands of its customers. Until 2019, the bank's call center relied on in-house technology, which was increasingly difficult to maintain and upgrade to meet new customer service expectations. The bank's focus on serving microenterprises, a segment often overlooked by traditional banking, required innovative solutions to enhance customer service. The bank needed a solution that could provide an omnichannel experience and modernize their customer service operations.

Sipssa Medicina Privada, a renowned prepaid health insurance company in Argentina, was grappling with the challenge of reducing response times for its members. The company was experiencing delays of up to 48 hours in responding to queries through phone and email channels. The need for 24/7 availability and immediate responses was paramount to enhance their relationship with members. The company aimed to reduce pending messages, provide round-the-clock customer service, receive online referrals from potential members, rate representative service in customer experience, improve customer service by providing adequate information, optimize and measure response times in each process, and systematize processes without needing representative assistance.

TAG Livros, a Brazilian book allocation club, is known for its high-quality service and customer-centric approach. The company wanted to further enhance its customer service strategy by covering all stages of the customer journey for both existing and potential customers. The main objectives were to consistently improve customer satisfaction, provide agility, and make information readily available. The challenge was to implement a solution that could support these goals, especially during key sales dates when customer service demand is high.

Cake, a Shopify brand with a mission to make sex more fun and destigmatize sexual health, faced a significant challenge in understanding their customers' preferences and needs. The brand's Director of Marketing, Will Allen, expressed the need to gain a better understanding of their customers' preferences in the bedroom. Like many marketers, Will wanted to know who was interacting with their website, their likes and dislikes, so that Cake could offer products that are genuinely desired. Given the personal nature of sex, it was crucial for Cake to be as specific as possible in their product suggestions to enhance their customers' sex lives.

Curlsmith, a gourmet haircare brand, was facing challenges in enhancing their email marketing and capturing more subscribers. They had a standardized set-up, including database capture tools and pop-ups, but the current process was not providing enough information about consumers. The brand creates specific formulations for different hair types and had been experimenting with guided selling tools for personalized recommendations. However, finding a tool that could build out rich customer data, deliver against the breadth of possible recommendation outcomes, and integrate seamlessly into Klaviyo and Shopify was proving difficult. The need to automate the current CRM journey was identified as essential.

FEAT Socks, a Direct to Consumer (D2C) company, was founded in a dorm room by two entrepreneurs who noticed a market for unique and crazy socks. Within their first year, they managed to sell 20,000 pairs of socks from their backpacks and subsequently moved to Los Angeles to further expand their brand. Their success led to them being named in the Forbes 30 under 30. However, despite their success, they faced a challenge in connecting with more customers and recovering abandoned carts. They were constantly introducing new products to keep their offerings fresh and exciting, but they needed a solution to effectively follow up with customers who didn't complete their orders.

Hunter & Gather, an ecommerce brand committed to providing nutrient-dense, natural food, was facing a challenge in improving the performance of their email marketing and increasing the percentage of their owned and returning revenue. They were keen on enhancing their customer experience and personalization, but their existing Klaviyo email marketing program was not performing up to industry benchmarks. They were missing critical flows and segments that could have boosted their performance. To address this, they sought the help of Blend Commerce, one of Octane AI's top agency partners, to analyze and improve their current email marketing program.

Jones Road Beauty, a brand founded by makeup artist Bobbi Brown, was facing a challenge in expanding its customer base. The brand was heavily reliant on Facebook for media buying, but with recent changes in data privacy, Facebook advertising became more expensive and less effective for most Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands, including Jones Road. The brand was looking for an alternative platform to diversify its media buying strategy. Despite initial skepticism about the compatibility of TikTok's user base with Jones Road Beauty’s target customers, the brand decided to give it a shot. The challenge was to crack the code on how to acquire new customers via TikTok.

VerClare Boutique, a family-owned clothing brand based in Bloomington, Illinois, was facing a challenge in their online Shopify store. Their core customers, busy mid-west moms, were often abandoning their shopping carts due to their active lifestyles. The boutique needed a solution that could automatically follow up with these customers and remind them to complete their orders. The challenge was not only to recover the abandoned carts but also to do so in a way that was convenient and non-intrusive for their customers. The boutique was looking for a solution that could seamlessly integrate with their Shopify store and Facebook Page, and effectively increase their revenue.

Wicked Edge, a New Mexico-based Shopify Plus merchant, is a leading seller of high-quality knife sharpeners and accessories. Despite having a loyal customer base ranging from home chefs to law enforcement, the company faced a significant challenge. Their products, unlike anything else on the market, required a learning curve even for experienced shoppers. The company wanted to shorten this learning curve and educate customers during their shopping journey. They also aimed to revamp their website to make it faster, more visually appealing, and easier for customers to navigate. They partnered with Tako Agency, a top Octane AI partner, to address these issues.

Astute Technical, a UK-based recruiting firm, was grappling with two significant challenges. The first was the need to become GDPR compliant following the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018. This legislation, aimed at protecting the privacy of EU citizens' personal data, hit the recruiting industry particularly hard. Astute had to clean up and secure its data quickly to avoid compliance issues and potential litigation. The second challenge was a lack of structured engagement with candidates and customers. The company noticed that many of its clients and candidates were slipping through the net, with some not having been contacted for a long time. Astute wanted a system or process that ensured every client and candidate was engaged with the organization, and that their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was full of legitimate, quality jobseekers, and their business systems full of loyal, happy clients.

Cooptalis, an international mobility operator, was facing challenges with their existing recruitment tool. The tool was not built to handle the volume of work they had and couldn't meet the company's needs. It was difficult to conduct targeted and precise searches, quickly find candidates in the database, and visualize the progress of their searches. The tool also lacked an API interface, preventing Cooptalis from adding or extracting data. Moreover, it was not a SaaS tool, requiring installation on personal workstations and server and database maintenance, making it cumbersome to administer. The financial model was for lifetime service licenses and included server maintenance costs, with little pricing flexibility. Cooptalis needed a cloud tool; a customizable online ATS that could integrate with other applications.

Mint Physicians, a locum tenens agency, faced a significant challenge in customer engagement. The responsibility of engagement was decentralized, left to individual account managers, resulting in a lack of uniformity and often being ignored. The nature of the staffing business requires strong relationships with clients and candidates, necessitating consistent communication. However, the decentralized approach led to a lack of accountability, with customer engagement and content creation often being pushed to the bottom of the account manager’s to-do list. This resulted in missed opportunities with customers and potential customers.

Motion Recruitment, a specialized IT staffing firm, was seeking ways to improve their processes and provide a consistent experience to their candidates. Despite their success in the industry, they identified inconsistencies in candidate experiences based on the relationship with their recruiter. They also lacked a channel to collect unbiased feedback from their candidates and clients. With the advent of staffing automation, Motion saw an opportunity to leverage this technology to enhance their operations and decided to be an early adopter of automation technology in 2017.

In 2010, David Spencer-Percival and Sir Peter Ogden launched Spencer Ogden, a 360-degree energy sector recruitment agency. The company experienced rapid growth, expanding from a staff of fewer than 20 at launch to over 500 employees across six centers in London, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Qatar, and Houston by 2014. This rapid expansion presented a challenge in terms of managing customer relationships, scaling operations, and maintaining low capital expenditure. The company needed a recruiting software that could support its international growth, deliver a seamless service to customers, and allow for straightforward resource planning. The software also needed to be intuitive, aligning with Spencer Ogden’s business processes and easily adopted by staff.

Talent International, a rapidly growing tech and digital recruiting specialist, faced a significant challenge as it expanded its operations across multiple offices, markets, and continents. The company struggled with a lack of visibility over performance, disparate reporting methods, and the physical distance between offices. These factors contributed to the growth of offices as isolated entities rather than as a unified organization. The leadership team needed a solution that would allow them to actively improve performance across all locations and ensure that every individual within the business benefited from their direction. The challenge was to find a solution that could integrate with Talent International’s existing Bullhorn solution and provide a comprehensive overview of the company's performance.

The Conexus Group, a London-based conglomerate of five companies operating in the consulting, staffing, and training space, faced a significant challenge in managing their candidate database. The database, built over a decade and a half, was filled with dormant, incomplete, or outdated entries. This made it difficult for recruiters to efficiently make placements. Candidates were typically contacted once or twice after registration, but if they weren't relevant at the time, communication would generally cease within six to twelve months. With thousands of candidates in the system, manually re-engaging was not a feasible solution. The group lacked the capacity and technology to revive these dormant relationships.

USPRO, a leading staffing agency in the Defense and Healthcare Industries, faced a significant challenge in scaling their business. Despite landing a large contract with a Department of Defense contractor in 2009, they lacked the necessary back-office support, technology, and capital to fully leverage this opportunity. The company was ill-equipped to handle large payroll operations, billing, and funding, which were critical to their growth. This situation posed a significant risk to their business, as they were unable to effectively manage their resources and lacked the necessary infrastructure to support their expansion. The challenge was to find a solution that would not only address these operational issues but also allow them to focus on their core competencies and revenue-generating activities.

IMVU, the world’s largest avatar-based social network, was facing challenges with its on-premises infrastructure which was limiting its capacity for advanced analytics. The company had been an early adopter of Apache Hadoop and Big Data technologies, but found it difficult to support and upgrade their 90-node Hadoop cluster and in-house built tooling. IMVU’s analysts lacked the tools to rapidly generate a range of business-critical reports on customer in-game behavior at scale. They were working with historical data in batches, which made analytics more complex and created multiple bottlenecks. Late reports resulted in inaccurate assumptions about customer in-game purchases, leading to slower sales and loss of profit. The analytics team also lacked a test environment to efficiently check analytics assumptions. The company sought to modernize their platform’s data architecture by introducing CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and other best practices, to achieve faster analytics iterations, better maintainability, and lower TCO.

DIVERSANT, the largest African American owned IT staffing firm in the U.S., specializes in helping organizations find direct hire candidates with specialized backgrounds in the IT space. However, they faced challenges in identifying candidates with niche skill sets. They used a variety of sourcing tools, job boards, referrals, and networking opportunities, but still struggled to find individuals with specialized backgrounds and hard-to-find areas of expertise. In 2019, DIVERSANT identified the need to invest in tools that would accelerate their ability to find qualified candidates and help clients support their hiring objectives. They conducted a vendor evaluation process to research additional solutions that could help.

Dynamic Search Group, a staffing and recruiting company based in Irvine, CA, was facing a significant challenge in sourcing fresh talent for their clients. The company primarily focuses on accounting and finance roles, ranging from CFO level to accounting clerks. However, they were struggling with a small candidate pool, primarily sourced from LinkedIn. The issue with this approach was that the same group of candidates was being selected and exhausted, as many recruiters were tapping into the same LinkedIn talent pool. Patricia Perez, Managing Partner at Dynamic Search Group, noted that the candidates were often overwhelmed due to the bombardment of recruitment companies reaching out to them. This situation led to the need for a more diverse and less saturated source of potential candidates.

Poshmark, a leading social commerce marketplace, was facing several challenges in its recruitment process. With a small team and limited bandwidth, the company was struggling to find a single, suitable tool that could accomplish multiple tasks. The company was also experiencing limitations with sourcing from LinkedIn alone and had difficulties in effectively engaging candidates, especially due to minimal access to accurate contact information. The company needed a platform that could help them bring in more qualified candidates quickly to keep up with business demands. They were looking for a solution that could help them source candidates for various positions on the engineering team, including Applications, Infrastructure, Security, Front-End, and Back-End Engineers.

Airtel Wynk Music, one of India's largest mobile entertainment platforms, faced a significant challenge with a large percentage of their customers going dormant. The company observed that many customers who regularly streamed music on their app would become inactive until a new music album or movie was released. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, new music releases in India decreased significantly. Instead of waiting for customers to return to the app on their own, the Growth team at Wynk wanted to proactively engage these dormant customers and encourage them to return to the app.