Summary
Gorgias is the leading customer experience platform, trusted by 15,000+ e-commerce brands. To support partnerships growth, they needed to build internal tools that would let them manage referrals and administer rewards payouts to referrers. They built an approval workflow and payments tool in Dataland in minutes, instead of hours. Their favorite feature? How fast, high-quality, and simple it was.
Jordan Lange is a RevOps lead at Gorgias, and runs a team of growth engineers that build systems to scale GTM. Elisha Amar is a partnerships enablement manager at Gorgias, who drives their strong network of technology partners.
To create a novel partner incentive + loyalty program, Jordan chose the Dataland platform to build the “control center” for managing customer referrals in a fraction of the time.
The challenge
Gorgias boasts a strong partnership ecosystem of 2000+ complementary technology vendors, agencies, and implementation partners for eCommerce brands. In 2023, they were thinking about how to improve incentives to get even more referrals going.
The main idea: Pay out "spiffs" directly via Paypal, Venmo, and Visa gift cards to individuals at partner companies who refer their clients to Gorgias.
While the idea itself is simple, executing on it takes serious engineering work. Jordan used tools like dbt to write BigQuery pipelines integrating HubSpot form data and Segment data to establish a clear view of referrers, referrals and actions taken by leads post-referral.
But then, Jordan had to figure out how to build a tool where his partnerships team could log in, easily approve / reject new user signups for the program, and the referral data from BigQuery & Postgres, approve / reject payouts, and keep track of the audit log of all of their actions. Normally, this would have taken weeks of time to build.
The solution
Jordan chose Dataland as the platform to build the internal tools his team needed. See a screenshot of the spiff approval tool below:
His main criteria:
Ease of setup + integrations with Gorgias’ existing data sources
User-friendliness + performance
Audit logs for user actions
He was able to spend less than an hour to securely connect Dataland to Gorgias’ existing Postgres + BigQuery, use Dataland’s AI feature to join together data sources, define actions that triggered Zapier webhooks that handled referral payment + messaging, and invite his teammates to use the tool.
"Dataland has allowed us to build a beautiful front-end directly on top of our data warehouse. End-users love it. Dataland’s AI search allows the team to write in plain English, and get a result with zero-latency.
Then, using the simplicity of Dataland buttons, users can manipulate the data - sending row-level data to pre-configured destinations. It’s beautifully architected, so it’s really simple for me to set this up.”
The impact
Jordan, Elisha, and the partnerships team has been able to drive thousands of highly qualified referrals as new Gorgias prospects, using Dataland as the referrals control center.
"Dataland is an incredible tool, the speed at which it can execute on line-item operations is incredible and the potential in a tool like this has many use cases beyond financial transactions!
Although we are continuously iterating on our partnership programs, using tools like Dataland are crucial to running a cutting-edge partnerships program."
The referrals program is a key growth lever, and is featured prominently on the footer of the Gorgias Documentation site.
