How Typeform used Twilio Segment Protocols to enforce its overall data governance strategy and ensure trusted customer data across the business

The big win

The Typeform team was expanding quickly, and their rate of growth outpaced their ability to enforce data standards. Typeform needed a partner that would help to quickly unify the organization around a single data tracking methodology.

Typeform uses Protocols to enforce its entire data governance strategy, enabling them to consolidate the number of tracked events from 200 to 50 and make smarter investments.

Typeform is on a mission to help businesses solve everyday jobs with cutting-edge forms. Launched in 2012, Typeform helps remove the friction of traditional web forms through friendly, customizable interactions. From beautiful surveys to engaging job application forms, Typeform’s intuitive, easy-to-use tool helps companies build stronger relationships with their audiences—by talking to them in a more human, memorable way.

Building trusted data to drive business decisions

The Typeform team was expanding quickly, and their rate of growth outpaced their ability to enforce standards around data structure. Various teams tracked analytics events in conflicting ways which created significant hurdles to wrangle the data they needed to answer important business questions.

“When an analyst or marketing team member tried to put our data to use in analytics or marketing tools, they would find multiple events with very similar names,” explained Colin Furlong, Business Intelligence Analyst at Typeform. “For example, we have one event named useThisTemplate and another named UseThisTemplate that were supposed to be tracking different actions. Because of the nearly identical names, these events were frequently used incorrectly.”

Without a synchronized method for tracking data, the entire company felt the impact:

• Product didn’t have the insights they needed to inform and prioritize their product roadmap.

• Marketing found gaps in their ability to directly attribute their programs and investments to revenue.

• Customer Success couldn’t get a clear picture into patterns and trends.

Scaled data collection

Typeform needed a partner that would help to quickly unify their organization around a single data tracking methodology, so they turned to Twilio Segment. Twilio Segment provides the foundational customer data platform that allows Typeform to collect first-party data from sources like their website, mobile app, and Stripe, and send that data to other integrated systems like Amplitude or directly to their data warehouse.

Additionally, whenever Typeform wants to implement a new software application, they can do it with a few clicks within Twilio Segment. “We recently decided to implement Appcues, a new tool to improve our user onboarding experience. Without Twilio Segment, this process would have taken a month to fully deploy including custom coding and sprint planning resources. With Twilio Segment, it only took five minutes,” said Furlong.

Seamless data governance with Protocols

Now that Typeform has a centralized data standardization plan in place, they are able to use Twilio Segment Protocols to enforce data quality and flag any discrepancies that arise. Protocols enables Typeform to align the company around a standard data spec and enforce those standards at the point of collection. Using real-time data validation and automatic enforcement controls, Typeform can diagnose issues before they pollute their marketing and analytics tools or data warehouse. 

With trusted data running through Twilio Segment to its downstream marketing and analytics tools, Typeform can deliver an engaging multi-channel customer experience — something that’s important in their quest to make online experiences more human.

“If a user activates a new feature in Typeform, Twilio Segment makes it possible for us to automatically send the user an email with tips for how to get the most value from that feature. Also, because of our Twilio Segment integrations across Facebook, Google AdWords, and Bing, we can successfully retarget users based on their specific integration,” explained Furlong.

Protocols establishes a source of trusted data

By hosting their Tracking Plan in Twilio Segment, analysts and marketers now have the context they need to use data effectively: what the event means, which properties are included and more. By using Protocols to enforce their overall data governance strategy, Typeform has also been able to consolidate the number of their tracked events from 200 to 50. This became immensely impactful for their downstream analysis because now Typeform has complete consistency in how they track events across all tools.

Now, when the Marketing team experiments with a new campaign or the Product team rolls out a new feature, they have a clear line of sight into the impact those programs have on user engagement and revenue.

For example, Twilio Segment allowed Typeform to easily collect A/B testing data for a new logic map feature. Using these insights, Typeform’s Product team knew how to optimize the feature and ultimately drive a 10% lift in user conversion to paid customers. Marketing was also able to see which Typeform templates were most heavily favored by customers and surface those at the top of users’ Template Gallery to increase engagement.

Teams across Typeform now trust the data feeding their downstream tools and have become reliant on Twilio Segment’s customer data platform to drive greater efficiency and bottom-line results. “Until we started standardizing our data, people didn’t realize how messy it had become. With Protocols, we can be confident that data quality issues don’t happen anymore,” Furlong said. “We’ve increased the general trust across the company now that the data is centralized and accessible.”