On Thursday, I had a LinkedIn Live session with Integrate.io's internal citizen integrator Nestor Marroquin. He discussed how and why he became a citizen integrator, how building up no code pipelines helped support better customer experience, and shared his best practices and lessons learned. 

Citizen integrators are becoming more important for organizations to achieve valuable data outputs. According to a report from Mendex in 2021, 62% of organizations have a growing backlog, making access to data and data pipeline prioritization a challenge for many teams within the organization. SMEs cannot always wait months to gain visibility into data or have access to a 360 view of their customers or develop new data access points. This is why the rise of the citizen integrator is so important. The increasing number of no code offerings helps enable people with technology in all realms of use. Within organizations the ability to empower business users to build their own pipelines will help organizations gain more data wins without taxing data teams. This is one of the reasons why Nestor's use of Integrate.io is so important. Aside from being able to drink our own koolaid, the customer success team has realized tangible benefits by having someone on the team take initiative to leverage data more broadly and help enhance overall customer visibility and access to important customer data in a centralized dashboard. 

During the session with Nestor, he discussed how he became a citizen integrator and gave some great advice to fellow citizen integrators. Here is some of what Nestor has learned: 

  • Know your audience - Start with the end in mind. Having a clear understanding of who will benefit and utilize the solution will help you stay focused on the requirements.

  • Know your product - Understand your business needs and gaps to see what is important for decision-makers and the data required to make data-driven decisions.

  • Broaden your knowledge and share the benefits- Once the initial use case is complete and working as expected, explore additional solutions that will benefit other parts of the business (i.e. Data Specialists, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, HR, etc). 

  • Work smarter not harder - Use your resources to create solutions that will automate manual processes in place that expose you to human errors.

  • Do not confuse Account Health with Customer Health - As granular data was gathered, many churning customers had no issues with our customer service and support, but rather had reasons related to their account health for canceling their account.

  • Use your resources - Integrate.io provides a comprehensive Knowledge Base library, which contains a wealth of information to address any inquiries related to the ETL platform. 

  • The data cleansing process is time consuming but significant - As we integrate our source data with Salesforce, we prioritize the accuracy of the data by conducting a thorough data clean-up. While this process can be laborious, it is crucial in streamlining future reporting and updates.

All of these represent firsthand advice about how to be successful as a citizen integrator. Organizations will have different challenges but, based on a study from Dimensional Research, 77% of IT and 71% of business stakeholders state that IT solution requests consistently go unmet. What this means is that organizations are stuck not being as competitive, productive, or profitable as they could be. Having no code/low code solutions that enable citizen integrators, provide a lot of opportunity to address these gaps and help companies gain needed visibility into their data without the wait.