Challenge

To continue engrossing millions of viewers with fresh, exciting digital content, Intigral needed a complete view of each subscriber compiled from hundreds of sources without coding.

Solution

Moved from high-maintenance, siloed Python-based data solutions to a scalable Matillion platform managed by a single person. Achieved without any disruption in less than 3 months.  

Results

A comprehensive view of each customer’s journey based on data pulled from over 500 data points. Reduced maintenance, point-and-click configuration, and seamless integrations, all while enjoying 99.99% SLA uptime.

Challenge – complete viewer data with one click

‘What do our viewers want?’ Intigral seeks to ask its millions of customers across different demographics and preferences. As the leading provider of digital entertainment and sport in the MENA region, gaining this information from multiple customer touch points, means the company can effectively cater to its audience’s needs.

Intigral extracts this data from more than 25 data sources, and 500 individual data points. “We aim to collate that into a single, personalized customer view and present it to our team, from business analysts all the way up to the executives,” says Farhan Hussain, Director of Data and Analytics at Intigral. 

Intigral couldn’t ingest all available data into a centralized repository with the previous siloed data management solutions. Without an established analytics infrastructure, the company found it challenging to get valuable insights. In addition, the Python-based environment required a lot of maintenance and coding skills to add and manage data sources and extract information. “We wanted to move away from that towards a more contemporary, low- or no-code environment, where we could just click and add a data pipeline to our repository,” Farhan explains.

Solution – simplified data processing

After evaluating several ETL solutions, Intigral chose Matillion. “What stood out for us was that Matillion was specifically geared to work hand in hand with Amazon Redshift, which is the force of our main knowledge repository,” shares Farhan. “The migration was seamless since Matillion allows for lift and shift of code components from Python. The whole process took less than three months and was conducted by one person, something I haven’t seen in my 18-year career in data analytics.”

Using Matillion, Intigral now extracts insights from structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data formats including CSV, Excel, JSON, email and social media. “Matillion has built-in connectors that integrate seamlessly with all data sources without much code development,” says Farhan. “Using this with Amazon Redshift means we can collect large volumes of data at a specific time or stream it continuously as it is generated, all without interruptions.”

Benefits – delivering timely, accurate content to support customer retention

Intigral now leverages Matillion to record customer actions as digital data points and collate them into a comprehensive view. “Rather than grouping customers into segments, we literally have a one-on-one relationship with each viewer,” Farhan describes. “Combined with high-speed data processing, we can meet their expectations and resolve delays and other issues to ensure our customers stay with us.”

Intigral’s business analysts have streamlined access to data points through a self-service, business-ready format. The team can run analyses at any level of granularity, like how specific features impact the customer journey. With data visualized into dashboards or reports and an uptime of 99.9%, customer care teams, marketing, sales, product, technology, and Intigral’s executives have the insights needed to make data-driven decisions.

With only one person needed to run data operations, DevOps costs are lower, while the turnaround time for ingesting new data sources is always under a week, regardless of type. 

Gleaning insights from all of the data led Intigral to build content ROI (return on investment) models. “We can now decide whether an investment has brought the right results. If it hasn’t, we can market the content accordingly to fix that,” shares Farhan. The ability to modify and iterate quickly was also tested in the first half of 2023, when the Intigral subscriber footprint doubled. The team upscaled their Matillion instance with a click of a button. “Just like that, we could cater to a double subscriber load.”

What’s next

The future for Intigral will bring more stringent guidelines on data protection and governance mandated by new Saudi law. Matillion will continue to act as a trusted partner in a new data cataloging process whilst maintaining business continuity and providing the data-driven insights that delight Intigral’s millions of customers.