Success Story: Unleashing Explosive Growth for Health and Wellness Company

The health and wellness industry, like everything else, is in the midst of a reinvention fueled by technology. Where consumers were once at the mercy of an obscure and slow-moving medical-industrial complex, they are increasingly empowered through digital solutions that enable them to take charge of their own well-being. Today Health and wellness companies are using technology to challenge traditional business models and bring unprecedented transparency, choice and convenience to consumers.

One such client of ours, a global provider of health and wellness products and services, saw an opportunity to accelerate growth by equipping its sales force with powerful digital tools. By more efficiently capturing and analyzing the wealth of marketing data at its disposal, the company could help its network of independent sales agents connect with consumers and grow the business like never before. At the same time, however, the client knew its existing technology infrastructure wasn’t strong enough to support the massive increase in data storage and processing needs. They turned to NTT DATA for help in making their sales enablement vision a reality.

Analytics ambitions

The client’s internal software development team had already built an impressive and full-featured sales enablement platform. With a cloud-native mobile and desktop application, the platform gave sales agents a “single pane of glass” to view customer data, sales metrics, and product information, and an altogether simpler and more efficient way manage their independent businesses. But there was one problem: the demands of the system were simply too much for the company’s on-premises database infrastructure to handle.

For the sales platform to live up to its performance-enhancing potential, it needed to be unfailingly responsive. In other words, users shouldn’t have to deal with frustrating delays or outages that stand in the way of sales. Additionally, the system needed to be easily scalable, to accommodate the company’s goal of rapid expansion into new markets.

What the client needed was a transition to cloud-native data warehouse and analytics services to support the sales platform. Moving the back end of the platform to the cloud would give them as much storage and data-crunching power as they needed, on-demand, without the massive expense of building out additional infrastructure.

More speed and space to grow

After researching several off-the-shelf solutions, NTT DATA’s Cloud Transformation team determined that a custom-built data warehouse and analytics platform would serve the client best. They chose to establish the platform’s back end on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, using Amazon Redshift as the data warehouse along with several other supporting AWS products.

Aside from its excellent reputation for performance and reliability, Amazon Redshift offered significant advantages in speed and cost effectiveness. Typically, performing complex queries against huge tables of data can be very time-consuming and expensive (the more data the system must sift through, the longer it takes and the more it costs). But thanks to Amazon Redshift’s built-in data query tool, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, as well as the ability to create materialized views in Amazon Redshift, users can get precomputed data automatically for frequently run queries. Simply put, Amazon Redshift’s tools get the company’s sales agents the data they need in near real-time, and it costs the company a lot less.

And since data warehouse capacity with Amazon Redshift is easily scalable, the client can grow its team aggressively with no concerns of overwhelming the system.

A future unlimited

NTT DATA helped the client get its new sales enablement platform up and running in less than eight months, and the ROI has become quickly apparent. The company’s sales agents have eagerly adopted the application, using it to facilitate faster, more targeted, more profitable customer engagements. At the same time, the platform helps them grow their businesses as part of a multi-level marketing network, enlisting and managing new agents in new locations to drive additional sales.

Incredibly, the network has doubled in size to more than 80,000 sales agents since launching the new platform, through which they support more than 4.5 million customers. Such explosive expansion would have been unthinkable relying on limited legacy infrastructure, but the combination of powerful data analytics and the cloud’s inherent scalability made it possible.