Empowering Investor in Students with a Future-Proof Analytics Platform

Client

Investor in Students

We helped IIS scale their data platform out from spreadsheets to a fully scalable, robust, data orchestration system. This now gathers, processes, and presents millions of datapoints, such that their customers - accommodation providers and PBSAs can improve their lived student experience.

Overview

Investor in Students is a global accreditation focused on understanding, measuring and improving the student experience in accommodation. Providing a 360º assessment of the success of the student experience, IIS currently measures the experience of over 216,000 students for over 44 members globally. Rapid growth and strong uptake have been exciting, but that momentum has also surfaced several key challenges that need addressing to scale efficiently and deliver consistently at pace:

Data Management: IIS relied on Google Sheets and Excel for data storage and analysis, which became increasingly cumbersome and inefficient as data volumes grew.
Time-Consuming Insights: The manual data extraction and analysis processes led to delays in generating actionable insights from survey responses.
Limited Sharing and Collaboration: Sharing insights with customers was difficult and time-consuming, hindering IIS's ability to provide added value.
Dashboard Management: Creating and managing dashboards in Looker Studio became a bottleneck, especially for end-of-year customer reports.
Scalability Concerns: IIS's existing tech stack and processes were not designed to handle the rapid growth and increasing data volumes they were experiencing.

These challenges highlighted the need for a more robust and scalable data management and analytics solution to support IIS's continued growth and success.

Cobry's solution for IIS directly addresses the challenges of sharing insights and collaborating with customers in several ways by moving IIS to BigQuery and Looker Studio Pro.

Enhanced Dashboard Management: Upgrading to Looker Studio Pro provides better control, customisation, and collaboration features, making it easier to create and share visually appealing and informative dashboards with customers.
External Sharing Capabilities: Looker Studio Pro allows for secure and controlled sharing of dashboards with external stakeholders, enabling IIS to provide customers with direct access to insights.
Real-Time Insights: The proposed solution, with its focus on speed and automation, ensures that insights are generated quickly and efficiently, allowing IIS to share timely information with customers.
Data-Driven Workflows: BigQuery with Dataform means there is no human-in-the-middle. This reduces human driven errors and inefficiencies. Cobry has automated the data pipeline from data capture all the way through to insight.
Data Enrichment: The BigQuery ecosystem allows for data synthesis and enrichment. We’ve created a sentiment analysis pipeline that allows IIS to extract quantitative data from qualitative data - something their customer value dearly.

By implementing these features, IIS can significantly improve its ability to share insights, collaborate with customers, and ultimately provide greater value through its "Investor in Students" platform.

Problem, Solution, Outcome

Problem: IIS, a rapidly growing sales and marketing agency in the student living sector, faced challenges in data management, timely insights generation, collaboration, and scalability due to its reliance on outdated tools and manual processes. These limitations hindered their ability to efficiently manage and analyse data, share insights with customers, and support further growth.

Solution: Cobry proposed a comprehensive solution involving migrating to BigQuery for improved data storage, utilising Dataform for SQL transformations, and implementing Fivetran for seamless data ingestion. Additionally, upgrading to Looker Studio Pro would enhance dashboard management and collaboration, while the Looker platform would enable advanced analytics and data-driven workflows.

Outcome: This solution helped empower IIS to overcome its data management and scalability challenges. By streamlining data processes, automating insights generation, and facilitating seamless collaboration, IIS could enhance its services, deliver greater value to customers, and support its continued growth in the student living market.