How SaaS Platform Avionté Used Sisense to Transform Staffing Analytics, Win Customers, and Boost Retention

Background: A Timely Acquisition

Founded in 2005, Minneapolis-based Avionté provides best-in-class staffing and recruiting software solutions to nearly 1,000 customers and 25,000 users. In 2018, Avionté acquired the staffing platform COMPAS Technology to access new verticals and integrate new capabilities, with a special focus on embedded analytics. COMPAS used Sisense for this capability. Likewise, Avionté decided to make Sisense integral to its product strategy.

We spoke with Odell Tuttle, Chief Technology Officer, Phil Martini, Director of Product Management, and Shravan Batlanki, Director of Data Engineering at Avionté, to learn how Sisense gives their business a competitive edge in the SaaS market. They share how Sisense can not only help SaaS companies launch analytics products, but empower them to create measurable value, win customers, and boost retention.

Challenge: Next-Gen Staffing Analytics

In staffing, firms race to fill open jobs while optimizing the margin between what they pay talent and what they charge the employer. Until recently, however, staffing firms couldn’t get a holistic view of their business. No platform offered a unified view of both their back-office data (onboarding, compliance, payroll) and front-office data (marketing, sales, recruiting). Instead, firms relied on disparate, standalone business intelligence (BI) applications. Analytics were often unavailable in situations where they could help with day-to-day decision-making. Using Sisense, Avionté aimed to solve this problem.

Solution: Avionté INSIGHTS

Avionté chose Sisense Fusion embedded analytics to deliver in-product insights to its large and growing customer base. A white label solution, Sisense Fusion offered the scalability, reliability, and data security Avionté needed to serve customers ranging from single office firms to multinational enterprises.

“A large benefit with this partnership is the ability for Sisense to handle large volumes of data and to support the integration with various data sources,” says Martini. “With that scalability, we’ve been able to consolidate all of our data sources from multiple disparate databases into a single analytics platform that gives customers a unified view for reporting, dashboards, and visualizations.”

The Avionté INSIGHTS product launched in July 2022 and soon became a differentiator, both for Avionté and its customers.

The Customer Edge: How Avionté INSIGHTS Creates Value in Staffing

Avionté INSIGHTS seeks to improve decision-making and business performance at staffing firms. With Sisense embedded analytics, INSIGHTS is able to convert complex data into intuitive analytics that anyone can use—no data scientist required.

“It provides a high level of data visualization capabilities for displaying complex analytical data in an easily understandable manner,” adds Martini. “That means it can help all stakeholders—recruiters, sales reps, hiring managers, and senior executives—to understand the trends, patterns, and correlations that lead to better decision-making at all levels. We’ve seen clients achieve significant gains in sales and revenue by acting on these insights.”

In brief, here is what makes Avionté INSIGHTS so valuable to its customers.

1. A Foundation with Customizability. Sisense provides 30 preconfigured dashboards and over 90 reports that allows Avionté INSIGHTS users to slice and dice the data however they want. Customers can truly make INSIGHTS their own, effortlessly customizing everything from color changes to incorporating unique calculations to data fields. The best part? No coding required. Firms seamlessly adapt Avionté INSIGHTS into their workflow, making adoption smoother and ROI acceleration faster than ever before.

2. Data with Financial Impact. By leveraging Avionté INSIGHTS, customers gain a comprehensive understanding of the financial headwinds and tailwinds impacting specific job roles, industries, and locations, empowering them to take proactive measures in mitigating risks and seizing opportunities. Avionté INSIGHTS can also calculate the average pay rate for a job title, average time to fill a position, and the ROI of using talent sources like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Monster for a given position, company, or industry.

3. Automated Reporting: Avionté INSIGHTS users never have to manually prepare and send reports. Instead, users design a report once, and Sisense automatically populates and delivers the report as scheduled. That set-it-and-forget approach means stakeholders can access analytics without overburdening technical teams.

The Edge for Avionté: Using Sisense to Win Market Share

Avionté INSIGHTS provides customers with a seamless, fully integrated experience, offering a holistic view of their business across all operations. Most BI solutions can’t do that. As Batlanki explains, “Typically, BI products are for internal company usage, whereas we leverage Sisense to provide it as a SaaS product to our customers who, in turn, use it for analytics. We still maintain the design and do everything on the backend.”

Avionté’s product team has discovered that Sisense also enhances customer experience, improving product stickiness and retention in several ways.

1. Improved Customer Experience and Retention. Avionté’s product team relies on Sisense reporting tools to track and understand usage by customer, user, and feature.  Avionté has the capability to identify and address instances where analytics are either unused or utilized ineffectively, allowing the product team to implement technical solutions or bring attention to the matter through sales, customer success, and the training team.

“Through the reporting and usage metrics, we’re able to capture information to better address our customers’ needs,” says Martini. “Ultimately, to help the product get higher retention and be stickier, we want customers not only to use the product but to love the product as well.”

2. Preserving Development Resources. Sisense Fusion Embed alleviates the workload for Avionté’s product team by taking care of data infrastructure and processes, allowing them to dedicate their resources to delivering fixes, enhancements, and customizations that directly improve the customer experience.

3. RFP Dominance. Avionté is currently the only staffing SaaS that provides fully integrated analytics, covering both the front and back office. This sets Avionté apart from competitors when responding to RFPs. And customers can see the improvements in efficiency, ROI, margin, and more by using Avionté INSIGHTS, making it easy for Avionté to demonstrate its value.

The Future: From Descriptive to Prescriptive

While many staffing firms struggle with fragmented and disconnected analytics, Avionté users have the advantage of making strategic decisions based on a comprehensive view of their entire business, rather than just a limited set of data points.