UpKeep.com, an industry-leading SaaS provider for asset operations management, found itself facing a significant challenge as a result of its rapid expansion since its 2014 launch. The platform, bolstered by $50 million in funding from venture capitalists like Insight and Emergence and incubated in the renowned Y Combinator, was struggling to handle the surge of new customers attempting to import their data into the product. A turning point came when UpKeep replaced their original, homegrown data importer with Dromo, leading to an improved user experience, considerable cost savings, and an impressive increase in data import success rates.

Hitting the limit of a homegrown importer

"People would go to upload all their data, and they'd get this generic error message and have no idea why it failed. I think some clients probably just gave up."

Daniel Binkoski, Senior Growth Product Manager at UpKeep

When a new Upkeep customer wants to digitize their asset operations, they first need to transfer data about all their existing equipment and facilities into Upkeep. This data usually exists across dozens of CSV files of varying accuracy and completeness, each with its own formatting.

To facilitate a smooth onboarding, Upkeep must make it easy for customers to fix their messy data files to comply with Upkeep's database requirements.

Originally, UpKeep built a spreadsheet importer in-house, with the goal of saving money and moving quickly. But it was constantly breaking as the company scaled up, leading to failed uploads, tedious back-and-forths with the customer success team, and frustrated customers.

"People would go to upload all their data, and they'd get this generic error message and have no idea why it failed," explains Daniel Binkoski, senior growth product manager at UpKeep. "I think some clients probably just gave up."

Daniel estimates that at least half of self-service imports failed with the original importer and required intervention from Upkeep.

Upkeep needed to improve its importing experience, and fast. New customers were blocked from using any of Upkeep's value-added features until they could upload their data, and the customer success team was getting pulled out of the support queue to manually fix spreadsheets.

Since every messy file was messy in its own way, each intervention was unique and the support team could not scale in a labor-efficient way.

From a cost perspective, the decision was obvious: It was far faster and less expensive in the long run to buy an off-the-shelf tool like Dromo than to rebuild the entire system themselves.

After getting quotes from leading alternatives like Flatfile, the Upkeep team concluded that it would save at least $40,000 a year by choosing Dromo.

Implementing Dromo is lightning fast

Implementation was a breeze, our customer success team is wasting less time on fire drills, and our developers can focus on innovation again.

Ryan Chan, CEO at Upkeep

The transition to Dromo was smooth and swift. In just a few days, UpKeep integrated a live Dromo prototype. Within weeks, they launched a trial importer to a subset of live customers, and in a few short months, they had incorporated Dromo into their crucial data importing processes for every new customer.

Behind the scenes, UpKeep's engineers simply defined the requirements for each file they needed. The Dromo importer then provided a self-service interface where customers could isolate errors and transform their own messy files to meet Upkeep's standard. Dromo ensured that any data it handled was now clean and ready to flow straight into the product.

"Implementation was a breeze, our customer success team is wasting less time on fire drills, and our developers can focus on innovation again," shares CEO Ryan Chan, a finalist for the 2022 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. "Most importantly, our customers love the new experience!"

With Dromo, onboarding messy customer data files is easy

"It's straightforward; it tells you what to do… All of these things make it a frictionless experience."

Jason Visenberg, Customer Success Manager at Upkeep

Following the integration of Dromo, UpKeep saw a dramatic improvement in success rates for self-service file imports. Prior to Dromo, customer imports failed around half the time. Dromo has improved the error rate by over 50x, as the success rate now exceeds 99%.

In addition to improving success rates, Dromo also transformed the user experience. The data import flow became more seamless, as described by Jason Visenberg, UpKeep's customer success manager.

"People can just come into the app now," he explains. "It's straightforward; it tells you what to do… All of these things make it a frictionless experience."

Thanks to their partnership with Dromo, UpKeep can focus on what they do best: delivering superior asset management and maintenance software solutions to its users. The issues that once plagued their data importing process are now a thing of the past.