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How Gorgias gave its business teams 'engineering superpowers' with Cargo

The problem#

Engineering bottlenecks in growth experiments

Gorgias excels in growth strategy by keeping customer acquisition costs low through frequent experimentation and scaling successful methods with engineering firepower.

Maintaining this high experimentation velocity requires a close partnership between the business teams, who generate the ideas, and the engineering team, who execute the required logic.

Before adopting Cargo, the team faced challenges in meeting their goals due to engineering bottlenecks. In other words, the simplest iterations like creating a new audience segment on top of their data warehouse, required the engineering team to write code, while the business team remained blocked.

The growth team searched for a tool that enabled no-code orchestration for the business team, while liberating the engineering team to focus on managing the data model behind the scenes.

This approach would speed up the creation, testing, and refinement of new marketing campaigns, and thus reduce the cost per customer touchpoint (and thus the cost of acquisition).

The solution#

Use case 1: Separating data and orchestration layers

Using Cargo, Gorgias decouples the work to manage the data and orchestration layers.

Now, the engineering team needs only to set up data tables within BigQuery and DBT, and then the business team handles the segment building and workflow activation, without having to write any code.

Use case 2: Migrating modular workflows to Cargo

Switching to Cargo from Hightouch offered a key benefit: Cargo's record-based enrollment architecture supports modular workflow logic to focus touchpoints on companies with the highest fit and prospects demonstrating the highest awareness levels.

Unlike Hightouch, which processes batches with a fixed logic, Cargo allows for conditional logic at every stage of the workflow.

This approach enables the business team to manage the entire process with minimal need for engineering support, streamlining the execution of targeted campaigns.

The outcome#

60% engineering overhead saved

The turnaround time for experimenting with new segments has significantly decreased, reflecting in lower customer acquisition costs. The ability to rapidly test and iterate on different segments without extensive engineering support permits the business teams to test more variations on their tactics to find the winning ones with less dependendence on engineering resources.

2/3rd revenue tools replaced by Cargo

Replacing workflows across various tools like Zapier and Hightouch with Cargo streamlines Gorgias's technology stack. This consolidation has led to reduced software overhead and improved Gorgias' ability to handle debugging at the business teams' level.