Carista - 173tech

Data Strategy

From fragmented data to a unified view of the customer journey

Objective

Build a data roadmap that drives measurable business value, prioritising the highest-impact initiatives first.

Obstacle

Disconnected systems across the customer journey meant no single view of user behaviour, and existing reports could not link hardware sales and in-app engagement.

Outcome

Identified $57,000 in savings and delivered a phased roadmap that unified marketing and subscription analytics, with value at every stage.

Background

Carista is a leading provider of aftermarket car services, empowering drivers with advanced diagnostics, maintenance tracking and personalised vehicle insights. With an ambition to double its active subscriber base within a year, Carista needed stronger data foundations to understand customer behaviour and optimise subscription performance.

The partnership began with a focused half-day strategy session with senior leadership, mapping the full customer journey and identifying the highest-value touchpoints. This set the direction for everything that followed.

Strategy Review

Fragmented Data, No Full Picture: Data sat in disconnected systems, including backend databases, Amazon sales, and marketing platforms, with no integration between them. This made it difficult to track how customers moved across touchpoints. Existing reports were inflexible and could not connect marketing activity, hardware sales and in-app behaviour, so the team had no way to see the full customer journey in one place.

Rising Costs, No Predictive Capability:Querying raw data directly in BigQuery was causing unexpected cost spikes, making even routine analysis expensive. Beyond cost, there was no capability to identify churn signals or predict high-value customers. Without these insights, optimising engagement strategies and growing lifetime value was not possible at the pace the business needed.

Solution

Strategic Business Alignment: We worked closely with the founding team to define business goals and identify the data use cases most likely to drive growth. Through in-depth interviews with stakeholders, we mapped the entire customer journey and pinpointed the areas with the greatest impact on engagement and retention. This alignment between data strategy and business objectives set the foundation for every initiative that followed.

Scalable Data Infrastructure: We audited the existing infrastructure and data processes, identifying the silos that were slowing the team down. We then defined KPIs aligned to the customer journey so Carista could measure growth at every stage. From this, we built a phased data roadmap designed to deliver immediate value while scaling analytics capabilities over time.

Impact

Iterative Delivery: We started by integrating the highest-value data sources, backend databases and Amazon sales, to deliver immediate insights into key business metrics. From there, we brought in marketing, CRM and Shopify analytics to build a fuller picture of the customer journey. The result was a unified data pipeline connecting all major systems, giving the team reliable access to data across the business.

Strengthening Data Capabilities: Building internal data capability was a priority. We helped Carista onboard a dedicated data specialist to own and expand the analytics infrastructure long-term. Our goal is always to set clients up for independence, while remaining available for support when needed.