At the time, this last line of defense consisted of Ibotta employees and local freelance workers. The solution wasn't ideal. “It's challenging work,” says Zev Barsky, Ibotta’s Vice President of Operations. “It can be repetitive, incredibly detail-oriented, and it can get very expensive. The majority of our receipts are done automatically, but the number that goes to this final moderation step is still substantial.”
During holiday shopping seasons, the number of receipts requiring moderation swelled as users flocked to the app. “There were days in the company's history,” says Barsky, “where literally everybody, up to the CEO, had to hop into the moderation queue and check receipts just so we could get those rebates into customers’ hands.”
When keeping up with the increasing workload became too much to handle, Barsky set out to find a better solution. “I looked at a number of different outsourcing vendors, including some in Colorado that claimed to offer a high level of accuracy,” says Barsky. “I also explored the potential for doing this overseas, researching vendors all over the world that provide the kind of data-management support we needed.”
The new vendor needed to meet or exceed current performance benchmarks immediately, and then achieve 10–15% better accuracy and nearly 50% more efficiency, as measured in processing time. “We set some really aggressive goals up front.” says Barsky. “We ended up weeding out a number of vendors because they weren’t up to the challenge.”
