How Persona Transformed Customer Insight Delivery with Sigma

Persona is building the identity layer of the internet, providing a secure, flexible, and fully customizable online identity verification platform. Whether a customer is prioritizing stringent fraud prevention or a seamless, low-friction user experience, Persona must deliver analytics that are fast, accurate, and tailored to each unique implementation. 

By adopting Sigma, Persona’s Customer Insights team modernized how analytics are delivered—both internally and to hundreds of customers. This shift enabled Persona to deliver true self-service analytics, cut dashboard load times by more than 75%, and increase customer adoption by over 8x, all while maintaining the same operational footprint.

The Challenge: Slow Performance and Rigid Dashboards

Persona’s previous analytics solution created friction for both the data team and customer-facing users. Building or modifying dashboards required long data extracts, complex formatting, and repeated rebuilds whenever a single field was missing. 

“The cycle of extracting, building, and re-extracting just to add one data field was unbearably slow.”

These performance challenges directly translated into an increase in churn risk. Dashboards frequently stalled at the “spinning wheel of death,” often taking minutes or failing to load altogether. Many users abandoned the page before ever seeing their data. On top of that, dashboards did not offer any drill-down capabilities, meaning that a simple follow-up question like investigating a dip in conversion on a specific day required a custom query and a two to three day delay.

This rigid, slow, and opaque model could not scale, limiting Persona’s ability to support customer growth and deliver timely, trustworthy insights.

Building a High-Performance, Self-Service Analytics Platform

Persona turned to Sigma to connect directly with governed data models in Snowflake, and modernize both internal and customer-facing analytics. The shift immediately resolved its core performance bottleneck: dashboards that previously took nearly a minute to load now load in seconds.

With this foundation, Eric’s four-person team was able to support hundreds of managed customers without adding headcount. They created a “Library of Sigma Dashboards,” offering targeted analytics packages for use cases such as KYC onboarding, transaction monitoring, anti-fraud workflows, and conversion optimization. Customers could directly engage with the most relevant data—from a high-volume onboarding flow to the detection of fraud rates as low as 0.01%.

A critical enabler of this scale was Sigma’s Input Tables, which allow users to contribute data and modify logic directly. Persona uses Input Tables to manage key mapping rules and write changes back to Snowflake, eliminating hours of SQL work. The capability also underpins a new scenario-planning application that lets Persona customers model “what could happen” before committing to full-scale product experiments.

“Input Tables and writing back to Snowflake are huge for my team. I don’t have to hard-code logic anymore. Business users can update it themselves, and I can focus on higher-value work.”

Business Impact: Higher Engagement and Full Self-Service

The impact of Sigma was twofold, strengthening customer engagement while simultaneously empowering internal teams to operate more efficiently.

Driving Customer Engagement and Trust

The shift to Sigma delivered immediate, measurable improvements. Customer usage of dashboards increased by more than 60%, with over 80% of managed customers actively engaging with the analytics Persona provides.

“We used to see maybe 10 to 20 percent of customers interacting with dashboards. Now we’re at over 80 percent of active usage in the last 30 days.”

This increase in adoption fundamentally changed how customers engage with their data. Instead of relying on static reports or follow-up requests, users can drill into trends, download transaction-level detail, and investigate anomalies on their own. As Gordon explains, Sigma enables his team to highlight “what is happening,” while customers independently investigate the “why,” strengthening confidence in the data and reducing friction in customer conversations.

Empowering Internal Teams

Sigma’s self-service model has dramatically reduced operational burden. Requests that once required days of manual work are now resolved in minutes, clearing the backlog entirely and freeing the team to focus on higher-value initiatives.

“Days have turned into minutes. We’ve completely cleared our backlog, and I’ve gained almost a full month of time back this year alone.” 

The efficiency has extended well beyond the Customer Insights team. Product, Sales, and other functions now rely on Sigma for their own workflows, including experimentation analysis and operational reporting.

By combining governed Snowflake data with two-way data flow through Sigma Input Tables, Persona has established a scalable analytics foundation—one that supports both customer-facing insight delivery and internal decision making at speed.

Positioning Persona for What’s Next

Looking ahead, Persona is focused on advancing true customer self-service. Sigma Tenants will enable data-savvy customers to explore governed data models and build custom dashboards themselves—shifting the company from prescribing insights to empowering customer-guided analytics.

Persona is also starting to integrate Sigma’s AI capabilities to accelerate data discovery. The team plans to use natural language exploration to kickstart investigations, prepare more effectively for customer conversations, and identify opportunities for product expansion.

Together, Sigma Tenants and AI represent the next phase of Persona’s analytics evolution, extending speed, flexibility, and trust across the customer experience.

Learn more about Sigma's AI here and Sigma Tenants here.