Executive Summary

As the data and AI company scaled, it needed a solution to ensure on-brand communications worldwide. The company turned to Grammarly to set an impressive standard of writing quality and cut the cost of miscommunication. 

Databricks teams saw significant productivity improvements, citing a 1994% ROI since implementing Grammarly. Marketing cut editing cycle times for thousands of documents by 50% and saved copywriters and editors 540 hours—time reallocated to more impactful work.

The CX/Support team improved the time to resolution by 25% and increased the average number of cases closed by 10–15%.

Grammarly for Business is essential to helping Databricks content teams align on communication standards. It also enables frontline technical support teams to engage with professionalism, clarity, and empathy. And Grammarly helps everyone communicate more effectively in a singular brand voice for an exceptional customer experience. Databricks credits Grammarly with helping to accelerate writing and reviews, protect its brand, upskill employees, and accelerate employee onboarding. All of this amounts to an estimated $1.4 million saved annually. 

The Marketing Email That Almost Slipped Through

For Databricks, trust and professionalism mean everything. 

So when a marketing operations manager intercepted a customer-facing email containing errors, Databricks knew it needed a better line of defense to ensure customer-facing messages meet the brand’s high standards. It was essential to prevent communication errors from becoming public.

“Nothing is more important to a corporate marketing team than ensuring a company is represented well out in the world. Ensuring that our brand is professional, fun, and enjoyable for all our customers is paramount,” per Databricks Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Jenna Kozel King.

The Challenge

Databricks—the data and AI company that over 10,000 organizations rely on—had grown steadily to over 6,000 team members. However, the in-house editorial team was still small and mighty. As talented as the lean team was, it was not easy for them to manually edit every instance of marketing copy, every corporate communication, and every customer-facing message.

“We’re surrounded by words, and words are still how we communicate,” said Neil Hamilton, Databricks’s Head of Editorial. “But if you can’t articulate your thoughts and communicate concisely, the impact can be immediate. People get the memo, but they don’t understand it.”

The company sought a credible, cloud-based solution that would uplevel communication for all customer-facing teams. It was essential that the new tool was easy to implement—and worked across the apps where their teams were already working. It found all that, plus enterprise-grade security it could trust, in Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant. 

The Solution

Hundreds of “Bricksters” (Databricks for “team members”) already used Grammarly. Grammarly for Business was not only easy to deploy, but bringing everyone together under a corporate license unlocked new enterprise features for those who already knew and loved Grammarly. It also worked out of the box with the company’s existing productivity tools, making it simple for Databricks to invest in licenses across the teams, including Marketing, Sales, CX/Support, Finance, IT, Engineering, and Legal.

Grammarly’s in-line writing assistance helped Databricks deliver high-quality, on-brand, clear, and concise communication, allowing its small but mighty editorial team to multiply its reach.

Databricks integrated a custom company style guide, so users receive real-time, on-brand suggestions as they write. “Here at Databricks, we’ve got our own way of writing and our own way of doing things,” Hamilton said. “Grammarly recognizes custom spellings of words like Lakehouse. It spells it correctly, and if someone gets it wrong, it corrects them.”

Traditionally, in publishing, there are safeguards, Hamilton explains. “You always have these lines of defense before something gets printed or goes out and gets published. With Grammarly, we can automate that whole process. 

“It’s sort of invisible, and that’s a good thing,” Hamilton said. “People are using it automatically. It’s giving helpful suggestions and coaching without you needing to seek out its counsel. It’s always there to help people write better.”

Driving Marketing Results on Day 1

The marketing team felt Grammarly’s value immediately. They send over 2,100 documents annually for editorial review.

“We collaborate remotely most of the time, so having Grammarly has been extra helpful,” says Millie Lapidario, Senior Copy Editor. “Our teams are growing, more people are writing, and more people are contributing various opinions about editorial style. Grammarly helps us define and standardize our editorial style, which ultimately helps our brand voice shine through.

“We produce an amazing volume of content—more than I’ve ever had in my career for the size of this team—and we do it quickly,” Hamilton said. “One of the reasons we can do that is because the content arrives in better shape. I’m skimming instead of grinding through copy like a proofreader. We can pull back and focus on the right messages, the right construction, what we can cut, and how we can polish to improve it. That’s something we couldn’t do before Grammarly.”

Databricks editors saved an average of 15 minutes per document. Because Grammarly helped each document meet an improved standard of quality, it cut editing time in half.

With Grammarly enabled across teams, Databricks has managed to scale the content creation and review processes to keep up with the volume without sacrificing quality. The editorial team has more time to focus on value-added content projects, as Grammarly helps make “good” content even better and gets it out the door faster.

“Now that everyone is starting on the same baseline, the same standard, I can focus more of my time on the quality of the writing, the quality of work, and the content . . . It frees me up to focus on strategy for the company and our team,” says Kozel King.

Upleveling Customer Support—and the Brand’s Reputation

It isn’t just the marketing team that benefits from Grammarly. 

Most of the 100+ technical support engineers who provide frontline customer support are non-native English speakers. It’s imperative to Databricks that they communicate clearly, with nuance, empathy, and professionalism. Grammarly allows them to do that.

The stakes are high because brand reputation is potentially at risk. “You may do ten good things but one bad thing, and your entire credibility as a company is on the line,” said Narsi Subramanian, VP of Support. “Our Support team is the face of the company, so using a tool like Grammarly is extremely important.” Subramanian and team use Grammarly in the Support team’s hiring and onboarding process, which saves nearly $8,000 in employee productivity annually and $50,000 annually in soft skills training.

Subramanian started seeing results within a week of implementing Grammarly. Because Grammarly is installed at the browser level as a plug-in, it was very easy for the support engineers to adopt. “Since then, language and communication are the least of my worries,” he said. 

Subramanian estimates a 10-15% increase in the average number of cases resolved and a 25% increase in time to resolution. “Frankly speaking, I cannot imagine working in a support organization without Grammarly,” stated Subramanian.

“If the customer doesn’t have to come back to clarify the questions we’re asking them, you’re reducing the time to solve an issue,” he said. “I’m not only saving time because things are getting resolved faster, but I’m also very confident that the experience going back to the customer is quite uniform, which is very, very important.”

Now that Grammarly is a core part of Databricks’s communication infrastructure, the company doesn’t worry about poor communication. Grammarly has not only helped them ensure high brand standards throughout their content, emails, and messages but has also improved productivity, driven efficiencies, and up-leveled the customer experience across the board.

While the savings might seem invaluable, Databricks has reported an estimated $1.4 million savings annually since implementing Grammarly. That’s 1994% ROI. In addition to those quantifiable benefits, Databricks has greater control and protection of its brand identity. “Databricks and Grammarly go hand in hand. We’re helping data teams solve the world’s toughest problems, and Grammarly is helping people communicate through them.” — Jenna Kozel King, Databricks VP of Corporate Marketing