To elevate customer experience, data must seamlessly flow: Resulticks CEO Redickaa Subrammanian
CIOs and CTOs are constantly looking for ways to find solutions for elevate customer’s experience. This is what Resulticks with its big data-driven, AI-powered, omnichannel approach promise to deliver.
In an interview with Mohd Ujaley, Resulticks co-founder and CEO Redickaa Subrammanian says, “By offering consistent, compelling, highly personalized communication throughout the entire customer lifecycle from awareness to engagement to conversion to brand loyalty, we have the ability to say that at an individual level this is the contribution of revenue to a particular brand.”
How has been Resulticks journey so far?
Since I come from an advertising background, I started an agency in 2004 primarily focused on digital communication. I used to be a part of the management team of an organization called DXC Technology where I had a lot of time and opportunities to dabble in technology. I used to part of one of the entities that eventually got acquired, and in that entity I had built something called an interactive engineering practice. Prior to this around 2000 – 2001, I focused on bringing together engineering and creative design capabilities to conduct programs or projects that delivered certain business outcomes. Whether it was a large scale focus development, a type 2 contract management system or bringing data from the middle end to the front end – it was all about user experience which was focused on delivering business outcomes.
Interakt Digital Group started by me and my business partner in 2004, and it focused only on digital. We had the opportunity to service nearly 150 brands globally in the digital space because we were there to capture data. Data was always very close to our heart even much earlier on, given we had the technical capabilities just as much as creative capabilities. We had multiple offers from all advertising groups when they started picking up their shopping bags, wanting to acquire digital capabilities. Eventually by 2012, the whole world was already transformed to recognize that digital was the way to go. Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG and EY were talking about Big Data and Digital Transformation.
Given our years of experience with digital and having worked on many of the platforms that tried to come in and help the marketeer automate the process of marketing and customer engagement, we had used all of those tools. We understood the capabilities that were required for how digital functions today. Essentially, we are talking about multiple channels, devices and identities and the fact that everything has to be in real time and individualized in terms of personalization. That is when we decided in 2012, that we can occupy this space and create a big spot for ourselves because we have the marketing knowledge, the technological knowledge and the overall knowledge of all the platforms that exist. That is why and how we created Resulticks from the ground up.
Adobe, IBM and Oracle all stepped into the space of customer engagement because the market demanded it. They bought marketing tools and created a hood, under which there are still silos. Resulticks, on the other hand, went in from ground up, and completely integrated it. Today you see CIOs and CTOs are looking for ways on how they can find solutions for customer’s experience. To get to that level of customer experience, data must seamlessly flow from end to end right across multiple channels and devices. You need to see whether it interacts with your social, is it online or offline. The data flow should be instantaneous and that is what we focus on doing and bring that as our value proposition to customers.
What kind of product portfolio do you have right now? What is the USP of your organization?
We have only one product and it is an integrated product called Resulticks – Real Time Conversation Marketing Cloud. We don’t modularize it and sell it, but it comes with 3 major capabilities. The first one is called Master Audience Data management or Customer Data Platform, which brings all the data together. The second pillar the Omnichannel Customer Orchestration deals with the customer journeys, whether it is a single dimensional journey or multidimensional journey. Whether it is based on any and every channel they come on, it helps to identify customers and what should be done when customers come on in the next channel.
The third capability is the Analytics Layer, which is the most critical. Although the world of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is super heightened, we first build the data for the customer, making sure that data then starts to learn which is where ML comes in. On top of that, we apply intelligence which is where the AI Layer comes, where we give all the deep insights and orchestrate the customer journey based on the insights that the system provides to the marketeers.
What kind of technology platforms do you use?
The product is built .NET (Dot NET) and the backend is a big data based platform. It has both the sequel and no-sequel at the back, so we run on Hadoop and we are hosted on IBM SoftLayer, Azure and AWS. We have our solutions on all the 3 service providers. It depends on the customers; if a customer is already on Azure that is good for us because we are also majorly on Azure as the entire technology is based on Microsoft Technology. The IBM Software is software we started off with when we began our development and we still are in some of their territories and some customers prefer the solution to be on the IBM Software.
We are a full cloud, SaaS based platform, but we also have a format which we call as the hybrid model. Today primarily between the world of healthcare and BFSI globally, companies don’t want to put PII information on the cloud. We have a model which we call Hybrid where they keep the PII information on premise. We have the ability to hash it or tokenize it (tokenized ID means none of the email IDs or mobile numbers or any of the actual contact information, will go to the cloud). On cloud, the marketeer or the business will typically use that segment to orchestrate the journey and then when the time of delivery happens the system comes back on-premise, picks up the necessary contact information and triggers the communication from on-premise. This way the data loss is never there.
The impact of a leak affects everyone in the industry in terms of security and privacy. That is another initiative that we have seen, where all the information security groups within the organization typically give us the highest marks, on our data security aspect, data confidentiality, security and pricing, because of the hybrid modern capability that we bring to the table.
What are your expectations from India market in terms of the business growth?
Our global vision translates back to India; we want to be the number one player in India before the end of the year which is a very aggressive target. This is because any dream is a dream until it’s realized. We see that we are in a very good position as an organization, given our legacy knowledge and understanding of marketing and technology. Today, the whole world is focused on data and data-driven customer engagement because there are so many different terminologies being used. There is only one platform that I want everyone to think of, respect, cherish, implement and realize value from, in the space of seamless customer engagement or audience engagement and that needs to be Resulticks.
We want to associate Resulticks with anything related to seamless customer engagement and that is our vision. Obviously India is one of the jewels in our crown. When we launched the platform, our initial set of customers, all happened to be from India because of the data volume. We cannot expect it to come from any other country other than India and China. With the population and the kind of volume of data that is coming, I think India is an important market for us.
India is booming in terms of digital adoption, understanding AI and ML. If we don’t take advantage of that opportunity, given the phenomenal aspect of our solution and understanding of marketing and technology, I think we will be leaving a lot of value on the table for our competition to pick up.
We are well on the road. We stepped into the market in 2014 and in five years, I personally tried to create interest and brand visibility. Nobody knew who Resulticks was 3 years ago, we even added ourselves into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I had to establish credibility and win the trust and respect of all the marketers here through the passion that I brought to the table. We were able to show how businesses can realize value from technology. Technology is just a facilitator and at end of the day if you don’t utilize it correctly it sits on the shelf.
That is where I think we did a lot of hard work and ground work of going in and socializing the product with all the CMOs and the CIOs. We are at the consideration stage of every brand who thinks of marketing automation or customer engagement; Resulticks is always there on the top of mind. We have made good progress in five years and by the end of this year, we think we will definitely have all the potential to get to a leadership position because there are lots of customers who trust and respect us.
How are you placed right now in India in terms of the sales and HR strengths?
We have a very large team here with about 30 people in the sales team in India and we are covering all the three major territories (North also handles the east, South, and West). We have a good customer base across all major verticals, such as BFSI which is our first key vertical given our hybrid model offering. There is also healthcare, retail, travel & hospitality, FMCG and consumer electronics. India is where some of our product development happens, so we have a big engineering team of 185 people based out of Chennai.
What kind of investment your are looking to make in India?
We are always looking for investments, and just completed a raise thought I cannot specifically disclose the numbers. We are also looking at another major raise because as an organization outside of India, we are expanding simultaneously into 4 major continent area. One is India specifically, where we want to get to a leadership position. Similarly we are trying to get to the leadership position across Southeast Asia, we already have offices in all the 6 cities, which include Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
We are expanding to Australia because it is a highly evolved market but it is also a market that is fatigued, where all the senior players have already entered and made a lot of promises but have struggled to deliver. Customers are looking for the Holy Grail, somebody to come in and really give them the relief. If we get our strategy right and can get customers, like what we have done in India, we can definitely make a lot of investments to get to that position very quickly. This is my strong belief. In the same way the US is such a huge territory. So our focus is on the US, India, Southeast Asia and Australia for this year. Next year, we are looking at EMEA and LATAM, for the final year which is 2021, we will be looking at Japan, China and Korea. That’s our aim of getting a global footprint, expanding and attaining that global leadership position.
How do you differentiate Resulticks from your peers?
The clear differentiator between us and some of our other peers is our focus to deliver business outcomes. We are more of an outcome based platform that is selling a technology and walking away. We have the ability to say that at an individual level this is the contribution of revenue to a particular brand. We always focus on uplifts of revenue. We try to see what kind of uplift of revenue customers can get from a particular segment by leveraging technologies such as Resulticks. We are able to show 3 to 5 times better uplifts in revenue by using the power of data-driven automation.
I have a very famous analogy that I always use – we are in a world where we are surrounded by water, but we cannot consume the water unless it is stocked effectively. The similar problem we have now is that there is too much data lying around. Then the situation becomes about which data is really actionable and how to process it, so that it can be more contextualized and relevant. This is the challenge that the entire globe is facing today. We as an organization want to leverage this opportunity well and take customers and brands to the next level.
