Customer satisfaction and retention always remain the topmost priority work for all brands. Also, we all know that this is not at all an easy job in so competitive world. But with the help of technology, brands are very much in control these days. These new and innovative tech solutions assure best customer experience for them. Locobuzz Solutions, one of the leading technology solution companies currently in India is helping many brands to manage their customer engagement workflow. To know more about the company, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal spoke to Vishal Agarwal Co-Founder and CEO Locobuzz Solutions. Check below the excerpts:
Rajeev: Why did you think of entering such a competitive business space?
Vishal: In 2015, the year Locobuzz was founded, there was a heightened opportunity to tap into a goldmine of data analytics and intelligence sourced from social media. The sheer volume and reach of online engagement and social media at the time established the purpose of our company. We knew right away that when converged with the optimal technology, AI-driven data analytics would propel every single business right into the future, ahead of their competitors. With powerful analytics and large volumes of data processing capabilities combined with sentiment analysis, workflows for team to engage with customers we generated ‘Location-based buzz’, and Locobuzz was born.
Soon enough with social media becoming a norm in our lifestyles, we began to observe how quickly customer expectations started to evolve, and there was a need created where customers demanded instant engagement with their preferred brands online. These changes solidified our intent to build smart technologies that creates stronger relationships between brands and customers and increases their lifetime value. We went onto creating a platform that today connects organizations across a spectrum of digital channels and leverage analytics and automation to increase efficiency across business processes and create a seamless experience for customers.
Rajeev: What were the initial challenges that you faced in building Locobuzz?
Vishal: Today, we are a platform that can process nearly 50 million datasets per month for some of the biggest brands in the country and abroad. When we had started out, some of our biggest challenges was to create team workflows and engagement initiatives that could handle each individual client’s large-scale unique customer-centric requirement. Creating a workflow engine, acceptable by all our customers was definitely a challenge as there were differences in how each one approached their customer relationships. Not to mention, the development and training of the platform’s machine learning capabilities to include a wide range of languages so that they could be accessible to customers on a nation-wide and global scale. We also built our automation solutions in such a way, that we could enable brands to be “always-on” and available round-the-clock to meet the standards of an ever-evolving customer base.
Today, with many years of successes, challenges and trials and of course, the right investments, large conglomerates from different sectors like BFSI, Telecom, Aviation, Hospitality, E-commerce and Automation trust us as their go-to technology partners in the modern day. To them, we are able to deliver consumer insights, advanced workflows, real-time data analytics, and effortless customers experience management that helps them streamline their CX processes, and has led them to becoming thought-leaders in their domain.
Rajeev: How do you see the technology advancements transforming customer experience across sectors?
Vishal: In this day and age, innovation is a constant and no solution can be set in stone. It’s not a bad thing – a new-age innovator will view this as a thrilling opportunity to be as adaptable as possible, because the point of technology is to facilitate growth in as many dimensions as possible. When it comes to technology in customer experience management, advancements are but of course, mandatory, because tech advancements work hand-in-hand with customer behavior and shifting marketing trends.
At Locobuzz, we look to aid brands to serve their customers as effectively as possible, and the workflows which the brands use should be seamless in itself. The point is to provide effective management and deep insights that can aid strategic brand growth and stellar customer engagement. All this, while keeping in mind that there are other players in the market, so the brand should be able to benchmark themselves against the competition, do better than them, and for that, we need to provide them with robust automation and intelligence. We have a dedicated task force of data scientists who constantly train and upgrade the machine learning capabilities and NLP strengths of our AI models. The underlying intention of our AI-led technology is to encourage automation to do the grunge work and relieve human minds to take these powerful insights, and create revolutionary solutions.
It’s always interesting to see how different industries adopt and benefit from the instillation of AI-tech in the space of customer experience. For example, chatbots in the hospitality sector are assigned to handle reservations and promote visual experiences. In the BFSI, bots deliver automated financial advice and provide simple services like the processing of cheque book requests, viewing of balance, reporting of credit/debit card loss, etc without any wait-time.
These are the kind of solutions that lead customers to feeling empowered and taken care of 24x7. It also builds a lot of trust which is a critical factor customer retention. The telecom and automotive industries also share the benefits of integrating CRM platforms and big data analytics for large scale customer profiling, that eventually help brands present tailored experiences to users.
Take Jio, for example, the company has digitizing their CX with voice-led services, eCommerce, digital personal assistants, and more, to integrate their brand with the social lives of their customers. Digital experiences start and end with the customer, and it is remarkable how technology has been pivotal in the ‘feel-good’ aspect of customer satisfaction. It truly is a revolutionary merge.
Rajeev: How do you enable organizations to deliver an enhanced customer service experience?
Vishal: In this day and age, customer satisfaction comes with being present on the channels where your customers are, knowing exactly what they are looking for and engaging with them in real-time. This highlights the undeniable need for social listening and highly developed AI automation across all sectors and businesses. The sole purpose of social listening and response management becomes about bridging the gap between brands and their customers. The right technologies can streamline and facilitate customer experience processes, and pivot the capacity of the brands to serve their customers and cut past their competitors too.
The modern citizen lives online now, and providing an omnichannel holistic approach for delivering stable and unified CX is crucial. A platform like ours works to ensure that a brand’s engagement game is strong, well informed and strategized, and that their marketing and branding efforts standout to their customers impactfully.
In a nutshell, we leverage technology to help brands strengthen their relationships with consumers and increase the life time value of a customer!
Rajeev: How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) proving to be a major difference-maker in customer management?
Vishal: Modern AI helps to create self-serve models for customer service, therefore enabling the customer to access services that doesn’t depend on another person to be facilitate aid. AI access millions of data points and information in order to help brands design technology that in turn help make memorable customer experience. A wide example of this is the ability for customers to order food on their mobile in a few easy clicks and have it delivered to their doorsteps. Customer satisfaction is retained the most when a journey is seamless, tailored and answers questions before they are asked - the platform processes sentiments and customer insights from different social channels and helps provide key information to a personalized experience.
Rajeev: Please tell me about the investments/funding that you have raised in the last couple of months? How are you planning to drive new growth opportunities?
Vishal: On the 11th of May, 2021, we raised a capital of 9 crores INR in a pre-series A round from SIDBI Venture Capital Limited (SVCL) for Locobuzz Solutions. As a SaaS company, we have raised funds to scale up on our technology platform and strengthen our inbound lead engine.
We have deployed some of the funds toward the expansion of our technology team, business development team, client services team with critical hires as well as focused marketing efforts. Inbound lead mechanisms and processes also require some investment at the initial stages, and the goal remains to ensure a deeper reach in the India market and newer geographies such as S.E Asia and the US.
This funding has equipped us with the ability to invest strategically in the advancement of our technology. Currently, we are in the process of moving ourselves to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Locobuzz has always led the Customer experience industry in India through our technologies and we pride ourselves as thought leaders in this space. With this funding, we aim to keep our commitment to evolving and leading the SaaS-enabled CX space. We continue to ensure that our clients have access to the best technologies and we consider the funding utilized in tech enhancement and R&D a very critical move.
We believe that with this investment we will be able to do better for our customers. In the latest update, we launched our mobile app on iOS and Android devices - and unlike other players in this space, remain a holistic app service that allows people to effortlessly get work done on-the-go. We continue to work hard towards creating a world class SaaS platform from India and creating value for our clients, partners and investors. We are proud to say that we are Built in India, for the world.
