As India rides the wave of digital transformation, new trends in technology and business growth are emerging across sectors and geographies. Leading the charge around this transformation are Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, which have been leveraging the power of cloud technology in innovative ways to chart new frontiers of growth.
To showcase and understand the changes that the new India is undergoing, YS is hosting Sassy Saturdays, in association with AWS, featuring experts from across India’s SaaS ecosystem who will share their unique insights around this digital transformation and how it will shape the ecosystem.
In this edition of Sassy Saturdays, we look at how Inventa, a leading Deep-personalisation Platform developed by Cutting Chai Technologies (CCT) — is reimagining communication between people, content, and businesses in an Online-Offline (O2O) world.
The Omnichannel consumer opportunity
In the past decade, the wide adoption of smartphones and Internet-connected devices, has heralded a golden age for consumerism. The massive number of products and experiences available anytime and anywhere, meant advertisers and marketers needed an edge to grab the attention of consumers.
Recent consumer surveys have shown that such efforts stand a chance of driving a greater impact on consumers only when it speaks to them on a personal level. A Salesforce survey of consumers noted that 70 percent believed that a company’s understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty. In a recent Personalisation Pulse Check study by Accenture, over 90 percent consumers said they are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
Personalisation based marketing currently is a multi-billion dollar and fast-growing industry, with companies leveraging advanced analytics and technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to secure deep consumer insights and provide more personalised omnichannel experiences.
Anand Virani and Rohit Kapoor, both former Business leaders at Qualcomm, co-founded CCT after observing that while consumers spent significant amounts of time interacting within both their offline and online worlds, no one was providing real time personalised recommendations that leveraged a consumer’s online and offline footprints.
“I saw a world in which the online and offline lives of humans and consumers converge on their mobile phones and smart devices and started to think deeply about the value this could create for both consumers and businesses globally. This led to creating a platform for smart devices that seamlessly blends the online and offline profile of users and matches this with the world around the user, to generate relevant and contextual communication on behalf of our customers,” says Anand Virani, Founder and CEO, CCT.
Bridging the gap between online and offline consumer experiences
Inventa, the company’s flagship product, uses patented technology and proprietary algorithms to create a dynamic and holistic Online-Offline (O2O) profile of a user and to deliver precise, spam-free communication to the User’s mobile and/or IoT device.
Businesses can integrate Inventa’s Software Development Kit (SDK) with their mobile apps to communicate with their customer based on his preferences at a suitable time and relevant location. The founders claim that Inventa powered communication significantly drives customer engagement and conversion across multiple industries and segments.
“Digital adoption has accelerated rapidly over the last years and customers are comfortable interacting with businesses via their mobile applications. This gives businesses the opportunity to better understand their customers and offer them highly relevant offerings. Inventa enables powerful use cases across consumer facing industries including retail, telecom, financial services, hospitality etc. and delivers tangible value to the end customer and the enterprise,” says Rohit Kapoor, Co-founder and COO, CCT.
For example, by using Inventa, sporting goods shops can send notifications on a sale on high-end running shoes to experienced runners in the park nearby. Hotel concierge services can provide personalised recommendations based on the guest’s preferences to make a vacation all the more memorable. Even credit card companies can earn greater brand loyalty by providing customers with personalised recommendations and offers based on their preferences to truly bridge the gap between online and offline experiences.
Enabling a new era of personalisation with AWS
Right from its core infrastructure to its deep personalisation capabilities, AWS’s cloud services play a central role in powering the Inventa Platform. To name a few, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) helps in meeting its storage requirements, while Inventa’s computing needs are augmented by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service from AWS, helps optimise the use of these computing resources.
Inventa’s O2O profiling, ML-led recommendations, and communication engine, which are key to its offerings, are also powered by cloud technology. What sets Inventa apart is that it stores and generates data based on a users’ online and offline interactions, integrates and analyses them to create rich, highly personalised profiles that are updated in real-time. These deep personalisation capabilities are augmented by Amazon Personalize, along with Inventa’s own set of analytics and personalisation algorithms. Inventa then shares these profiles to its customers, which help them to enhance the personalisation of their users’ experiences.
“AWS has been a great cloud partner in our journey to reimagine customer personalisation for the online-offline era. The rich portfolio of AWS services that we have adopted has allowed us to rapidly adapt and deploy Inventa to the diverse needs of our customers. The Amazon Personalize service, with its ability to develop and deploy custom machine learning models, enables us to offer highly customised recommendations capabilities to customers across Industries. The support from the AWS team has been phenomenal,” says Badal Shah, Product Management at Inventa.
Inventa is designed with customer data privacy and protection at its core.
Customer communication is triggered via explicit opt-ins and preference sharing. Further, the Inventa platform uses a modular design for the separation of customer data and microservices and offers hosting flexibility to accommodate the needs of multiple types of businesses.
These capabilities are delivered with a fully integrated, end-end and managed SaaS platform that allows businesses to set up and deploy at scale within days and not weeks.
With leading payment and retail apps in India and Southeast Asia as its clients, Inventa has been powering the personalisation of the experience of millions of consumers and thousands of physical stores across these regions.
The company has plans to go global with Inventa and is currently raising funds for serving opportunities in North America and the EU via strategic partners and direct deals.
“Deep personalisation is the future of customer engagement. Businesses and brands need to build stronger relationships with their customers, by offering curated and personalised experiences that speak uniquely to their customer’s ever-changing and evolving preferences. This is critical in the post COVID era as businesses rebuild customer relationships across their Online and Offline touchpoints. With Inventa, we are excited to be leading this transformation for our customers and partners,” says Anand.
