Posted by “Marketers need to have a clear purpose for their data,” says Resulticks CEO Redickaa Subrammanian.
Digital has influenced every aspect of business functions including marketing and branding.
And that’s a new sweet spot marketing technology (Martech) companies like Resulticks is exploring and building innovative integrated and intelligent solutions for marketers.
By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics and other new technologies, Resulticks is helping marketers and marketing organisations to deliver desired outcomes and ROI for their respective companies and clients.
In this interview with TechHerald.in, Resulticks Co-founder and CEO Redickaa Subrammanian talks on her company’s solutions and the role of technologies like AI, ML and analytics in the solutions.
She also discusses how data is vital in helping organisations achieve their business goals and the challenges faced by marketing organisations.
Edited excerpts…
Q1. Resulticks is largely into marketing technology space, so can you give a brief about the company and its offerings?
Redickaa Subrammanian: Resulticks stands apart from other marketing automation solutions in two significant respects—our deep roots in digital marketing and our totally integrated structure, both the direct result of having been built from the ground up by marketers to address specific marketing challenges.
My partner, Dakshen Ram, and I created and ran a quite successful, global digital marketing agency, Interakt Digital Group, from 2004 until 2014. Through our work with more than 120 clients—including some of the world’s most recognizable brands—we gained experience with virtually every marketing technology platform in existence at the time.
We learned both their strengths and weaknesses and becoming acutely aware of the universal difficulty in managing big data, orchestrating omnichannel communications, and documenting marketing ROI.
Leveraging that knowledge and experience, our team designed and built the Resulticks platform to address each of those challenges and launched it in 2014.
We’ve continuously enhanced the solution ever since to address even more fully our clients’ most pressing marketing challenges including delivering a seamless, highly individualized customer experience in real time while also ensuring data security and privacy.
Some of our industry-leading innovations have been the first-to-market with voice assistant marketing and the world’s first blockchain-enabled solution.
Our innovation and rapid growth have captured the attention of industry analysts. As a result, we feel very honored to have been name to the Gartner Magic Quadrant alongside other industry giants for three years in a row.
With our headquarters in Singapore and offices in the US, India, and Australia, we’re pleased to count clients among a number of Fortune 500 companies and top tier regional corporations, as well as SMEs across all industry verticals. We cater to clients across all industries such as BFSI, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, consumer electronics, real estate and other industries.
Q2. What technologies are empowering Resulticks solutions?
Redickaa Subrammanian: Three major pillars support the Resulticks platform. First is the master audience data management capability—referred to as customer data platform. It consolidates both structured and unstructured data from all the brand’s relevant internal and external sources.
The second pillar is our omnichannel customer orchestration capability that enables our clients to deliver seamless customer journeys—single-dimensional, multidimensional, or event-triggered—across every relevant channel.
The third is our advanced analytics capabilities, which deliver all the deep insights required to tailor individualized customer experiences across all channels in real-time.
Resulticks 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 three service providers.
Even though we’re a full cloud, SaaS-based platform, we’ve also differentiated ourselves by offering a hybrid model that gives customers—especially those in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare— the ability to retain their highly sensitive personally identifiable information in their own data centres, while at the same time taking advantage of all our advanced cloud-based engagement capabilities.
Q3. What is data’s role beside technology in helping customers or marketing organisations to drive outcomes?
Redickaa Subrammanian: For years, marketers have looked for new and better ways to harness the power of data to segment and target audiences with personally compelling messages, brand experiences and offers. What’s changed so dramatically in just the past decade or so is the speed and scale at which they can do this.
At Resulticks, we’ve understood since our agency days the power of data to enable engaging, personalized customer experiences on-demand. But, we also know the challenges. There’s a line from a famous poem about a man adrift at sea that captures those challenges very well. It goes something like this, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”
Today, brands have great stockpiles of data lying around, but the challenge lies in knowing which data is really actionable and how to process it to make it more contextualized and relevant. This is the challenge that the entire globe faces today, and we’re solving it at Resulticks with our advanced audience data management capabilities, machine learning, AI, and sophisticated analytics.
Q4. Also, can you give an example and explain briefly how AI or big data makes marketing or ad campaigns more effective in reaching out to the targeted audience?
Redickaa Subrammanian: When marketers map a customer’s journey, they can accurately get a sense of their customer’s pain points and needs in real-time as well as identify where they need to improve interactions at various touch points to optimize the customers’ journeys.
A strong rules engine, driven by AI and ML, enables marketers to know the individual customer propensities and preference for channel, time, content and to create the kind of personalized customer journeys that drive customer engagement from first impression through conversion and towards loyalty.
With an omnichannel rules engine, like the one we’ve engineered at Resulticks, brands can specify in advance detailed business rules and customer actions, triggering communications along divergent customer pathways.
Other advanced technologies that enable individualised audience tracking and identification further ensure that each consumer is not simply identified, but also engaged with contextualized messaging that builds on past moments and resonates with the present.
The tremendous influence of big data-driven marketing campaigns on effectively targeting your marketing communications has only been realised in recent times.
Q5. What are some of the key challenges that marketing organisations face today as the traditional marketing and advertising media are being replaced by a wide range of technology-based platforms, consumer devices as well as social media?
Redickaa Subrammanian: Because consumers have already gone omnichannel, the biggest challenges for marketers all seem to revolve around how to leverage data in real time to deliver rewarding, seamless customer journeys across all channels and devices. This is no easy task. As I mentioned earlier, data overload can seem daunting to even the most seasoned marketers
That’s not all. New channels emerge constantly, and the existing ones are becoming more sophisticated as we speak. Consumers, already at ease in in this omnichannel world, fully expect brands to delight them continuously with seamless, individualized interactions at every turn.
Here are a few practical tips on how to get started as well as a longer-term sustainable solution. One of the first challenges to overcome is to tear down existing data silos, a problem compounded in many businesses by a reliance on disjointed, legacy systems.
The next challenge is to consolidate customer data from internal and external sources into one unified information hub and to map the tangle of attributes onto individual customer profiles. This is key to individualizing every subsequent interaction.
A word of advice here. Marketers should always have a clear purpose for their data. The point has never been to hoard more and more data. Instead, the true value of audience data lies in its ability to reveal insights into the right time, channel, content, context and impact for each and every interaction with the individual customer or prospect.
Another piece of learned wisdom—when it comes to customer data, there’s no time for rest. It’s critical to acquire the necessary capabilities to not only consolidate but continuously augment existing data as new data generated as customers and prospect interact with the brand at critical touch points.