“Gaming Is an Effective Tool for Audience Engagement” Says Kamalika Bhattacharya

Playing online games, generally presumed as a fun activity, has applications that lie beyond the sphere of leisure and recreation. Gaming has come a long way from being a channel for engagement for kids to being an active and effective instrument to instill certain skills and motivate certain responses which otherwise would be impossible. QuoDeck, a gaming platform is a pioneer in providing gamification solutions, particularly in the Ed-tech sector, provides game-based solutions. They say the QuoDeck courseware tools are highly reliable for improving engagement quotient. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Kamalika Bhattacharya, CEO & Co-Founder at QuoDeck Technologies.

Q1) Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Launched in 2017 by Kamalika Bhattacharya & Arijit Lahiri, QuoDeck is a B2B SaaS Digital Engagement and Enablement Platform that enables organizations to use interactivity and games to engage audiences such as employees, value-chain, and gig workforces. QuoDeck caters to the growing need of organizations to build digital engagement for the mentioned audiences, with an inherently scalable approach.

QuoDeck specializes in the innovative use of games and gamification mechanics, driving higher adoption and greater retention. QuoDeck captures valuable data in real-time and analyses it using big data analytical tools. The platform is well-equipped to handle large user bases and extended ecosystems, such as sellers, agents, vendors, distributors, partners, etc.

Today, QuoDeck is the market leader in its category, catering to over 5.1 million users across an enterprise client list that includes Unilever, Vodafone, Flipkart, Dabur, and many others. 

Q2) With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the company's inception.

QuoDeck began with a chance encounter of Founders Kamalika Bhattacharya and Arijit Lahiri with a security guard on a routine visit to a mall. The security guard was playing candy crush between scanning visitors, and that's when they realized that games and entertainment were great motivators. Maybe, this could apply to learning too! 

After this eureka moment, the founders set out to create a platform that could serve an organization's need for interesting and interactive content to attract and retain customers, train extended workforces and engage value-chain stakeholders. 

QuoDeck began as a game-based learning system but has now evolved into a complete digital engagement suite called the QuoDeck Interactive Cloud that promises engagement, regionalization, speed, mobility, data, and security. 

QuoDeck has also been awarded a fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering, London, and Newton Fund. It is also a winner of the ET Power of Ideas.

Q3) Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions to the company and the industry.

  Kamalika Bhattacharya is the Co-Founder and the business brain behind QuoDeck. Her passion for entrepreneurship was built over many years through her 22-year-long career, where for the most part, she has worked with startups and ventures raising private equity and venture capital.  Under her leadership, QuoDeck has grown into a thriving company boasting marquee Fortune 500 clients.

In her past avatar as an investment banker, she held senior roles in a business building in companies such as ADP, ICRA, IDFC, and Intellecap. At QuoDeck, she heads business development and drives the team's hunger to be better, bigger, and faster. She holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, and is an economics graduate from Osmania University.

Arijit Lahiri is the Co-founder / Chief Product Officer and the creative brains behind QuoDeck.  A gamer at heart, Arijit started his career in the financial industry and held senior positions for over a decade across banking, treasury, risk, and wealth management. In 2017, he decided to translate his passion, vision, and deep love for gaming into QuoDeck.

Arijit leads the product function at QuoDeck, with a specific focus on keeping the platform cutting-edge through innovation. He works with a high-powered team of gamers and hackers to push the envelope on what technology and gamification can do for the digital engagement space. Arijit has over 22 years of experience across various industries; he holds an engineering degree from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.

Q4) How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes by adopting the company's technology innovations?   

  As India's largest digital learning and engagement platform, QuoDeck works with several Fortune 500 companies such as Unilever, Vodafone, Flipkart, Tata Consumer, Dabur, and Britannia. These companies have been quick in recognizing the potential and benefits of gamification for both their external as well as their internal audiences. Gamification is particularly effective for training and upskilling extended workforces. Moreover, given the large audience size that these companies need to address, digital platforms are the only scalable option for them as they allow standardization and big data collection. 

Q5) Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/Analytics space?

QuoDeck uses event-stream data collection and Machine Learning to identify trends that prove effective for consumers. The data is aggregated, co-related, and filtered in real-time to help create personalized recommendation algorithms that evolve based on what users prefer to consume. As for Artificial Intelligence, it finds applications in learning content creation such as question generators and chatbots that are used to closely mimic real-life situations.

Q6) Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

As a SaaS platform, we see an unexplored potential in the field of cloud management strategies, real-time data capture strategies, etc., apart from the interactive approach of gamified learning. We look forward to serving budding companies as well as established conglomerates with our data-driven SaaS products. 

Q7) How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?        

Most companies already realize the need for scalable platforms to engage and train their workforce. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore the importance of gaming and gamification as effective tools for audience engagement and training; embracing them fully is not too far away in the future. 

Modern-day businesses across the world are dealing with the challenge of reaching their geographically widespread workforce. This challenge is a huge opportunity for us. We plan to go global with our entire suite of services and work with companies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.