“We Empower Brands with the Right Set of Customer Experience Technologies” Says Nitin Agarwal

People use multiple channels to access products and services and indulge in lots of incoherent communication that indirectly suggests their experience with the brand. Companies always want to listen to that chatter to understand what the users' expectations are. They faithfully depend on a clutch of digital tools only to waste their resources over disconnected digital strategies. Locobuzz, identifying the demand that exists for designing a consistent user experience across multiple channels has evolved as a versatile omnichannel digital experience management platform. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive e-mail interview with Nitin Agarwal, Co-founder & CTO of Locobuzz.

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

Founded in 2015 by Vishal Agarwal (CEO), Nitin Agarwal (CTO), and Shubhi Agarwal (COO), Locobuzz is a global enterprise software company specializing in digital customer experience management. We enable consumer-focused brands to design robust omnichannel CX strategies, automate and manage the workflow, and deliver great humane experiences across all their customer-facing functions.

Our solutions range from Reputation Management, Social Media Management, Online Response Management, Social Listening & Brand Monitoring, Digital Customer Care/command centers, data intelligence hubs, and AI-enabled Chatbots which enable brands for smarter and responsible customer care with a multifaceted platforms to support needs in today's digital age. They can also leverage our advanced workspace analytics to get powerful customer insights, build strategic business metrics, and leverage key analytics to establish brand effectiveness.

2.With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

We started Locobuzz with a vision of creating technological solutions for digital customer experience management. Initially, the idea was to utilize the potential unstructured social media data and use it effectively with the help of the right technology. It led to the creation of Locobuzz as a tool for monitoring and analyzing social engagement. However, the company has evolved significantly over the years. Today, it is an end-to-end customer experience platform that empowers brands with real-time data analytics, consumer experience automation, consumer insights, and social media management, including publishing, listening, analytics, and engagement.

Our mission is to empower brands with the right set of customer experience technologies, so they can plan their business and marketing strategies with greater success. In the last seven years, we have evolved as a market leader in customer experience management. Today, we are a trusted technology partner for over 200 companies in India and overseas. From fortune 500 companies to marquee brands, our solutions have been widely adopted across multiple industries including BFSI, Telecom, Aviation, Hospitality, F&B, E-commerce, and Auto. We work closely with these consumer-centric brands and have an outstanding 95% retention rate which significantly demonstrates the trustworthiness of our services.

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

Vishal Agarwal is an experienced and multifaceted professional with more than 22 years of experience in enterprise solutions, marketing automation, and digital strategy. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Locobuzz, he spearheads the company's strategic goals and is instrumental in constructing its future roadmap.

A graduate of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications from Amravati University, Vishal did his Masters in Electronic Engineering and Geography Information Systems from Penn State University, USA in 2003. He has worked across US, India, and the Middle East on GeoSpatial Analytics.

Nitin Agarwal is the Co-Founder and CTO of Locobuzz. He oversees all aspects of product innovation, development, and implementation; as well as the management of Locobuzz's technology resources. Nitin graduated from Amravati University in BE – Electronics, and Telecommunications, where he earned top honors. He has worked with Vishal on a tech startup before Locobuzz, ensuring transparency and accountability in governance using technology.

Shubhi Agarwal is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Locobuzz Solutions. Shubhi has spent over two decades in the field of strategic partner alliances, driving business objectives through diverse technological solutions that create immense value for all associations involved. In her current role, Shubhi oversees product development and envisions long-term productivity of incremental changes, upgrades, and innovations. She has been the driving force for creating visibility of the product and curating beneficial associations between businesses and opportunities in Artificial intelligence and digital customer experience.

An MBA graduate in Finance from California State University, USA, and a BE in Electronics and Telecommunications from Amravati University, Shubhi has earlier worked with Tata Motors, YEN Management consultants, UTV Software Communications Ltd, Bigflix, Hungama, BoxTV- Times Internet, and others.

4.Tell us how your company benefits the clients.

As customers increasingly use multiple channels to interact with brands, omnichannel customer service is a winning strategy for businesses. It allows them to serve customers and deliver a humane customer experience in real-time. For brands who want to deliver consistent customer experiences, Locobuzz is the ideal partner. We help them to increase customer loyalty and brand advocacy, enhance their customer's lifetime value and drive revenue growth.

Locobuzz offers brands an unlimited range of digital channel integration and limitless analytical possibilities. It allows them to listen to the voice of the customers, gain useful insights, uncover competitive marketing strategies, and track campaign impact. These insights help businesses manage, understand, and unify their business goals and customer data not just for brand growth but also for effective customer experience management. Furthermore, it helps brands in tracking leading KPIs that depict customer satisfaction.

5. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Companies across sectors have been going through digital transformation by leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Big Data, Advance Analytics, etc. However, the pandemic has accelerated technological advancements in the past two years. As a result, consumers' behavior is changing drastically and so the customer experience has become the brands' requisite.

Companies are buckling down to omnichannel strategies that streamline all communications and help to provide a delightful and uninterrupted customer experience at any stage of their journey. Over the past few years, we have been seeing big data come to the fore in the field of customer experience. This trend is going to increase in the times to come with more unstructured data coming along with social media integration. 

Businesses are now incorporating technologies to make informed strategies where artificial intelligence helps them for enriching and immersive customer experiences. Intelligent chatbots are known for holistic business processes that drive customer engagement making businesses 24*7 working entities. 

As businesses are more customer-centric today, a seamless customer experience and accelerated business growth are essential to bank on. There comes predictive analytics that helps businesses become smarter, more efficient, and less expensive.

The future of the customer experience market looks promising, not just in India, but around the globe. We're proud as a digital CX enabler leading in the industry and striving for continued growth, which will be fuelled by our passion for innovation, support for our customers, and dedication to excellence.

6.The industry is seeing the rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impacting the business sector?

We have been at the forefront of productizing the latest developments in AI and ML to streamline CX operations. Convergence and cloud technology enablers are proving to be very beneficial and are in line with our business segment. This allows us to provide a one-stop CX solution that is flexible enough to support businesses' needs.

Virtualization is an incredible asset that eases managerial overhead while expanding efficiency, scalability, and cost optimization. Whereas the cloud helps in improving CX and internal processes and makes it possible to unify data from different sources and improve collaboration with cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

Convergence of services effectively brings multiple core functions together such as marketing, customer service, and analytics to provide brands with in-depth insights and unique solutions for engaging customers. It allows businesses to get a 360-degree view of customers' behavior that helps them create personalized and customized experiences giving detailed insights into customers' interests online as well as offline. This serves as an incredible tool for providing great customer experience and greater customer satisfaction with increased efficiency.

7.What are some of the challenges faced by the industry today?

Creating a customer-centric culture across all departments and teams is one of the most common CX challenges faced by organizations today. Consumers are now engaging across a variety of channels and they expect consistency and purpose-driven experience across all the touchpoints. In order to meet these dynamic behavioral changes in customer demand, many organizations have invested in multichannel modes of customer engagement but the processes, systems, and data are not synchronized to provide a fluid experience. Each channel exists within its own separate silo and this disconnected multichannel experience can cause frustration and annoyance for the consumer.

Personalization is another factor in delivering great customer experiences, and a common challenge when striving to provide personalized experiences is to deliver these unique experiences at scale to all customers in the organization. Since each customer has different pain points throughout their customer journey, figuring out which problems are more urgent and should be acted upon first makes it challenging for brands to prioritize them.

8.What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We are in the midst of taking a leadership position in India. However, we continue to believe that Locobuzz is still in the early stages of a very long-term sustainable growth opportunity as we capitalize on our leadership position in the digital customer experience management industry. We have a strong roadmap for business growth and will implement it in a phased manner.

Currently, we are operating in seven countries including India, Sri Lanka, and the SEA region. As the next step to growth and expansion, we are looking to reinforce our roots in these regions and emerge as leaders in the digital customer experience industry. In addition, we are also looking to expand our footprint in the US market and expand into the North America region.