Resulticks Is Helping Brands Leverage Omnichannel Automation
In the age of increased personalization, brands are realizing that investments in marketing technology can save time and strengthen customer relationships. Today, B2B/B2C marketers are looking out for the right marketing automation platform to manage, automate and track the success of marketing campaigns through multiple channels such as email, mobile, social media and websites. This is where companies like Resulticks have a role to play. With their AI-powered, omnichannel approach, the marketing automation company helps its clients nurture leads to emerge as a winner in a data-driven world. In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Dakshen Ram, Co-Founder & Head of Product and Strategies at Resulticks, speaks about the marketing automation trends and how Resulticks is helping brands in unlocking the full potentials of omnichannel customer engagement.
CXOToday: Could you tell us about your journey with Resulticks so far?
Dakshen Ram: In 2004, my business partner, Redickaa Subrammanian, and I started a full-service digital communications agency named Interakt. Having serviced more than 150 brands around the world, we developed a deep understanding of the needs and challenges of our clients and their businesses. Most enterprises were facing similar challenges, they were unable to effectively quantify ROI from marketing, owing to data being stored in different systems, not having a single view of the customer, and thereby unable to deliver on the promises of omnichannel customer engagement. We developed Resulticks to tackle these challenges, transforming Interakt into a real-time conversational marketing company to empower brands across the world.
Resulticks was thus born in 2014, as a real-time, big-data-driven, and AI-powered marketing cloud solution built from the ground up by experts in marketing, technology, and business strategy to deliver top-line growth. Outcomes-focused and enabled by the world’s first customer data blockchain, Resulticks is an integrated digital transformation engine. Scalable, intuitive, and highly secure, the platform empowers brands to deliver segment-of-one omnichannel engagement that is attributable and measurable. Although we do offer expert-driven services to our clients in terms of implementation, strategic consulting, and so on, the platform itself is our primary offering.
In 2017, Resulticks became the first platform from Asia to be placed in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management. It was also named to the 2018 and 2019 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. In my opinion, recognition such as these and our growing list of clients really testify to the value of our approach and capabilities.
CXOToday: Being a MarTech firm, what kind of technology do you help your clients leverage to get the desired outcome?
Dakshen Ram: Resulticks is an integrated platform and does not provide modular offerings, because we want to give our clients all the capabilities in one cohesive platform, one that takes seriously the interconnected nature of the different facets of omnichannel engagement—from data management to segmentation to orchestration to analytics and more. What’s more, Resulticks provides customized capabilities for not only B2B and B2C businesses but also B2B2B and B2B2C organizations.
Moving on to the platform itself, we designed and continue to improve Resulticks as the transformative centrifugal force between the brand and its audiences, integrating data, engagement, and insights from any data source to any touch point. Specifically, the platform consists of five major pillars. The first is our master audience data management module. Enabled by an integrated customer data platform, it helps brands consolidate their customer data from all sources and channels. It helps brands transform, segment, and activate their data to get a 360-degree view of the customer.
The second is our omnichannel communication orchestration module that allows brands to orchestrate sophisticated omnichannel campaigns and customer journeys with an intuitive UI and a diverse set of tools. Our recently launched AI-powered orchestration feature automates the entire process of campaign creation based on key metrics, past audience interactions, and real-time insights.
Thirdly, we have the advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities—such as segmentation, propensity scoring, identity resolution, and offer optimization—across the solution. Brands can also explore a range of in-depth analytics on campaign performance, individual customers and their journeys, as well as actionable, AI-powered insights for improving their marketing efforts in time.
The fourth pillar is our next-best experience management feature. Underpinned by our AI and machine learning models, this translates to extensive capabilities for managing, deploying, analyzing, and optimizing marketing communications, customer journeys, content, and offers, product recommendations. This feature also helps brands monitor the evolving profile, behavior, and propensities of each customer to optimize when, where, and how to engage for optimal impact.
Finally, Resulticks’ multi-level account hierarchy setup allows each brand to set up its entire enterprise’s accounts in one instance, all while offering it the flexibility to customize user access, data governance, and marketing insights at all levels.
CXOToday: With more firms making a shift from their traditional marketing practices to a more omnichannel and tech-driven platforms, what are some of the key challenges they are facing today?
Dakshen Ram: I believe there are three principal challenges businesses are currently facing. Firstly, they are struggling to consolidate the data at their disposal, which is often scattered across siloed systems and sources. Secondly, as it is difficult for brands to effectively deliver coordinated campaigns across the shifting set of touch points navigated by their audiences, it leads to irrelevant communications that incur wasteful spend, poor customer experience, and limit the brand’s competitiveness in a fast-evolving landscape. Thirdly, brands across industries struggle with determining the ROI of their campaigns and attributing the impact each channel has had on their marketing efforts.
To tackle these challenges, brands need to first get data right, and that’s precisely the starting point of our solution. Our audience data platform (or CDP), can fully accommodate the volume, speed, and complexity of the data deluge today. It helps brands unify their data into a single, ever-evolving foundation, which paves the way for them to harness it for insights and action using the wide range of capabilities we provide. Of course, each brand will have a different path towards data maturity. In our engagement with clients, we have always focused on helping them gain a clear view of where they stand in terms of data and then mapping out a transformation roadmap that matches their specific needs and capabilities.
CXOToday: How disruptive is the CMO’s role today? Can you please throw some light?
Dakshen Ram: The CMO is at the center of the future-forward business’ digital transformation efforts. As they lead their business to become not only more data-driven and customer-centric, they will bring about—in collaboration with other leaders, of course—disruptions to existing processes and even the entire ecosystem in which they operate. It should also be noted that CMOs today are no longer responsible for customer acquisition; they are becoming visionaries and strategists that re-imagine and reshape their brands’ engagement arsenal to cultivate lasting, fruitful customer relationships.
CXOToday: How AI can make marketing or ad campaigns more effective in reaching out to the targeted audience?
Dakshen Ram: AI enables brands to achieve unprecedented precision and depth in their targeting efforts. In addition to refined segmentation and actionable insights, it also strengthens capabilities such as individual audience identity resolution—which helps brands unify the disparate digital identities of each customer for a single profile to recognize and engage them relevantly. AI makes it possible to optimize marketing action, content, offers, and product recommendations in real time and at the individual level, ensuring that brands maximize the outcome of every communication.
CXOToday: What is the future of AI-based Marketing Automation?
Dakshen Ram: There are obviously a wide variety of opportunities AI will open up for marketing automation as we move forward, but here are a few key trends brands can look forward to. To start, AI will function as the engine that powers deep personalization as well as contextual targeting and offers. Next, AI will detect deeper, finer patterns of customer behavior and intent to create and optimize communications for better engagement and conversion. Brands can also expect more actionable and relevant insights from the AI algorithms in their marketing platforms. Lastly, AI will empower brands to map individual prospects, leads, and customers to the right communications based on their resemblance to personas and look-alikes in terms of demographics, behavior, psychographics, and more.
In essence, all marketing solutions will have to focus on powering brands’ digital transformation towards customer centricity. This goes beyond localized functions and temporary adjustments. It will be a long-term journey with exceptional opportunities on the way—and this is precisely the future we at Resulticks have been trying to deliver.
CXOToday: What is your business roadmap this year amid uncertainty due to the COVID-19?
Dakshen Ram: We will continue to help brands in unlocking the full benefits of omnichannel customer engagement, by helping them implement more innovative use cases, elevate their customer experiences, improve their strategic insights, and boost top-line growth.
In 2019, we made expansions into Southeast Asia, Australia, and the US, and this growth momentum will continue this year, even as we make the necessary adjustments in a time of uncertainty. As we strengthen our presence in these markets, we also plan to enter LATAM and then Japan, Korea, and China. We will also invest in further explorations of new AI-enabled capabilities while continuously enhancing the Resulticks platform, because we want to keep our clients ahead of the curve. Our ultimate aim is to make Resulticks the solution of choice for scalable, intuitive, and measurable real-time engagement for our customers.
