With the ever-increasing number of apps on the Play Store or the App Store, conversations on social media and in app reviews have increasingly emphasised on the UI/UX aspect. UX refers to user experience, while UI stands for user interface, and while they are often used together they play different roles within any software. At the intersection of these both is the user — players for games and customers for shopping apps and so on — which makes UI/UX a fundamental part of any software, internet company or brand.
The user journey is often called customer experience and according to Forrester, “CX transformation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.” The report said that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator.
However, not everyone has been able to crack the code to solve for the challenges of customer experience. Some of the challenges being discussed industry-wide includes value for money, fulfilling customer demand under organization structure, strategic investment, managing customer-centric operations etc.
To solve for the same, serial entrepreneurs Arihant Jain and Ajeet Kushwaha have launched Seekify. Jain told Inc42 that Seekify is a customer experience automation platform. “We easily integrate into many business CX software to aggregate all the data that drives their customer experience. We give actionable insights from this data with the help of our AI and ML engine,” he added.
Moneyball: Finding Inspiration From Sports
Jain told us the duo found inspiration for Seekify from Brad Pitt-starrer Moneyball.
“Moneyball was right — you need wins, and for the wins you need runs. For runs, you need people who can get you runs. Sports and business are similar — you don’t need top performers; you need the right set of people moving all the little indicators that come together to drive results.”
Jain said Seekify synchronises the right people, process and tools in a business for it to win the ‘championship’.
And this is not the first time the duo has come together to build a tech startup.
Jain and Kushwaha have been working together since they met as the founding team at HealthKart. While, Kushwaha was CTO, Jain was the COO then.
The duo had been involved in the launch of 1MG, and build Joe Hukum, a chatbot in 2015. The company was then acquired by Freshworks in 2017. The duo then spearheaded software implementations in several countries across the world working to improve customer experience for brands.
“Our experience in building B2C businesses made us realise the value and difficulty in delivering an amazing customer experience and the importance of it. As part of the leadership at a B2B SaaS business in the CX space, we realised the gaps in the software that existed in the CX space. The reason why we started Seekify is to solve this gap between what we wanted and what’s currently out there,” Jain added
The company is looking to monetise via subscription model. “We are targeting mid-market customers and we expect our ARR to be in the $50-150K per year,” he added.
How Does Seekify Work?
In simple words, Seekify brings together multiple customer interaction points to a common platform to help the company make sense of data and use it accordingly.
Jain explained that Seekify takes customer interaction data from fragmented points (for a physical help desk, customer service chat, telephone calls, NPS tools and more) and generates actionable insights to automate processes to enable individuals, teams and organisation to implement the right CX strategy. The company can also set its CX goals like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) at company level.
Then Seekify breaks down company-level goals into team and individual levels. By monitoring actual performance for the company, teams and individuals against the set goals, Seekify surfaces actionable insights.
The team of 15 in Gurugram also enables automation for feedback communication, collaborations and on-the-job training processes based on these insights. Seekify will use insights to power actions across its products leveraging application program interfaces (APIs) and robotic process automation (RPA). This enables the companies to offer personalised customer experiences to their customers.
The company claims that the USP for Seekify is its automation technology for customer experience. At present, Seekify’s initial customers are in Singapore, Delhi, Bengaluru, Johannesburg, Berlin and Chicago. “They are a lot of tech startups in fintech, retail and telecom but also traditional players in BFSI, logistics and mobility,” Jain added.
The Challenges Of Solving Customer Experience
An Econsultancy survey found 22% of companies identified CX as the most exciting business opportunity of 2019 — beating content marketing (15%) and mobile marketing (13%).
It has been widely discussed that even though the prioritisation of customer experience is a necessity, the challenges are in the backend processes. So, even building a product to solve for this has been a challenge for Seekify.
Jain told us that the biggest challenge is educating the market. “CXO’s around the world are just realising the importance of CX and the “Head of CX” is a new post in many organisations. We hope CEOs actually pay heed to CX, not just lip service,” Jain added.
One of the other players working to build for automated customer experience is US-based ActiveCampaign. The company talks about working on smarter automations leveraging machine learning algorithms.
Automation is the key to bridging internal workflows and customer-facing processes. The customer experience management market is projected to grow from $7.8 Bn in 2019 to $14.5 Bn by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.3% during the forecast period. The major growth drivers for the market include the increasing need to improve customer engagement and reducing customer churn rate.
Seekify has also seen interest from top VCs in India and are looking to find the right investor partners. While India has become renowned as a hub of innovations, most SaaS companies have had to sell abroad to build their business. Hence, it will be important to see how Seekify builds and grows its business domestically, even as it expands in international markets.