SUMMARY
Easyrewardz helps retail brands drive their CRM strategy evolved through simplistic loyalty & reward programmes
The startup caters to more than 150 brands across 250 cities
The startup is well entrenched in India & has made inroads in MENA & APAC
From adopting new technologies to finding productive and scalable methods to keep customers engaged in the longer run – customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty continue to remain the cornerstone for retailers. What has come out as a saviour in this regard are the innovations which are commonly referred to as – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and loyalty & reward programmes; where technology has joined hands with the principles of creating, maintaining and strengthening the dynamics of customer relationship with a brand.
Having a satisfied customer return for future purchases has always been a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for any business. But in the pre-internet era, face to face communication was the only method to seek feedback or upsell. Even though this was doable, quantifying the information received and turning them into actionable processes was just a guess game. This is when in the 1980s, CRM came into existence. Since then, with the evolving technology, CRM solutions have made life easier at affordable pricing. The drive began in 1986 with Tally developer software solutions to help their business operations run smoothly, mainly accounting.
While the market for CRM and loyalty & reward programmes are competitive with the presence of giants like SalesForce, Zoho and emerging startups like Xeno, Hashtag Loyalty, UrbanPiper, there is one startup which is consistently delivering a solution that is both effective and scalable; and caters to a wide range of organisational issues – Easyrewardz.
Simply put, CRM is a blend of strategies, technologies and practices used by companies in order to manage and analyse customer interactions along with data throughout the customer lifecycle. The aim is to improve customer service relationships and customer retention assistance to drive growth in sales. A CRM platform also assists in staying connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Easyrewardz: Levelling Up Customer Management Solutions
Gurgaon based Easyrewardz provides cloud-based customer management solutions and services with an omnichannel approach across industries including — Fashion & Lifestyle, retail banking, hospitality, healthcare, food & beverage and wellness.
“Leveraging experience & technology expertise garnered through several years of loyalty programs & CRM, we have set out to revolutionise how retail brands engage with customers. This helps foster growth for the brand and delight for the customers in this digital age, in India and globally,” says Angad Singh, Founder, Easyrewardz.
Easyrewardz was founded in 2012 by Soumya Chatterjee, Angad Singh, Tejas Kadakia and Sapan Kadakia. In the digital era where people connect socially to share everything from life stories, travel stories, work stories and more, these four founders shared their business ideas which had a common theme – consumer loyalty.
With an aim to make it a holistic CRM stack, the founders pooled their experience to go to market quickly with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then incrementally evolve the value proposition. The key highlight of this MVP was the blending of strategies, technologies & global best practices that brands followed; along with seamless data capture throughout each customer’s lifecycle.
Today, Easyrewardz stitches together a Single View of Customer (SVC) collating signals, & interactions from multiple touchpoints to enable holistic customer experience across all channels. This also provides customers with the opportunity to be rewarded for spending and engaging across all channels. Easyrewardz doesn’t only capture & reward a transaction but also helps automate influencing the customer lifecycle & create reactive triggers responding to each interaction.
“The emergence of an omnichannel has revolutionised how the loyalty and reward programmes function. Today, more and more brands are adopting omnichannel-based loyalty programmes, which are proving to be very effective,’’ emphasised Sapan Kadakia.
Furthermore, Easyrewardz with their platform POIINK makes the whole ‘Loyalty & Rewards’ option engaging and rewarding for the end consumer. It allows them to track & manage several loyalty programmes & offers of brands in a single place & get recommendations while shopping. In addition, POIINK allows the clubbing of points across several participating brand’s programmes, making points redemption easy, quick and convenient for consumers.
Easyrewardz serves a diverse set of retail brands across sectors, including Apparel, Lifestyle, Wellness, Hospitality, F&B, Diagnostics & Banking. Prominent banks – RBL Bank, Kotak Bank have been happy customers of Easyrewardz for over 5 years. Notably, RBL Bank partnered with Easyrewardz when they launched their credit card vertical with 80,000 cards in 2014. Today, with a portfolio of over 18,00,000 cards & growing at 25% annually, RBL continues to a very happy customer of Easyrewardz.
Solutions by Easyrewardz
- Acquisition: Lead Management System – Capture leads thru Web Forms, Social Widgets, Walk-ins. Map leads to opportunities, assign notes, follow-ups, revenue values, and life-stages. Automatically score and mark leads, basis funnel stages.
- Activation: Campaign Engine – Multi-wave campaigns for 7 – 15 – 30 – 45 – 60 days from sign-up. Tailor-made campaigns on the basis of services availed, type of customer & location.
- Growth: Loyalty & Rewards Toolkit – Create a loyalty program. Map rewards to promote specific customer behavior. Coupons, Gift Vouchers, Points, etc.
- Engagement: Ticket Management, Feedback, Chatbot – Track customer’s feedback/complaints/queries across all touch-points. Influence communication to make it uniform & convert it to dialogue.
- Retention: Analytics, Campaigns, Rewards – Fee renewal reminders, Churn alert, Win-back, Conduct surveys, Next best action, Service recommendations.
The Competitive Landscape For Easyrewardz
Marketing and advertising are very crucial as they help brands create an identity which is vital in this competitive market to stand out from the competition. Especially for startups and SMBs with restrained budgets for retargeting the small customer base they have created. What they require is an effective and scalable CRM solution which helps them retain, resell, upsell to the existing customer base; at the same time streamline their operations internally to function optimally.
Finding the right CRM partner who can cater to not just implementation of the software but also assist and help the brand see through their CRM requirements like consultation, development, maintenance, integration of key internal processes, etc. is important. A lot of players like Zoho, MS Dynamics, Oracle Siebel & Capillary help brands connect in real time with customers and prospects across all channels. Furthermore, Salesforce helps doing both qualitative & qualitative tracking by allowing access to every single account, task, event, opportunity that is attached to a lead. However, the bright spot for Easyrewardz is what Anand Narang, VP marketing, Bata India and South Asia had to say, “we have transitioned from Capillary to Easyrewardz which offers us a more technologically advanced, actionable, and consumer-centric solution.”
CRM applications are primarily focused on before & after a transaction, never during the checkout process. In Retail, the ‘moment of truth’ is what is always the stage of checkout. Retailers require their CRM applications to help engage & influence the customer during the transaction process till they checkout after the purchase. This is where Easyrewardz’ integration at POS (features such as Single View of Customer (SVC) helps a brand engage with customers.
To ensure that the solution is scalable & always ON, Easyrewardz has partnered with Microsoft to leverage the capabilities of their Azure cloud platform. Today, Easyrewardz is one of the biggest adopters of MS Azure in the startup ecosystem & Microsoft is also helping distribute the software to its existing clients.
How Easyrewardz Plans To Walk The Future Of CRM
Furthermore, the increasing need of CRM solutions coupled with constant innovation has made way for startups to serve the market in order to make both — business and managing the customer base efficient and highly productive.
From a market standpoint, the CRM applications market is the fastest growing software market and is expected to reach $80 Bn by 2025, according to a research analysis. Also, from a brand’s standpoint, the research suggests 65% of sales representatives who have adopted mobile CRM have achieved their sales quotas. And to cater to all of this, CRM providers like Easyrewardz are disrupting the landscape with continuous innovations leveraging AI, ML, Data sciences & other cutting edge technologies. With a firm foothold in India, Easyrewardz has started exploring adjoining growth markets in MENA & APAC regions.
“We already have a toe-hold in MENA, which we would like to build upon,” said Soumya Chatterjee, Co-founder & CEO when asked about expansion plans.
Looking at the industry landscape, it can be said that with more and more startups & SMBs adopting technology driven CRM solutions to deliver a seamless customer experience, providers like Easyrewardz have a pool of opportunities to capitalise on and keep disrupting the industry.
