You’re in a retail store and you’ve a bad experience with a sales person. You convey your feeling in an online feedback form at the billing desk, and leave the store, deciding not to visit it again. As soon as you come out, you get a call from a responsible official from the company, apologising and assuring that it won’t happen again. You have poured all your anger on the official, it makes you feel better and changed your outlook towards the store.
CloudCherry is a ‘customer experience management platform’, which helps companies tackle issues related to customer satisfaction, which, if not handled carefully, could affect the brand name and long-term business of these companies. It has about 50 clients at present and it can facilitate four-five million customer interactions a year, which could go up to 10 million by the end of this financial year.
Launched in February 2014, offering services in tablet format, the company now covers 17 channels of communication. Its first major customer was Titan Company from the Tatas’ stable. It currently has around 100 customers.
In September 2016, Customer Analytics Technologies Inc, owner of CloudCherry, raised Series-A funding of $6 million from Vertex Ventures, Cisco Investments and IDG Ventures India. This infusion will be used for CloudCherry’s global expansion, with strong focus on the US and Singapore. It had received Rs 5.1 crore in seed funding from Chennai Angels and customer relationship management solutions provider Capillary in May 2015. Great Lakes Institute of Management co-founders Bala V Balachandar and Sriram Subramaniam, and its founding chief financial officer, B Hariharan, were angel investors during the initial days.
From restaurants to retail
According to T C Meenakshisundaram, founder and managing director of IDG Ventures India, which has invested in several customer-facing companies, CloudCherry is addressing one of the major pain points of such firms.
Initially, the idea was to focus on the hospitality segment, where customer interaction is crucial. The crude prototype of the product was tested in salons, spas and restaurants. An accidental meeting with the Titan management changed the whole paradigm. Titan was trying to build something similar internally and the company saw value in CloudCherry's product. By December 2014, the product was installed in Titan. The product was commercially launched a few months later, in April 2015.
“We discovered that retail, e-commerce and banking put a very high premium on customer analytics and analytics-driven decision making. That marked the pivot and we focused more on retail,” said Vinod Muthukrishnan, co-founder and chief executive officer.
Its first BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) customer was Axis Bank. “Our first big learning was that the verticals need not be F&B (food and beverage) and hospitality,” he said. Instead of merely collecting data and handing it over to the client, the company looked at providing advice on small changes that could improve the customer experience.
CloudCherry currently has 17 channels to collect and analyse customer feedback. These include mobile app, Twitter, among others.
The pricing depends on the number of channels, stores and customers to be covered, apart from the services required. Recurring revenue deals start from $36,000 to $250,000 per annum. It also has small and medium business offerings, which could be between $200 and $3,000 a month.
According to Ben Mathias, managing director and India head of Vertex Ventures, the company has good potential. “Feedback from customers has been good and customers love the product as well as the CloudCherry team.”
Challenges & the way forward
Mathias said CloudCherry’s challenges include maintaining the quality of service in multiple locations. “They (CloudCherry) need to constantly innovate the products and stay ahead of others.”
CloudCherry needs to make sure its sales model is scalable in new markets. While in India there is no major competition, in Singapore and Malaysia, the company will be competing with big US companies such as ResponseTek, Medallia and Qualtrics.
According to IDG Ventures’ Meenakshisundaram, thefocus should be to win some marquee brands in the US and develop its engineering and product teams, beside sales and marketing teams to sustain growth.
FACT BOX
Inception: February 2014
Product launch: April 2015
Area of Business: Customer experience management software
Founders: Vinod Muthukrishnan & Sriram Subramaniam
Fundraising: Seed funding of $1 mn from Chennai Angels, IDG Ventures India and Capillary Technologies, in May 2015; Series-A funding of $6 mn from Vertex Ventures, Cisco Investments and IDG Ventures in September 2016
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EXPERT TAKE The journey of a customer engagement starts once a business acquires a customer and thereafter watches all the engagement touch points. It could be that the customer has a service requirement, complaint or is commenting about the product. In the environment we are in, acquiring a customer is a challenge and retaining the customer is another big effort. That is the space CloudCherry operates. CloudCherry integrates the customer feedback from various channels to know whether the customer is happy with the company, whether he will recommend you to others. It is critical and there are not too many companies which solve such a problem on a global scale. It puts the customer in the centre of the business. |
Business has moved from selling to customer to monitoring how the customer experience is. The future of the customer engagement management is that it could be predictive now, to signal whether the customer is happy or not with the business.
There is a huge potential for this segment. The opportunity is over hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for businesses. Most customer satisfaction management tools are integrated into customer relationship management tools. There are several players with such integration, such as the Dynamic CRM or Salesforce, which has capabilities that can be built to compete with CloudCherry. The size of the opportunity is also a challenge. Most of the players are in CRM and since CloudCherry is in a unique space, the challenge would be how quickly they can scale, deploy and create value for the customer.
Harish Vaidyanathan, director – ISV Business, Microsoft Corporation India (which earlier incubated CloudCherry)
