How this conventional marketing startup stayed relevant by pivoting to automation
Singapore-based startup Resulticks offers marketing automation solutions to help enterprises achieve real-time, omnichannel customer engagement.
Redickaa Subrammanian, the CEO of Resulticks, and Dakshen Ram, her Co-founder, were part of the conventional era of marketing agencies. After starting her career in copywriting, she worked as an account manager at a number of agencies, and went on to head an interactive engineering practice at Intiqua International, a global tech company that shut shop in 2003.
In 2004, during a meeting at a coffee shop, she and Dakshen Ram, who had nearly 10 years of experience in leading creative direction and project management across several tech companies, decided to start Interakt, a full-service communications company that rebranded itself as Resulticks in the final quarter of 2014.
The Resulticks team. Redickaa is sixth from right, and Dakshen is seventh from right.
As an agency that serviced more than 150 brands around the world, Redickaa says they had developed a deep understanding of the needs and challenges of clients. The biggest challenge enterprises had was quantifying the ROI from marketing, and surpassing siloed data and fragmented systems.
The duo built Resulticks to tackle these challenges, and gradually facilitated Interakt's transition into a real-time conversational marketing company to empower brands across the world. Its integrated, next-gen solution aims to deliver on the promise of real-time omnichannel customer engagement.
Redickaa says that the focus of Resulticks, since day one, has been to enable brands to succeed through sound strategy backed by advanced technology.
“That means empowering them to achieve real-time, omnichannel customer engagement that is outcome-driven and customer-first,” she says.
Why Resulticks? The name is a play of words to represent a team that delivers ‘results that tick’. The Singapore-based startup has an office in Chennai and employs 250 people across the world.
Facilitating the transition
Redickaa pursued a diploma in fine arts, a bachelor's in History from the University of Madras, and an MBA from the State University of New York, Buffalo. Dakshen has a master's of business in Information Technology from Curtin University.
Coming from the era of conventional agencies where retention was credited by personalised CX, Interakt had a loyal client base. As a result, Redickaa and her team were well versed with the nuances of marketing and the potential challenges they could face.
Like any new entrant in an already crowded market, the initial challenge would be to convince brands to take the leap and embrace new technology. However, this challenge was short-lived for Resulticks.
Redickaa says, “When we made the leap to the marketing automation space, several major clients trusted us and gave us the momentum to demonstrate in practice the capabilities of our solution and the value we help them create.”
The Resulticks platform functions on three pillars.
First is the audience master data management capability, which consolidates structured and unstructured audience data from all relevant internal and external sources of the brand.
The second pillar is the omnichannel orchestration capability that enables a brand to deliver seamless customer journeys across all integrated channels.
The third is the advanced analytics-cum-ML and AI capability, which delivers deep insights required to tailor customised customer experiences across all channels in real time.
The integrated approach allows marketers to have a 360-degree customer view to create advanced audience segments and orchestrate targeted omnichannel campaigns across all distribution channels (web, email, mobile, social, paid media, and voice).
It also lets them define detailed rules for real-time response triggers, and access comprehensive campaign reports with AI insights to take corrective measures in real time for results-driven marketing efforts.
Revenue model and technology
Revenue generation at Resulticks has three components: solution licensing, smart engagement, and consumables. It has solution packages for startups, mid-market, and enterprise companies, with varying pricing of licensing.
The startup’s solution is fully integrated and formulated by experts in marketing, technology, and business strategy. This helped build a digitally enabled, channel-agnostic, real-time marketplace. With its omnichannel coverage, the platform delivers communication across online and offline channels like social, email, mobile, voice assistants, extended systems, chatbots, QR codes, and call centres.
“It’s a single solution, not a patchwork of disparate and often-incompatible existing solutions,” the founders say.
The hybrid deployment architecture hosts critical customer data on client premises while ensuring full access to the scale, speed, and convenience of a marketing cloud. This meets the data security and regulatory compliance needs of brands in highly regulated industries like banking, finance, insurance, and healthcare.
The technology stack is a SaaS-based platform on the cloud, built on .NET, and the backend is big data base, which has both SQL and NoSQL.
Redickaa says, “In highly regulated global industries like healthcare and BFSI, companies don’t want to put their customer PII information on the cloud. We have a model which we call Hybrid, where they can keep it on-premise, and we have the ability to hash it or tokenise it.”
Market landscape and the way ahead
Globally, the marketing automation software market will be worth $7.63 billion by 2025, as per estimates by Grand View Research. The market is expected to grow at 13.5 percent CAGR annually in the Asia-Pacific region between 2016 and 2025, with India and China witnessing the highest growth in customer base. The report also states that the size of India market alone is over $500 million.
Resulticks faces competition from players like Ozonetel, Exotel, Knowlarity, and VoiceTree when it comes to similar solutions. Across the world, it locks horns with major players like Zoho and Salesforce.
Privately funded at an undisclosed amount, the startup is constantly improving its solution based on industry needs and feedback. Going ahead, Resulticks is looking to deepen its current capabilities and expand its presence where it is already strong. Some of the notable clients include Samsung, Levi’s Etisalat, UTI Mutual Funds, Manipal Hospitals, American Express and HDFC Bank.
It is also looking to fuel expansion in the Southeast Asian market, across Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
“The goal is to make a solution of choice for scalable, intuitive, and measurable real-time customer engagement. One initiative we’re working on is to build AI research labs to feed local language and data to the solution’s AI layer so it can better address new and emerging opportunities. For example, voice interactions and customer experiences that appropriately accommodate local contexts,” Redickaa says.
(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)
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