Capillary Technologies introduces Easyverse

The #ready18 logo.

It is Capillary Technologies' 10^th anniversary, and the report card is impressive. The company boasts transactions worth US$15 billion annually, over a million transactions per day, and 300 million consumers on its platform.

Aneesh Reddy, co-founder and CEO, Capillary Technologies, the omnichannel customer engagement and e-commerce software provider, spoke during the inaugural #ready event in Singapore.

He called what Capillary Technologies provides to clients the 'Easyverse'.

As the name implies, it is about creating a retail universe that makes purchasing easy for consumers. "(If you) live in the Easyverse you expect brands to understand you intimately, personalise the experience, and do everything for you," he explained.

Reddy introduces the Easyverse.

The key to succeeding in the Easyverse as a retailer is thus to give great and easy experiences. "We want you to be present wherever they are," he said.

The company has identified four building blocks that help companies understand consumers:

- Data helps to understand the consumer better. The goal is to get insights for personalised engagement

- Create the ecosystem to leverage those insights

- Engage the consumer when and where they prefer. Consumers want to respond wherever they are

- Recognise and reward them in a personalised way

Reddy disclosed that internal research has found that consumers interact with brands on six to 13 channels. "Capillary is building the experience and technology that allows these four building blocks," he said.

One way that Capillary has delivered on the Easyverse is becoming mobile-friendly. This is imperative when up to 80% of the online retail traffic in Asia is on mobile, Reddy said.

"Brands want to deliver a great experience on the mobile (but) consumers don't want to download an app," he observed. The solution for Capillary is creating an app-like experience on a mobile browser, he said. Customers which have adopted this route have seen a 50% jump in conversions on the same traffic, with no new offers, he said.

"We just made it easier for consumers," he explained.

Reddy's keynote included customer testimonials. Bata, the shoe retailer, is present in nine countries in Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East and Africa. It has 3,000 stores, and 26 million consumers who interact with it every year.

In a video, Bata executives talked about their focus on rewarding customers for purchases and how Capillary had helped them. They had seen 57X the return on investment (ROI) for a Facebook campaign, for example.

"We want to be where the customer is, to keep the engagement going," said one.

Bata is now focused on an omnichannel strategy with one-to-one engagements on Facebook and other channels. Half of all their consumer interactions run on Facebook and Instagram.

Rozario explains how working with Capillary Technologies has benefited Pizza Hut in Oman.

Pizza Hut Oman's journey with Capillary Technologies began about two years ago, said Nicodemus Rozario, Marketing Manager for the company. Today, the company sees 56% of delivery sales from the online platform, and 32% of e-commerce sales coming from its own sites, rather than aggregators such as Talabat which would take a percentage of sales revenue.

To attract consumers Pizza Hut Oman has made its platform as user-friendly as an aggregator platform, and added information as well as offers that are not available on aggregator sites. The 'secret sauce' to the recipe, he said, is catering to the traffic which comes from mobile channels.

"The Middle East is more a mobile generation (than a) Millennial generation," he said. "Almost 80% ordering on the e-commerce platform are ordering through mobile."

Some of Capillary's solutions include the Essential Insights BI tool to track targets, and see what is performing well; Capillary Zero, which ingests data that has been created on the Capillary platform, then adds insights that can help to personalise experiences; and InstoreVision, which gives offline stores the insights that only online stores used to have.

Zero can suggest tailored offers, down to the channel, time and product, Reddy said. A vegetarian might receive offers for vegetarian pizzas on mobile, while a weekday shopper gets offers by text on a new collection on a weekday. While a human analyst can suggest the same offers based on available data, it would take longer than Zero, which can make the recommendations in under four minutes, he elaborated.

The personalisation has an impact. Biba, an ethnic fashionwear brand in India, saw a 30% conversion improvement from personalised recommendations online, he said. "Execution becomes a nightmare, (that is) what we're trying to get Zero to simplify for you," he said.

Conversion in offline stores can be achieved through collecting data with physical sensors placed in a way that does not collect personally-identifiable information (PII), Reddy added. Rich offline data can lead to more personalisation, determine if staff are following established procedures, measure footfall, identify popular locations in-store, and establish shopper demographics.

In an offline environment, a shopper might ask staff about a black shirt whereas they could search for one online, for example.

"Those interactions are very important to capture and analyse," Reddy said.

In keeping with the omnichannel experience, Reddy shared that 35% of visitors to an offline shop actually buy more online, while merchants like Fossil will display offline store inventory online, blurring the offline-to-online (O2O) boundaries.