“Together with the power of machine learning, AI models at Locobuzz are built on the insights, data points, variables that make AI models equipped with relevant capabilities to aid digital customer experience management”
Technology is evolving dynamically, with time companies have observed how consumer expectation is changing rapidly – from no dialogue with brands to a need for meaningful two-way conversation, and social platforms are the key drivers for this change.
And this is where Locobuzz comes in, the company focuses on customer engagement initiatives, making business easy. As data volumes soared and technology advancements were made in Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, Locobuzz integrated powerful NLP.
In a recent interview with Pahi Mehra from MyMobile, the founding team of Locobuzz, Vishal Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Shubhi Agarwal, Co-Founder and COO, and Nitin Agarwal, Co-Founder and CTO Locobuzz Solutions, shared about their journey, the role of AI in changing consumer behaviour, and what does the future hold of data analytics industry.
What was the idea behind the inception of Locobuzz?
Locobuzz was founded in 2015. It was a thought that originated from the firm belief that data was a goldmine of opportunity if analysed correctly and converged with the right kind of technology. Online chatter and social engagement had piked to a prominent scale and this was enough to establish the fundamental of Locobuzz as it is today. Thus, the idea of bringing powerful analytics, driven by data from various social media channels was formed. – “Locobuzz – Location based buzz”. The founding team conducted simple analytics on unstructured data focussing on processing large volumes of real-time data and further augmenting it with sentiment analytics.
Interesting observations began to crop up – like how fast-changing customer expectations are – from a time where there was no dialogue with brands, to demanding a meaningful 2-way communication. It was then decided that there was a need for innovative team workflows and other engagement initiatives to help manage and cater the large volumes and data and specific customer demands.
As data volumes soared and machine learning and artificial intelligence went through several technological advancements, Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities were integrated with several data models for language detection, intent detection, deviation alerts, sentiment scores, and other factors. These upgrades eventually led to the building of a fully cognitive chatbot service housed on the Locobuzz platform.
Thus, Locobuzz evolved into a fully integrated, unified Customer Experience Platform. Locobuzz builds software to smartly connect brands and customers to each other!
- Listen, Analyze and Engage with their customers
- Automated customer interactions using AI
- Realtime Data Analytics Hub, Research and Insights
- Marketing and Advertising intelligence
Locobuzz currently works with 100 reputed clients across geographies.
What does the company do? How does it aim at minimizing the gap, with the use technology?
Locobuzz is a unified customer experience platform that converges technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Analytics to help brands forge stronger relationships with their customers and increase their lifetime value. We connect organisations with their customers across a spectrum of digital channels and leverage analytics and automation to increase efficiency across business processes and create a seamless experience for customers.
Locobuzz CX Platform is designed to work on a standalone basis or as an integrated solution that can be fused with various departments and functional verticals like product teams, marketing teams, customer experience, CRM and sales teams and more. The marketing teams can derive inputs that aid in designing campaigns, monitor brand chatter, identify influencers and benchmark with the competitors. The customer experience teams can engage with customers, resolve queries, identify patterns, streamline the process for efficiency to improve customer satisfaction scores. Sales teams can identify leads and other engagement opportunities. Locobuzz helps brands derive rich and detailed insights that drive business decisions, product innovation and factor a remarkable growth potential in the digital realm.
Headquartered in Mumbai, we serve marquee brands across sectors like Hospitality, Telecom, Automotive, BFSI, aviation etc. We have helped our clients streamline their customer experience processes, leading them to create long-lasting relationships with their customers and position them as thought leaders in their domain. The use cases can vary from lead generation to crisis or campaign management, to influencer and community management to market research and consumer insights – all on a single platform – Locobuzz
Today, Locobuzz works with some of the best companies in the world. We cater to many of the industry leaders in various sectors in India, countries across South-East Asia, and are also expanding to the US and UK. We serve a series of Fortune 500 clients and have created enduring partnerships with various brands on the basis of our exceptional product capabilities that has completely transformed customer experience for them.
What is your current clientele and what do you offer?
Locobuzz is a Unified Customer Experience Automation and Intelligence platform that garners business and customers insights from every key digital and social channel a modern customer uses. Locobuzz offers a wide array of AI-driven automation and data analytics services through social listening, response management, CRM integrations for personalised customer approach, holistic data management and collaborative workflows for organisations to utilise in a single view – and in real-time.
Though Locobuzz is entirely a sector-agnostic product, many of the clients that rely on Locobuzz hail from industries such as BFSI, Telcom, FMCG, Automotive, Digital Agencies, E-commerce, Real-Estate, OTT and Education, Hospitality, Governments and continues to expand to other industries such as Aviation etc. Locobuzz helps brands achieve customer-centricity in business processes by leveraging business intelligence and automation to create stronger, effective brand-customer relations.
Built on AI and ML, Locobuzz enables brands for smarter customer care with multifaceted technological such as Online Reputation Management, conversational commerce and digital command centres. The idea is to have technology present various customer care mediums, align branding teams, and also derive real-time insights from every single customer touchpoint. However, Locobuzz goes above and beyond that. Some of the strongest functions of the Locobuzz platform is to derive data for business growth, such as competition benchmarking, share of voice, influencer management, specialised channel or operational alerts mechanisms, social intelligence, product and brand performance reviews, ticket management and most essentially, versatile real-time data visualisations. The insights that brands can garner can vary across multiple KPI margins such as industry trends, crises management, detailed reportage of brand health, performance and opinion mining. Locobuzz helps brands manage, understand and utilise the business and customer data to not just enable brand growth, but ensure effective and impressive customer experience management.
According to you why Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is vital for Digital Customer Experience?
In light of COVID19, many businesses had experienced a sudden shift in their customers moving and engaging with them online. There were volumes of data that qualified as negative chatter as many brands couldn’t serve or deliver due to the unprecedented crisis of the pandemic. What is also noticeable is that customers often rely on other customers to help make a decision, such as reviews or ratings. It was a rare outcome of positive sentiment that couldn’t really override the negative impression, something that could endanger any businesses growth in a very critical manner. To provide an understanding of patterns and the ability to draw insights from raw data is what AI does to help brands. AI Technology helps measure, quantify, engage and most importantly, makes you aware of your customers’ needs.
When it comes to customer sentiment, empathy is the key to a successful relationship – at the very least, that is what the COVID19 pandemic has taught us. If that were to be translated into data, pushing for positive sentiment scores may not be enough. The only way to bring about a change from negative sentiment to positive sentiment is to make an honest effort in timely communication and handling cases by understanding the customer deeply. AI and ML play a huge role in contributing to this understanding and helping brands address these microscopic needs, but they don’t necessarily fit in a one-size-fits-all sentiment-score upliftment. Prioritising customer queries based on emotions, engagement patterns, association and influence, etc can strengthen response and reputation management. Locobuzz does this in several ways: routing customer queries to agents on a skill-basis, raising specialised behaviour or channel-oriented alerts and even making it easy for relevant brand teams to unify their efforts to solve a case – and automation makes it easy no matter the scale and size of the firm and their teams.
Eventually, all brands hope for customers to be brand advocates and have a positive outlook about the brand. So, for a brand, it is essential to keep not just each customer, but also communities happy. CX platforms focus the majority of their tech building efforts on inspecting every aspect of actionable intelligence. With Locobuzz, brands can manage and access in-depth ticket insights and categories, sentiment scales and more to improve both brand growth and customer relations.
Contrary to popular opinion, AI-led automation is not as expensive and arduous as one might think. If anything, it is a great investment that saves costs and time especially in large scale efforts like customer experience management. The best part about CX platforms is that they are built to manage and automate many administrative business processes. The diversion of human effort from time-consuming task to customer-experience oriented innovation can result in high value for money. In this investment, even the tiniest interaction can add to a pool of data that a brand can draw insights from. AI-led automation is designed to manage the pace and manner of these interactions and are valuable catalysts to CRM and closures.
Highlight the role of Artificial Intelligence in understanding consumer behaviour?
Artificial Intelligence has essentially helped personalise customer relations, innovate brand communications, and meet specific demands. Together with the power of machine learning, AI models at Locobuzz are built on the insights, data points, variables that make AI models equipped with relevant capabilities to aid digital customer experience management. This is a constantly fine-tuned and evolving sphere and Locobuzz invests heavily in state-of-the-art AI-models and infrastructure for brands to leverage customer and business insights from.
Locobuzz helps brands by enabling AI to gauge the market, customer needs and automate business processes. One of the biggest efforts data scientists at Locobuzz put is in perfecting sentiment accuracy – a number as high as 97%. Data or information gathered over a period of time helps build this kind of accuracy and analyse customer behaviour for products, brands, competition and much other important business KPIs.
Consumer behaviour analysis a complex task, it becomes more complex when we talk about internet scale. Locobuzz has created highly optimised consumer behaviour analysis models which work in real-time. These models can predict consumer behaviour for the brand thus helping them in creating highly targeted ads and eventually, exponentially high returns of investment.
We always hear there are not enough women working in Tech. According to you what needs to happen to change that?
In this generation, it is difficult to imagine how any company could justify a bias against someone purely based on their gender. However, the fact that this question arises means that there is a fear or inability to envision a smooth journey for women in industries like technology. It is against that very fear that we must reinforce assurance and stability to women by openly encouraging them to dismiss the constraints of stereotyping. It is upon every modern and ambitious organisation to creating an equal and safe atmosphere for women to rise to leadership positions.
Having established so, the matter is only about self-confidence, because women don’t need to prove themselves against men to be deemed achievers. At least here at Locobuzz, it is women who hold leading positions, right from testing, design, sales, operations, etc.
It is helpful to realise that the barriers of gender-based stereotyping are transparent and that gender-biases are limiting to women, men, and the organisations that let biases like such fester. Any good firm would set the standard by actively valuing a person for their intelligence and talent, skills and determination and most essentially, the will to succeed in their best capacity. These expectations are not structured from so-called gender norms. Great thoughts and ideas can come from anywhere to set the premise for advancements, not limitations allegedly associated with someone’s gender. Efficiency and competency are the keys to success, not just in tech and engineering, but in entrepreneurship and thought-leadership too!
What does the future hold of this data analytics industry and how can companies utilize it to maximise the benefits?
We are living in the age of COVID, naturally, customer behaviours have changed and continue to change quite a bit. Ever since the world has moved online, technology and automation have gone through a sudden developmental surge. Customer data resides in the digital ecosystem in large amounts and each industry and each company is leveraging that data to create personalised experiences for customers. This is the value addition that has become very critical in the times of digitization and WFH. Hence, the role of AI and big data analytics is only going to become stronger.
What is also interesting to note is that while customers have become more digitally inclined, the need for human touch is always going to be there. Such as when a customer wants to buy a house or make a decision for a car, or experience the process of a business that is too sophisticated or empathetic in nature to automate, people prefer to keep experiences interpersonal and offline. Whereas there are other things like banking or pricing or transactions that don’t really need human intervention, to which automation plays a huge role in the journey of the customer’s experience with a brand.
We agree that technology has a role to play, but customers also need to adapt to technology. Like how Darren How, CXO Singapore Pools said in the CCW (Customer Contact Week Asia 2021) “It is about finding the right balance between automation and keeping the human touch.” Cloud solutions are both the future and the now, as customers are willing to traverse in both offline and online, leaving behind a pool of data that allows us to analyse and understand who they are and what they want. Big Data analytics, AI, Automation are all the definite future of all business in the coming generation.
