CxO of the Week: Mr Ankit Utreja, CTO and Co-Founder, WebEngage

CxO of the Week: Mr Ankit Utreja, CTO and Co-Founder, WebEngage

A technologist at heart, Ankit has over 14 years of solid experience in building scalable tech stacks. The in-house database guru at WebEngage, he keeps the house running like well-oiled machinery. He has a keep pushing attitude, his peers say. On a typical day, you'll find him enabling the team to investigate - identify - eliminate the root cause of anything that holds them back from pushing ahead for any mission.

With CioL, as CxO of the Week, Ankit sheds lights on technology disrupting the market. He also talks about the role of MarTech companies to boost deliverables in Indian D2C Markets. Further, he talks about the importance of the customer data platform and its potential to enable successful campaigns for brands.

What are some of the challenges you face in driving product transformation?

There are two - deciding to transform and transformation execution.

Decision - As a product company, one always has requests originating within the team, customers and market. Most of the time, there is a lack of data points available to decide on prioritization. Most of the product transformation projects do appear to be a big ask for resource needs; it could be in any or all of the areas like product build, adoption, go-to-market etc. Though rare, surprises do happen when one underestimates the impact of a low effort change. A lot of time, such changes fall in our blind spot. If prioritized correctly, these can bring a gradual but consistent product transformation.

Execution - Bigger shifts can take more time and energy. Not only customers but your own team gets into the rhythm and transforming the product or its positioning needs a very strong conviction. This is more omnipresent and natural to humans. In our journey, we too went through these. In 2016, we extended the product suite from a simple DIY onsite engagement tool to a complete marketing automation stack for B2C companies. The product was 10x more comprehensive than the earlier avatar. It needed a complete change in how we think of the problem space, how we build, market, distribute, price and sell the product. Such transformations can be very challenging if leaders lack conviction.

What is your top priority while making decisions to improve tech infrastructure at WebEngage?

WebEngage is a marketing stack for B2C companies. It hosts billions of data points across different customers daily. These data points are signals of what end users are doing on client’s mobile applications or websites. Based on these signals, marketers create life cycle customer journeys that WebEngage executes in real-time to achieve user retention. The platform needs to deal with high velocity and a high volume of data to take real-time actions and provide insights to marketers. At WebEngage, the whole system is composed of many smaller systems chosen to effectively solve a specific problem. While making decisions to choose a particular technology, our top-most priority is its effectiveness in solving the issue; the understanding of the technology within the team and its total cost of ownership.

What is the pre-product planning system of the company? How do you handle consumer feedback?

There are multiple streams of feedback coming from different customer-facing teams. These are managed by a dedicated internal SPOC. This feedback along with the existing backlog and product roadmap items are prioritized based on customer impact, urgency and effort. At the beginning of each quarter, we first pick game-changer items for the business. We then keep adding the items based on the prioritization model leaving some buffer for ad hoc items. The product team keeps on updating the progress to internal teams periodically and send out monthly newsletters to all our existing customers about the new rollouts.

A lot of companies are struggling because their products fail to go digital. How do they re-engineer themselves?

If their product is deemed to be digital, then most likely it is the miscalculated risk appetite to blame. Digital transformation won’t make an average product or a service better but it can definitely help a good one to get better. If an organization needs to re-engineer, it is not going to be easy. One needs to share responsibility for bringing the transformation with the team to relook at from a fresh mindset. To begin with, it could be a small part but it definitely has to be done end to end. Organizations need to budget for this risk for innovations to thrive.

How is tech enabling connected experiences for digital natives/evolved consumers?

Evolved consumers may interact with a brand via multiple touchpoints and they rightfully expect the mediums to adapt seamlessly. A user may hop across different devices while completing a grocery purchase for the household, or just playing an online game. A user who is actively calling up your call centre or chatting with a chat-bot to sort an issue might not like to receive an untimely text message from the brand. And, while they are it, they expect the support agent to not ask the redundant questions that the brand must already be aware of.

This is where technology jumps in to bridge the gap and connect the dots to result in a wholesome experience. Knowing where your customers are in the true sense is indispensable to an effective marketing campaign. Brands need to leverage cross channel orchestration tools to engage with their customers and deliver a connected experience.

Dumping technology into the system does not make it right because everyone claims to deliver a technology-enabled solution. The data collection and implementation are fundamental to anchor the customer journey in concern and make the users come back for more. User behaviour is unpredictable and that is exactly what technology aids in by predicting the right channel at the right time for the user.

How can a company deliver a powerful brand experience?

Brands need to communicate very coherently across different channels by putting the user at the centre of all the business aspects. Being completely digital for new-age businesses is actually a boon, it is mainly a challenge for businesses that have traditional offline touchpoints to match the expectation. They need to design the business processes and the supporting technology stack whether it is their CRM, HelpDesk etc. keeping users at the centre of it. A user doesn’t need to understand the intricate details of the organization functions. An integrated experience of sales, marketing and support is expected.

Are brands harnessing data to trigger uninterrupted growth in 2021? What will be the new normal?

Yes, a few are but still not a lot of businesses are leveraging. Though data collection has become easier in the last decade with the increase in the adoption of Cloud and SaaS tools, there are still struggles on the ground to make sense of the data. In today’s era of “move fast and break things”, if marketers rely on a data source that is not the source of truth for the entire business, it can lead to data quality issues creeping into the system. Defining an owner to maintain data sanctity is crucial for businesses.

Thereafter, the struggle is for individual operators to harness the data and make marketing more targeted and personalized. The good news is that the shift is happening. Products like WebEngage help a marketer to focus on the necessary signals, show business metric anomalies and provide predictive insights on marketing campaigns. It won’t be too long for most of the businesses to get to this new normal.

You have mentioned CDP in an existing article. Is it a buzzword or a necessity?

The necessity is to have one single view of your user. If it is a home-grown system or a traditional CRM that solves the business need to provide a unified customer experience, call it a CRM or a CDP, that business won’t care. But, in today’s omnichannel engagement, where an end user’s identity can be different based on the phase of the lifecycle a user is in for a business along with the identifier used by different business processes to know a user can vary.

The online trail of end-users begins when the user is anonymous. The user may have landed on the website organically or may have installed the brand’s app via a paid campaign. Stitching this entire trail across time, devices and geographies need a more sophisticated system. And, that is what the ecosystem refers to as CDP. Call it a buzzword, but definitely a necessity for today’s businesses.

Where does the future of marketing automation lie?

The marketing automation space is yet to shape up well. It still has to catch up with today’s practical challenges. A complete end to end cost to revenue platform that allows experimentation and provides intelligent insights to businesses is to be disrupted soon. One of the goals every marketer has is to regulate spend and prove effectiveness during economic slowdowns. Proving sales attribution to the concocted marketing budget is hyper-critical. Marketing automation will shape up to be an inevitable solution for achieving mass reach embedded with personalisation.

The future is only going to get better with easier to implement tools coming into the picture. The goal is no more to show who hosts the most complex technology in the market but to make a lucid and industry-agnostic solution. It's become mission-critical for brands to adopt newer channels to reach their customer. It is a full-stack marketing automation platform that will help brands get closer to their users but still respect their privacy.