2008 was an eventful year for Aneesh Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO, Capillary Technologies and his friends Krishna Mehra and Ajay Modani. Just as Lehman brothers was filing for bankruptcy the core team of Capillary Technologies, was procuring a $30k loan from its Alma Matter IIT Kgp to build cloud-based CRM software solutions for retailers. The team spoke to organized retailers, trying to understand the difficulties they faced in terms of customer engagement. Looking to work with emerging technologies, the team combined cloud, data analytics, mobile and social to come up with a reliable solution to power end-to-end Customer Engagement, Clienteling, Loyalty and Social CRM solutions.

Five years down the line, the company has some impressive numbers backing its success. Capillary is helping over 140 major brands across 10,000 stores globally bringing instant shopper gratification to a staggering 70 million consumers. To fuel the fire, Capillary has also received Series A funding of $15.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners, a mammoth task achieved by few tech startups. What started as a small CRM software provider for Indian retailers has today become a global entity with a strong presence in over 16 countries such as UK, US, Singapore, UAE. The company is now on a spree to conquer the American retails and other consumer facing businesses falling between the 50 million to a couple of billion dollars category. Having found a niche for itself, Capillary is winning client after client owing to its cost effective solutions and guaranteed RoI.

The Initiation

As the world today is becoming increasingly virtual, consumers' shopping preferences are also seeing a shift. Users live on their mobile and interact through social networks. Retailers have moved online and are leveraging the power of e-commerce to boost sales. This trend was hurting the brick and mortar retailers who were still stuck in the traditional ways. Reddy spoke to over 50-60 retailers who were bogged down by dwindling sales and falling customer retention. After detailed research the team concluded that consumers did not like filling out forms or carrying loyalty cards. "We felt that the consumer attention span was short and the correct approach to combat these issues was to use emerging technologies like data analytics, mobile and social to make customer engagement more realtime," says Reddy. This is how the team zeroed down on building a reliable customer engagement tool which encompasses CRM, customer intelligence platform and campaign managers.

The company has taken an approach to prompt the consumer to purchase the right product at the right time at the right price point and through the right channel. Their CRM product help retailers improve sales and gain higher margins by intelligently collecting, analyzing and using data and running campaigns for customers. Capillary's Intelligent Customer Engagement (ICE) solutions suite integrates everything that consumer marketers and retail operators require to engage with their customers. The solution offers real-time, high quality data capture, actionable analytics, instant cross-sell solutions, and instant shopper gratification to generate significant ROI within weeks of implementation. By combining big data with a robust, cloud-based analytics engine, Capillary optimizes the relevance and profitability of discounts and personalized offers to consumers in real time, significantly increasing both loyalty and sales.