o2s360 Bringing Retail Industry Closer to Its Customer Date:   Tuesday , August 07, 2012 With competition multiplying geometrically for every consumer product and service in every aspect across the country, knowing who your customers are, learning what they think and keeping them engaged is crucial for survival. This is a lot more critical if you are to operate across multiple locations. Over the last few years, the Indian Retail Industry has been witnessing stupendous growth and has been acquiring customers rapidly. Technology, today, can play a key role in managing this growth and the need for the hour is to bring innovative technology solutions to help consumer businesses reach, engage and manage their customers in a scalable and comprehensive manner. This is the space that Bangalore based o2s360 is eying. Just a year old, o2s360 provides customer engagement technology solution to all multi-location consumer products or services, including fast food chains, beauty services, gyms and electronics products. It provides retailers with solutions to build and manage their customer database, keep in touch with their customers, run multichannel marketing campaigns, and measure service quality through reviews and customer feedback. “Built to handle the ground realities of Indian environment, we use mobile and social technologies to give our retail clients an easy, scalable and cost effective way to build customer databases, engage them and increase repeat business,” says Vaibhav Tewari, Co-Founder & CEO, o2s360. “We currently support member clubs, mobile coupons, mobile feedback, mobile reviews and mobile redeemable offers. We are currently developing social versions for all the capabilities,” he adds. The real life experience inspired products proved to be very effective and useful to their customers. Unlike its competitors, whose products take a long time to get deployed and become fully functional, the company with a simplified rollout model can deploy its solution in a medium sized company in as less than seven days. Be it the implemented comprehensive coupon issue, redemption tracking processes, multi-location review processes or member club processes, all can be easily managed by a non-technical business analyst, there by striking out the need to hire a technical expert. The company believes in focusing on business results and metrics rather than abstract value propositions, and this has ensured the technology works in a measurable manner. For Tewari, the fundamental belief is “Business Results First” and the same is instilled in to every employee, whom the company considers and important part of the company’s future vision. This has helped the team to think big and give their best in building the company to the next level. “We reward initiative and help our employees learn new skills as they need. Our whole idea is to build a company with many entrepreneurs so that at every stage of company’s growth, we can sustain ourselves to the next level easily,” says Tewari. The company considers experiential learning process as a very crucial part and provides ample time and space to experiment and learn. This has helped them to get past the challenges that they faced in the past. When it comes to challenges, in the begining o2s360 had a hard time in convincing the businesses on the need to better engage with their customers. Most of the consumer businesses at that time believed expanding to more locations was all that was necessary to grow. “Now with increased competition and coming out of a demand recession there has been mass conversion across the country on the need to hold onto current customers and delight them always. The time for solutions that help better manage customers has come,” said Tewari. Presently the company’s focus is on Indian market as the country is providing them with excellent opportunities. Future plans include covering the entire spectrum of customer engagement and loyalty across channels, a feat not seeming tough for this dynamic company.