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May - 2009 - issue > Top 25 companies
Bringing Brands and Customers Together
ST Team
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Seeing brand engagements not leading to sales or customer acquisition, Mitesh Thakker is trying to carve a business out of it in AdoRoi, Thakker has a company that seeks to help clients nurture leads and turn them into sales; in other words, AdoRoi’s solution enhances and speeds up customer engagement and ensures that the engagement results in a meaningful relationship of the customer and the brand.

While many may take AdoRoi as a lead management solution, it is much more than that, he says. The solution focuses on making the engagement between brands and their prospective customers more effective and actionable, leading to customer delight and shorter sales cycles. The idea is to make the customer have positive disposition towards the brand throughout the interaction, explains the founder and CEO of the company.

“We help brands reach out to their prospective customers when they are in an information seeking and decision making mode,” he explains. The company also enables brands to send relevant information instantly to prospects through dynamic response vis-à-vis an automated SMS/IVR static response.

Presently incubated at the SP Jain Institute of Business Management in Mumbai, Thakker’s company has received several accolades since it came out of its stealth mode of development around six months ago. Chief among them are the Red Herring Asia & Global 100 Winner 2008.
“We were chosen as part of 100 most innovative and disruptive companies in Asia and the world,” says Thakker. “These were two separate selections that involved review of over 5000 technology companies from across 250 countries,” he adds. AdoRoi was also among the NASSCOM Top 50 IT Innovators in India for 2008.

Genesis

Thakker was working as the Director of Marketing in a U.S. based company before he started AdoRoi. While on an assignment to India, he noticed that their marketing spends were generating a lot of leads, but these leads somehow were not getting converted into sales largely due to inefficiency in lead distribution.

He also noticed that once leads were passed on to the sales executives on the field, it was very difficult to track them. Also, very often, either prospects would not respond to calls from the company’s call center or the sales team would not bother to follow-up the leads generated through various sources and label them as cold, all these due to the time lag between the lead generation and follow-up. This in turn leads to very low conversion rates for the leads generated from the marketing efforts.

He strongly felt the need for a solution which could bridge the current gaps between the marketing and sales functions of an organization. He became aware of the lack of a solution that could seamlessly integrate the interaction between a prospective customer and multiple touch points of a brand (all the ATL & BTL activities).

Thakker found a business opportunity in this and, after a few months, quit his job to launch AdoRoi. Built with around Rs. 2 crore, AdoRoi is largely self-funded, but also supported by a bank loan.

Disruption

In today’s highly competitive market place, the customer has a wide variety of options to choose from. In this context if a brand is not responsive to the prospect or customer when he or she needs it the most, then the brand has lost a prospective customer. All the marketing efforts and the cost of customer acquisition go in vain. More importantly, the cost of acquiring such customers, who have had a distasteful experience earlier with the brand, is very high. We believe that a prospective customer should always carry home a positive brand experience and the brand should end up with a delighted customer. AdoRoi is an effort in this direction.

“Our unified communication technology helps complete the entire engagement in 10 seconds or less, resulting in prospects or customers being able to receive the information they are seeking at the peak of their interest, and serves to motivate the sales and dealer teams as the prospects lead arrive to them on a real time basis i.e when the leads are hot, apart from other benefits,” says Thakker.

AdoRoi uses a variety of interactive media, viz. SMS, IVR, Web, WAP, e-mail, or DTH to engage with customers responding to advertisement on the print, TV, radio, OOH, online, or mobile media. The way it helps prospective customers connect with the brand is different: when a prospect calls into the client company’s number seeking information about some product, AdoRoi’s solution routes the call to the most efficient sales person nearest to the location form where the call originates, as against the call going to a generic call center.

It also helps monitor the engagement between a prospect and dealer or sales person through a threaded communication, and offers flexibility of customizing messages (such as local offers, product promotions) by the locality or region.

Though these are still early days, and market conditions are not quite perfect, Thakker believes in the unparalleled value proposition of AdoRoi. “In these times, of all, companies would seriously be looking at lowering their customer acquisition costs while providing them with a positive brand experience,” says Thakker. He believes this is a good time to launch AdoRoi in the market and given the disruption it offers, things could just turn for the better.

* AdoRoi is an IP protected application in the U.S. and India.

To know more about AdoRoi you can reach Mitesh at mitesh.t@adoroi.com


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