Innover expects business from India to grow 300% in three years: Rakesh Prasad

Innover, which is into data analytics and service supply chain management, is expanding its Digital Experience Studio services in India; these services were limited to US clients only. With cutting-edge capabilities in technologies like metaverse, AI/ML, digital twins, etc., Innover aims to help consumer-centric brands transform the user experience. Apart from opening up services to Indian clientele, this studio will enable the seamless transition of CMOs into Chief Marketing Technologists (CMTs). Innover will work closely with CMOs to identify key friction points and high-impact areas to create a customized execution approach to drive overall business growth.

In an interview with Adgully, Rakesh Prasad, Senior Vice President - Digital Services, Innover, talks about the objective of launching a Digital Experience Studio in India, services offered to Indian enterprises and USP, expansion plans, and the role of India in Innover’s global growth footprint, the overlap in marketers responsibilities, etc. He expects business from the India market to grow 300% over the next three years, powered by our Digital Experiences & Analytics Studio. In the next five years, the company expects its India business to contribute about 10% to the overall revenue. Excerpts:

What is the objective of launching a Digital Experience Studio in India?

India is a fast-growing economy with major brands pouring in investments for expansion focusing their attention on customer experience as a differentiator. This coupled with Innover’s expertise in building connected, insight-driven businesses across industries, growing demand amongst Indian enterprises’ CMOs to embrace a more intelligent approach to Customer Experience (CX) strategy that amalgamates data, analytics, and AI across all the touch points made for a compelling reason for the launch of our highly successful Digital Experiences & Analytics Studio in India. The initial response from our business partners has been very encouraging.

We envision rewriting the customer experience narratives in India through our studio by making CX more personal and immersive by unlocking the value of data, analytics, AI, metaverse, and other leading technologies. Our focused intent through our studio will be to make Indian enterprises future-ready powered by cutting-edge solutions such as metaverse-powered experience lounges, customer journey optimization, hyper-personalization, and experience-driven commerce to transform the way brands interact with their customers and to maximise the return on digital spending.

What are the services offered to Indian enterprises and USP?

With the launch of Digital Experiences & Analytics Studio in India, we have created an integrated capabilities catalogue for our clients in India to build a sustainable, enriching, and profitable business model centered on transformational customer experience.

Here are our offerings in detail:

Customer Journey Optimization: Innover helps enterprises meet and exceed their customers’ needs by deciphering every customer interaction in real-time across business silos, touchpoints, and channels to obtain a single, unified view of customers. The unified view of customers thus enables businesses to optimize the entire customer journey roadmap, right from brand discovery to interaction to purchase and after-sales.

Our Customer Experience (CX) journey optimization capabilities enable marketers to build successful loyalty programmes, reduce campaign delivery timelines and improve marketing ROI. Enterprises can leverage our solutions to drive empathy and sustainability into their customer journey strategy and exceed customer expectations.

Experience-driven commerce: Innover’s digital commerce solutions enable enterprises to build trust, convenience, and consistent experiences across all channels and storefronts. From site to store, our connected commerce methodology leverages our expertise to recognize, connect, measure, and scale the space our clients occupy in the minds, hearts, and wallets of their customers.

Our multi-faceted teams with expertise in creative design and leading e-commerce platforms design and execute headless e-commerce, AR/VR-driven immersive commerce solutions and more to keep you at the front end of change. Our technically erudite personnel are backed by a strong partner ecosystem and unmatched accelerators like Migration Blue Book, XDD™ framework, and Optimization KPI Catalog powering  performance, business agility, and accelerating ROI realization.

Hyper-personalization: Personalization is a key ingredient for marketing success. At Innover, we have designed customized hyper-personalization solutions that leverage the power of data, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create targeted, personal, and “human” experiences that deliver memorable experience across moments, channels, and buying stages. Helping us deliver these exceptional experiences is our strong domain knowledge coupled with our proprietary tools and accelerators. Our experts reimagine end-to-end customer journeys and serve highly relevant content across every touch point. They strategically integrate Digital Intelligence Platforms (DIP), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), and Data Management Platforms (DMP) to establish a holistic view of customers enabling marketers to drive engagement and unwavering loyalty.

Innoverse: Welcome to an ever-evolving world of digital possibilities: Innoverse. Innoverse is a land of possibilities powered by the combination of our creative capabilities, along with our AI/ ML capabilities plus the promise of metaverse to create compelling and engaging digital experience solutions.

Innover is at the forefront of building AR/VR and analytics-powered metaverse solutions where customers, irrespective of location, can teleport into a metaverse contact center space to resolve their queries. In this virtual rendition of a real-life environment, customers are treated to lifelike one-on-one interaction with the agent. The visual interaction enables agents to understand and diagnose the problem more quickly and clearly, providing visual, direct, and more personalized assistance. The solution also provides consumers with an immersive experience that powers interactivity with different company products for additional information that can guide purchase decisions. The solution use cases include new smart device installation, fault detection, remote troubleshooting, product selection, purchase, and more.

The customized metaverse platform is built using the latest technologies. The data layer is in Python with ample use of AR/VR for immersive and Angular for the bottom end. The solution is completely hosted on the Microsoft platform.

Key highlights of our services:

  • Customer Research and Journey Mapping across the entire engagement life cycle (Product Awareness to Service)
  • Building Digital Engagement and Commerce platforms powered by Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, among other leading technology stacks
  • AI-Powered Insights Solution leveraging NLP, CDPs, and Innover AIplatform
  • Customer Service and Engagement solution in INNOVERSE leveraging Metaverse and AR/ VR capabilities
  • Personalized Commerce Solution to expand into a profitable D2C business

What are your expansion plans and the role of India in Innover’s global growth footprint (expected clients to serve in India, hiring, etc.)?

Innover has grown exponentially since inception at an impressive CAGR of 52% over the last five years and we are optimistic that our impressive run will continue with expansion in India. We are looking to hire best-in-class talent across five critical locations for work-from-office roles, including Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Noida, and Kolkata. We will be expanding our India team to 2000+ innovators in the next couple of years. This year alone, we have 500+ openings across digital experiences, data science, software engineering, advanced analytics, design thinking, metaverse technologies, and RPA, to drive continuous innovation.

We expect our business from the India market to grow 300% over the next three years, powered by our Digital Experiences & Analytics Studio. In the next five years, we expect our India business to contribute about 10% to the total overall revenue.

What are the current challenges faced by marketers and possible solutions?

The reliance of marketing on technology is growing by the day, especially in a day and age when digital has become the norm. Marketers are now expected to don the hat of a technologist giving rise to a new breed of marketers christened Chief Marketing Technologists (CMTs). The CMTs are now entrusted with the responsibility to champion experimentation of emerging technology trends and simultaneously drive overall strategy, creative capabilities, customer experience journey, etc. The role of marketers is becoming more and more complex as they are expected to be absolute experts on customer behaviors, technology solutions, business performance, and broader mega-trends.

Innover’s solutions are an apt mix of technologies that are flexible, engaging, and profitable. These are very capably backed by advanced analytics capabilities enabling the delivery of insight-driven experiences and hyper-personalized customer-centric sales. Innover’s Digital Experiences and Analytics Studio is a perfect semblance of technology, and analytics, seasoned with new-age marketing strategies that enable marketers to sense the pulse of the consumer and deliver hyper-personalized experiences in the moment.

What are the emerging trends in the field?

Metaverse: Brands are jumping on the metaverse bandwagon which according to experts will become more mainstream in the coming years; hence, the 21st-century marketer can't afford to miss out on experimenting with the metaverse. It offers limitless possibilities for marketers beyond physical boundaries to improve sales, elevate brand loyalty, and boost business. It allows brand strategists to personify a brand and deliver on the promise of exceptional holistic experiences that exceed the charm of video, ad, words, or image. Metaverse will give brands an opportunity to virtually serve their products and services transcending borders and physical limitations. It is expected to give a major fillip to luxury brands and services that are predominantly experience-driven. Luxury tours, hotels, cars, health and fitness brands and more can conveniently demonstrate products and services through immersive experiences to arouse interest and zero in on high-net-worth prospects and build on their clientele.

Early movers will get an edge and can capitalize on the ‘WOW Factor’. The younger generation (Gen Z and X) will soon get accustomed to the metaverse, emphasizing the need for marketers to make a move, closing the gap between the virtual and real worlds. Many brands are already hosting events in the metaverse, and soon events, exhibitions, and conferences in the 3D virtual spaces linked to a virtual universe will become mainstream. To summarize, the metaverse as an emerging dimension will bring work, entertainment, social media, gaming, education all in one platform, by mirroring customer’s real-world activities.

Web3.0: The arrival of web 3.0 has changed the digital landscape dramatically. Web 3.0 will disrupt marketing in multiple ways:

  • User experience: The way marketers collect and store data will change, impacting user targeting and delivering personalized experiences. This in-turn will heighten the user experience, making the overall interaction more personal and tailored.
  • Searcher's intent: While web 3.0 will not supersede SEO, it will nudge marketers to pay more attention to producing content based on the user's purpose rather than merely focusing on keywords.
  • Secure online transactions: Since Blockchain is an essential feature of Web 3.0, it will enable users to undertake secure, transparent, and tamper-proof transactions, thus revolutionizing how people conduct online transactions.
  • Faster, accurate and actionable insights: Embedding analytics, AI and BI capabilities into the underlying transactional process systems and applications to provide data analytics capabilities without dependency on any third party systems and applications.

Needless to say, with the rising popularity of metaverse and web 3.0, professionals need to develop the latest digital marketing skills like semantic content marketing, data analytics, design thinking, advanced analytics, and more to hyper-personalize offerings for customers.

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