Empowering Marketers to Create Powerful Mobile Engagement Strategies: Sunnyvale-based CleverTap Continues to Rise Up, Sets Sights on International Expansion

Our platform makes it easy to collect, analyze, and act on customer insights in milliseconds: Sunil Thomas.

In a world in which web applications and websites are becoming ever more diverse and complicated, running them effectively has become equally complex. In the incredibly competitive world of the contemporary Internet, ensuring that a business remains ahead of rivals required utilizing a series of procedures and tools.

In view of the above mentioned, we are delighted to present CleverTap – a powerful, unified, integrated, and comprehensive platform, that provides real-time behavioral analytics and user engagement, which brands can use to better understand and engage their users. Used by leading global brands including Samsung, Star Network, Sony and many more, CleverTap gives you highly actionable insights into your users’ behaviors and actions based on your optimal KPIs, business objectives and individual user preferences.

The company was established in 2013 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Interview Excerpt: Sunil Thomas, CEO/Co-founder

Why was the company set up? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?

CleverTap was born after we were convinced that mobile engagement automation was broken – very specifically, for consumer businesses. They had experienced:

• User data that is in multiple silos.
• User data that’s not actionable in real time, and at scale.
• Marketing and product teams cannot isolate improvements in user behavior to messaging/user engagement campaigns.

A proliferation of different technology stacks ranging from CRM systems to email and marketing automation systems, to website and mobile app analytics solutions to different advertising platforms over a period of time has created this problem.

Not having a single source of truth, and the ability to take action on that data in real time makes it extremely difficult for user engagement to be contextual and relevant across multiple devices.

CleverTap provides a seamless way to organize all of the user’s data into a single platform, so you can keep track of every user across their multiple touch points including website, mobile apps, email, push and in-app notifications and more. Employing CleverTap’s technology, marketers and product owners can gain access to in-depth analytics and the industry’s best user segmentation tools to better understand and deeply engage with their users resulting in significantly higher retention, revenue and lifetime value.

How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience?

We have been extremely successful since our first generation of the product. The problems we solved were huge differentiators to companies that had large digital audiences. We provide what we term as the ‘Virtuous Cycle’ in real time and at scale and it has been valuable for our customers.

We are focused to stay at the leading edge of innovation and work closely with our existing customers to improve our product offering on a daily basis.

What do you feel are the reasons behind:

Your product popularity:

Solves a real problem: Combining the silos of behavioral analytics and user engagement with one tightly integrated product makes all of your data actionable immediately. You can look at trends in real time and immediately automate omnichannel messaging to guide users forward in their lifecycle. Economically, you now get a powerful and feature-rich solution that combines the best of both the worlds with the cost of one.

Continuous Improvements: We are always looking ahead – talking with our customers, understanding the landscape – to bring value to our customers. Customers, in general, appreciate an actively improving product and we want to keep delighting our customers with innovation that brings value to them.

Empathy and service to our customers: We put our customers before everything. Our teams go the extra mile to service them, understand their problems, learn from their experiences and improve our offerings on a daily basis.

Your consistent growth as an organization:

Consistently providing value to our customers is the only guarantee for growth. We are 4+ years into this journey and we still believe that we are closer to the start line and not the finish line. We will continue to make CleverTap valuable and cost-effective for our customers.

From an operational point of view, we do a good job on setting ourselves aggressive and time-bound goals and putting everything behind trying to achieve these goals. We meet these goals, celebrate, reset and go after the next milestone and this routine has been successful for us.

We have been very consistent and still strongly believe in our founding philosophy that user engagement cannot be effective without really understanding every user you want to converse with. So, a strong foundation of tracking users across their multiple devices and the ability to analyze, understand trends and exceptions has to be the basis of a marketing automation platform.

What are the biggest assets to your organization? What would they be and why?

Our team is the biggest asset we have in the organization. The level of skill, the flexibility to take on whatever needs to be done, the passion, the focus and the camaraderie the team brings to work every day is unbelievable – and we are blessed to have it.

Our focus and empathy to our customers is also a huge asset. We truly want each one of our customers to be successful and put all our energy behind that. Our customers will define our success forever, so we are blessed to have this culture and attitude in place.

Our technology is another critical asset to our success. We have purpose built this technology for solving a specific problem. Everything is 100 percent real-time and we can process millions of user data points within milliseconds on a single server. We can distribute data over any number of servers, so irrespective of the size of our customers we can give them the same speed of interaction and ability to act on their users’ data.

Do you have any new products ready to be/getting ready to be rolled out into the market?

The current roadmap, which is the third generation of the product, is centered around data sciences and effectively using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help our customers automate the creation of user segments by predicting champion users or loyal customers vs. at-risk or hibernating users. This generation of the product will significantly improve the productivity and effectiveness of marketing and product teams.

Where do you see you and your company a couple of years from now?

We see significant growth in the next couple of years and much more of a global presence for CleverTap. We are seeing massive adoption in mobile-first economies, emerging markets and in verticals like demand tech, media and entertainment, Telco’s, and events and ticketing across the world. We will continue to innovate on our product offering and continue to add value to our customers as we grow. Due to the ubiquity of mobile devices across the world, we feel this is truly a global opportunity and we will be a significant piece of the puzzle for companies to solve the user engagement problem.

The Brains Behind The Operation: A Brief Background

Sunil Thomas, CEO/Co-founder: Sunil has worked at some of the most respected technology companies including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Infospace (now Blucora) and Network18 on the path to developing his position as a seasoned leader in the technology field. He has over 25 years of industry experience and has been CTO at public companies both in the United States and India. Sunil drives CleverTap’s strategic vision and manages investor relations.

Anand Jain, Operations Head/Co-founder: Anand was the founder and CTO of burrp.com, India’s largest local reviews and recommendations platform that he successfully sold to Network18. Prior to burrp.com, Anand worked with Motorola, AT&T and Brience based out of Seattle and San Francisco.

Suresh Kondamudi, CTO/Co-founder: Kondamudi is an IIT-Madras alumnus with a deep background and passion for data sciences, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Having held leadership positions previously at Network18 and CenturyLink, Suresh currently runs the engineering teams, and all the research and intellectual property (IP) responsible for delivering massive scale, high-performance real-time platform at CleverTap.

“We truly want each one of our customers to be successful and put all our energy behind that. Our customers will define our success forever, so we are blessed to have this culture and attitude in place.”

keep in touch: clevertap.com