Today’s competitive market is flooded with a plethora of choices that forces the consumers to explore new brands and experience the latest offerings. From the seller’s perspective, holding out customers is the key to survive the fierce market competition. Loyalty programs and reward points act as the most impactful weapons in the armory of the sellers as they play a pivotal role in retaining buyers. However, often it’s a tedious task for the buyers to manage and take maximum benefits of these programs as they are fragmented in nature.
This unique excerpt unveils the story of Easyrewardz Software Services Private Limited – a company that was conceptualized in 2011 with the vision to address a white space, especially between the available CRM tools for SMB’s in the retail sector. Additionally, Easyrewardz is India’s first social collaborative rewards market-place. At present, it has customers across diverse segments including Apparels, Banking, F&B, and a lot more! Some of the biggest brands like PVR, Fabindia, Pizza Hut, Spykar, Jack & Jones, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hyatt, SRL Diagnostics have bestowed their trust on Easyrewardz. Team Easyrewardz is focused on delivering technology products with in-depth analytical insights and best in breed services to create customer-merchant ecosystems that foster growth for the merchant and delight for the customers.
Exquisite Services
Right from inception, the company had set definite goals and had commenced its operation accordingly. Offering two distinct product lines, Easyrewardz has successfully managed to evolve as a competent player in a very quick time.
Customer Lifecycle Management Stack: This is a full-stack CRM & marketing automation platform built for retail SMBs. Through various interweaved modules it helps retailers to engage customers right from lead identification, through the first sale, to timely engagement, understanding their preferences and guiding them towards the right products. The CLM stack helps retailers derive maximum value by providing professional services to integrate the technology with their business processes allowing their marketing team to use the insights & trends captured by Easyrewardz’ s tools in the promotion & pricing strategies of the brand. Today, it influences consumer experiences across 8000+ stores of 125+ brands that use this technology.
Poiink: Poiink is a ‘gee whiz’ channel to drive business through customer engagement and is a B2C platform for businesses to maintain an Omnichannel presence. It works as an enabler for brands to reach a captive base, delight customers and drive loyalty. This is a platform for end consumers to allow them to track & manage several loyalty programs & offers of brands in a single place & get recommendations while shopping. POIINK allows the clubbing of points across several participating brand programs, making points redemption easy for consumers. Till date, the app has over 100k downloads and continues to create milestone despite limited marketing.
The Team – Getting Up, Close, & Personal
The famous quote by Helen Keller, – “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” stands apt for Easyrewardz as this entity was co-founded by mavens who came from diverse professional backgrounds. The inspirational journey of these marvels gives a glimpse of how they realized their dream of building a castle together. Let’s unveil these personas and understand what makes them so unique!
As the Co-founder and CEO, Soumya Chatterjee (ex – CTO, Yebhi.com) is a start-up veteran with deep experience spanning geographies & verticals across strategy, technology or operations in these disciplines. As a CRM practitioner, he leads the product vision & strategy, which in turn also shapes the organization strategy of Easyrewardz. Prior to Easyrewardz, he has been a part of various management teams delivering core responsibilities like Operations, Technology, Payments, Customer Strategy, CRM and much more!
Angad Singh (ex-investment banker, Barclays) is an IIM Alumnus and a people’s person. A Formula-One lover, travel junkie, professional swimmer and a strategist for life – is how his life is defined! As the Co-founder & Director – Strategy, Angad leads Business Development & Alliances for Easyrewardz. He focuses on the business acquisition in the North & Eastern regions of India. In addition to his existing responsibilities, he also doubles up as a CFO, managing the investor community & corporate finance.
Tejas Kadakia is another Co-founder & Director – Sales (ex-AVP of BNP Paribas, New York). Often called the ‘Rainmaker’, he has mastered the art of making relations and business deals. His love for tech & innovation drives him to create strategies for next-gen products. He heads Sales & Business development for Easyrewardz with a core focus on West & South regions. He also onboards new strategic partners who can work as our vendors or resellers.
Completing this team is Sapan Kakadia – Co-founder & Director – Marketing & Operations. Over the years, his intuitive nature coupled with the analytical problem-solving approach has uniquely positioned him to overcome the obstacles in the professional-life scenarios. At Easyrewardz, he manages the strategic alliances including vendors who list their products along with managing the resellers, who help the entity to connect with retailers to onboard their technology solutions.
Conquering the Challenges
Every successful journey carries the imprints of the challenges and hiccups faced during the initial days and the same acts as a motivational force in creating new milestones for the future! While recalling the challenges, Easyrewardz has segregated the major issues under three categories that it had faced to withstand the complexities of the Startup Industry.
Raising Money: The foremost hurdle was to raise money and back in 2011, the venture capital industry was enthralled in an e-Commerce or B2C startup investment environment. The Enterprise tech sector under various segments – B2B, B2B2C, or SaaS had not gained momentum yet and the total available market for CRM in India was being earmarked at ~$200Mn. Left with limited options, it decided to bootstrap with some seed capital and built the first version of the core stack and launched it by end of 2012. However, it was still an uphill battle and a lot was yet to be accomplished!
Onboarding Resellers: Despite working on limited funds, they launched the next version within the next three months; however, the immediate concern was to create a reseller network. Lack of prior knowledge of the industry and creating the infrastructure in the market was again an uphill task and the core team had to devote a long time in convincing and finalizing these deals.
Working Environment: By 2014, the company started to deliver the solutions but soon realized that the ultimate challenge was to have a pool of talented resources and that too on limited budgets. As consistency of delivering quality and innovative services became a priority, flourishing a positive work-place environment was the need of the hour! All these efforts paid off well and the icing on the cake is that the first employee of Easyrewardz is still a part of the growing family.
Keeping Pace with the Future
As the startup eco-system continues to flourish by each passing day, team Easyrewardz is quite optimistic about the future. The company plans to consolidate its business across India by upgrading the existing and new customers to the integrated CRM platform.
Alongside having a continual progression in the MENA region, Easyrewardz plans to expand its footprints in the untouched territories of the APAC region through its reseller network. Analyzing the growth prospects in the international arena, it’s confident that around forty percent of the total revenue will be coming from the expanding overseas business in the next twenty-four months. By 2022, the entity plans to reach the pinnacle of success by cementing itself as a reputed leader in CRM for SMB in the India and APAC region
Easyrewardz – Smart Minds Make Smart Moves
