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“Improving Customer Experience”

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Onkar Sharma
New Update
Customer Experience

Vishrut Chalsani, Co-Founder and VP, Enterprise Solutions, Akosha shares insights about the company and reveals how Akosha helps brands to address customer complaints.

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What is Akosha.com? How does it help address the customer grievances?

Akosha

Akosha.com is a user-friendly platform that makes it easy to connect with companies to resolve any customer queries and complaints. This unique platform not only advises but also helps in getting the best possible resolution for consumer grievances. It helps brands to reduce negative impressions on the internet and reach out to unhappy customers in an effective manner. Customers can connect with Akosha via a dedicated customer care helpline, the website and the mobile app.

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Consumers do not have the time to keep following up with the brands or reach the right person in the brand team. For general queries, we help consumers with the right information and guidelines/processes to resolve their concerns on behalf of brands. For example, most customers are unaware that if an airline ticket is booked through an OTA and is cancelled directly with the airline, the refund will not be processed. Similarly, a lot of customers are highly anxious during the waiting period between the company cancelling their order and the money being credited to their bank accounts – usually it can take from 7-20 days for this.  In most of these cases, a communication from our end reduces the anxiety level of the consumers as we help them understand the processes better and the intentions of the brand to resolve their issues at the earliest. We also share a clear communication about the time it will take to get the query resolved, reason for the delay, status of the query etc. We follow up with the brand and keep customers updated via email, SMS and phone, till the query/concern is resolved.

While we have seen most CRM technologies failing, how does Akosha One Direct pass the test of addressing problems?

OneDirect Cloud connects every online interaction the customer has with a brand. OneDirect is the only platform that includes all of the capabilities to manage a holistic social media strategy; along with built-in integrations with traditional CRMs to leverage the power of social media throughout the brand, this is where the traditional CRMs fail.

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OneDirect product line includes tool like:

  • Indic Crawler- Custom-built natural language processing (NLP) tool to track all relevant online mentions in the Indian context.
  • Workflow engine- Intelligent technology which automates assignment of mentions using advanced business rules and workflow architecture (integrated with your CRM).
  • OneDirect Feedback cloud- Integrate customer feedback from all sources including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, website, email and other sources.
  • OneDirect Customer Love- Curate online mentions which capture the great experiences of your customers – use social voice to showcase happy customers.
  • OneDirect Social Leads- Tap customers before your competitors snap them. Involve yourself in conversations around similar products/services, and convert pre-purchase audience into customers.
  • OneDirect Benchmarking Index- Our proprietary index based on 30+ criteria spanning across social personality, Google online presence and customers’ perception gives you a real picture of your online reputation.

How is Akosha OneDirect helping brands to improve their customer experience?

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Akosha OneDirect helps brands to improve their customer experience and enhance their reputation. The OneDirect Enterprise Suite has been built from the ground up to address specific reasons why brands are unable to actually deliver a great customer experience. Our aim is to make a world-class CEM product keeping in mind the Indian brands requirements. OneDirect empowers marketers and customer service teams in large enterprises to manage all online customer interactions including social media seamlessly, in a timely way to impact the overall customer experience.

We work with brands to provide second generation ORM solutions in an innovative way, besides helping them to leverage their customer service apparatus to drive exceptional returns on the marketing spent. The OneDirect tool helps the brands to streamline internal processes to improve efficiency in the existing systems. Eventually, we work on the root-cause analysis and benchmark a brand's performance with industry peers to generate positive reputation and take customer service to the next level. We believe that client success is our success.

-Who should pay you? Consumer or company?

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Akosha is primarily free for users. Our main revenue model is based on charging brands for monthly software fees.

Who are your customers? Share insights how they have addressed some of the key problems using Akosha platform.

We work with brands across sectors and some of our clientele include brands like Aircel, Micromax, Groupon, Snapdeal, MakeMyTrip, Voltas, Daikin, Dish TV, Videocon, Bata, Olx and FashionAndYou amongst others.

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Case study-How is Akosha OneDirect helping brands?

Sharing Aircel Case Study, which was done during the floods in Jammu and Kashmir two months ago. The number of Aircel consumers looking for help in reaching out to their relatives or addressing queries regarding the network shot up. Aircel closely listened and acted on the voice of the customer during the flood using Akosha's OneDirect Suite. It opened up its network for all players in J&K, provided information to people about last known location of the people who were not reachable through an SMS service, and the time to execution and rolling out was in less than 24 hours. The impact, was the immediate increase in positive word of mouth in online conversations around Aircel.

How big is your team?

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We are a team of over 250+ people.

Have you got any funding?

Yes, we received funding of $5.2 million from Sequoia Capital in July 2014. The funding is being used to make sizeable investments in technology and to expand our OneDirect Suite. On the B2C side, we are investing in our mobile app that will completely change the customer service space in India. Our new mobile app will be launched soon. In addition to this, we are making significant investments in expanding our team and hiring the right talent, across various departments. We are growing and it is important to add young and passionate professionals to the team, who will play a significant role in building Akosha’s reputation and brand value.

What are the industries you look at for tapping?

The maximum number of complaints are for telecom and e-commerce related verticals, hence apart from tapping these two verticals, we are also targeting- Consumer appliances, smart phones, Financial products, FMCG and Travel & Leisure.

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