Interview with the CEO
What makes your solution possible?
Let me start with a brief introduction to give you an overview of the market in which we operate. Over the past few years, loyalty to brands and places has been increasingly built by building customer relationships and better service (including all customer experience and satisfaction). “Bribing” customers with discounts is an activity that is no longer enough, especially in an era of hyper-competition between brands and places. Customer relations are essential, because more and more marketing expenditures are only paying off with a few purchases. For example, the same “thank you” after purchase significantly raises NPS. If you look at the FMCG industry, it’s extremely hard for it to build relationships with customers. This is only done by retailers, e.g. with the help of their own applications.
And this is where our solution comes in, which changes the current status quo.
Blovly is a customer satisfaction platform based on the state-of-the-art AI in which we specialize. We build a global customer relationship management program for all brands that want to professionally take care of customer satisfaction. However, all kinds of portals with opinions, comments and feedback are filled with artificial content created by agencies. Additionally, brands don’t want negative comments to appear online. They prefer to talk to a disgruntled customer and explain the problem by giving him little compensation. In addition to fully automated service with chatbots, AI and marketing automation, our platform is further distinguished by a thorough proof of purchase check. Currently, the validation system is mainly based on sending photos of receipts and invoices from online stores. They reward users for sending them. This enables companies, primarily FMCG brands and retail centres, to build engagement with their customers and collect data about them, which was previously only available to retailers. Ultimately, our customer satisfaction platform also applies in e-commerce and HoReCa, where managing satisfaction and customer relations in general is also crucial.
What does it look like in practice? Just install the widget on your website or landing page. Everything takes place in the brand ecosystem. You can also download the app for convenience and take a picture of your proof of purchase (receipt or invoice from the online store). If a brand sees that there is a product on the uploaded receipt, it can instantly thank the user, for example, via video or by awarding points/discount/gift. In addition, it can encourage him to re-purchase (including cross sell, up sell), as well as answer various questions m.in. whether everything meets his expectations, what he would like to change, etc. Thanks to Blovly, all this is done in a completely automated way, with the help of recommended motors and AI.
What is your competitive advantage?
For more than 10 years we have been providing AI to the largest corporations in the world, mainly outside poland. Our team members worked in the AI research centers of major technology corporations. While the competition uses existing AI solutions provided by specialized companies, we build such solutions all the time 2 years ahead of others.
Currently, we have built the most efficient receipt and invoice scanner on the market, which not only reads all the data in detail, from frequently bent receipts, but also detects all kinds of fraud, e.g. when people try to send the same receipt after a few days, but from a different angle or lighting to deceive the system. In addition, next year we are introducing m.in. a new generation of chatbots, which themselves will learn any answers based on m.in. loaded rules, pdf/word/powerpoint or web pages. You won’t have to teach such a chatbot every possible question and answer – which is currently very time consuming and expensive, and also reflects at the expense of the quality of the conversation. I think that for the next few years no one else on the market will have such a solution. We also have some insider aces up our sleeve.
Who is responsible for creating the solution?
The solution is mainly responsible for a team of specialists in big data, machine learning and artifficial intelligence, with extensive experience in cooperation with marketing managers, but we also cooperate permanently with many specialists from different fields. We are currently working in our startup on clear, marketing communication of what we do (unique value proposition) for both companies and consumers and on dynamic increase of sales (joining more companies in the program).
What caused the most difficulty in building your solution?
Financing. Most of the work, including research, we had to finance ourselves without the support of venture capital funds. All kinds of subsidies were too restrictive for us. Now, with the product and showing revenue, VC funds are more open to talks, although we have still not acquired an investor and are still in talks. Just building an advanced AI-based product is very expensive. It turned out that experienced specialists in the team and a good idea alone is not enough to raise capital from VC – you need a good so-called track reckord solution, which we already have.
What are the forms of subscription to the service?
We negotiate with large companies individually. Some corporations want to obtain data about their customers and contacts to them (emails, cookies for displaying advertisements, etc.) what, where and when they buy, who they are. Our program makes this possible. Other companies want to donate a reward for their purchase and encourage them to buy another product. Still others want to ask their consumers about their opinions.
Our customer satisfaction program for small businesses including cafes, online stores, etc. provides, in addition to the loyalty program, collecting feedback and feedback, rewarding for inviting friends and giving away discounts, and a recommended system – personalized product suggestions. Monthly subscription is several hundred zlotys. Startups are given the opportunity to test for free.
What are the plans for further development?
We want to instantly reach the threshold of 10 million users in our program and join as many FMCG brands and shopping centers as possible.
In parallel, we also want to acquire as many online shops and small businesses as possible, such as cafes and restaurants. Next year, we’re deploying our version of chatbot and voicebot, which will make online consumer service and interactions completely automated and intelligent.
How do you rate the martech industry in Poland?
Unfortunately, behind most of the big brands are foreign companies, which in Poland implement only the strategy of headquarters. We have very innovative martech startups in the country, but many local managers are addicted to headquarters and are afraid to take risks. A huge opportunity for Polish martechs are government programs such as Scale UP. Thanks to them, the State assumes the financial risks associated with possible failure. This is how m.in. our startup developed.
What do you think are the most important trends in martech today?
In our opinion, this is personalization not only of products (microsegments), but also of communication itself and automation of communication using AI.
The future of the industry is two-way communication with the brand – until now, companies have only spoken to consumers, but monologues like “how cool we are”, as research shows, no one really likes it. This leads precisely to ads blindness. The only way in this case is to increase consumer engagement through bilateral communication, which is what we are betting on in Blovly. Customer engagement is also the best way to collect consumer data and communicate even better.
https://nowymarketing.pl/a/27669,polskie-martechy-blovly
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