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CleverTap Quarterly is our virtual product showcase where we share market insights and introduce our latest innovations. At our most recent Quarterly on February 25, we also hosted a fireside chat with Shobhit Singhal from Disney+ Hotstar, who candidly discussed his best tactics for building lasting customer connections.
For those who attended the event live, we’re so grateful you could join us! Here, we’re recapping the event highlights and sharing videos of key presentations for you to watch on-demand.
2020 was a challenge for us all. No matter what industry you’re in, we’ve all been facing a lot of uncertainty, learning new ways of working together as we all figure out remote collaboration, pivoting on a dime to meet changing customer needs, and so much more. We all deserve an “I Survived 2020” t-shirt!
The need to digitize everything and the dependency on mobile devices has accelerated tremendously throughout 2020, and we’ve been blessed with a lot of growth because of that.
After a record-setting Q3, Q4 extended that growth and was our best quarter ever. We continue to expand across 5 continents, and we’re seeing rapid growth with Fintech, ecommerce, health & fitness, and edtech brands in particular. We’re taking all of this exciting momentum with us into Q2 and look forward to smashing more company records in the months to come.
We only win when you win. Our success is directly tied to how well we listen and work with you to help you achieve your goals of creating amazing customer experiences. As our business grows, we’re reinvesting in R&D and upscaling our customer success team. We’ll be instituting a formalized QBR process that focuses on domain-specific solutions. You’ll be able to sit down with our customer success team on a regular basis to dive into your exact business metrics and use cases, and we’ll be able to add a lot of value and expertise to further support your growth.
Speed and simplicity have been intentionally built into the DNA of our product and our company since Day 1. And our commitment to innovation remains a guiding principle as we continue to invest in our platform. This quarter we are very excited to release our solution’s new foundation: the Smart Platform powered by ARC. ARC is our biggest innovation ever and we can’t wait to unveil it to you.
We’ve also been working very hard on a refresh of the CleverTap brand. It’s been exciting to see our brand grow so much over the past year and this new look is a reflection of how far we’ve come, what we’re aimed for, and where we’re heading. On behalf of the entire CleverTap team, we’re grateful to have you on this journey with us.
For the past several months, our product and engineering teams have been working with a singular purpose: defining and building the next generation of our platform. I am excited to announce ARC, the engine that powers our platform. It’s at the heart of every user action that you store, every query that you run, and every campaign that you send.
With ARC we are now taking a gigantic leap forward. Our initial data on existing traffic shows over 250% improvement in query performance. ARC is 20x more efficient for memory traversal, meaning it can access larger data sets faster. And it’s 8x more efficient in storing large amounts of data.
We currently store more than 10 trillion data points for our customers, and we’ve sent as many as 40 million messages per minute for a single customer. With this explosion of user activity, the sheer volume of data, and the complexity of the use cases that are required to engage today’s mobile users, we needed to look at our platform with fresh eyes and rethink how to efficiently scale while maintaining performance.
We also learned from you. You asked for new, out-of-the-box segmentation models to build more effective user engagement flows. With shrinking app attention span, personalized, real-time action is needed more than ever. This type of campaign optimization, powered by advanced data science models, requires a platform that can analyze large amounts of data. And more and more of your users are now global, where distributed data and supporting systems that can scale infinitely is something that we had to address.
Deep Learning Personalization
On a fundamental level, this exercise to rebuild our platform means solving for deep personalization. We needed to build a platform where we could capture every single user action and augment user-generated data with external data sources in order to provide deeply personalized experiences.
We already see our platform learning more complex business rules derived from not just transactional, but contextual data as well: through browsing behavior, customer lifecycle stage, and even affinity towards certain actions. We have already started some of this work for a few customers with specific use cases that provide recommendations for next best action.
The necessary technology to build this includes the next generation of machine learning, smart solutions for long-term data storage, and efficient data processing. ARC solves for all of these.
Performance & Efficiency
Everything will be faster when we migrate you over to ARC. We’ve seen a 300% jump in speed and performance.
With its unique combination of remarkable performance, powerful features, and incredible efficiency, this is by far the best platform engine that we have ever created, and we are so excited to bring it to you. Watch for an email from us as we start the process of migrating your accounts over the next month.
We’ve been working hard over the past few quarters to provide a refreshed CleverTap experience for our customers.
We wanted to build a brand that connects with our product innovations, including ARC and other things to come. Since innovation is a big part of our brand and what we represent, we landed on using the character of Tony Stark as motivation as we approached our brand refresh.
The brand also needs to represent the way our customers provide engagement and retention services for their own users. A big part of what we’ve done is add a consumer flair and a sense of fun and boldness to the brand. We’re looking forward to unveiling it to you in full in the next few weeks, and be sure to keep an eye on your mailboxes for some new swag!
Campaign Refresh
The new Campaigns experience brings everything you need to create powerful campaigns on a single page. The new interface allows you to work smarter and faster by defining target user groups and creatives and scheduling them in any sequence. Coming May 2021.
Web Inbox
Keep an inbox of messages that customers can access right on your website. Just like an email inbox, these messages are stored and can be viewed at any time. Share updates on new products and sales, popular content, or other important customer communications.
Product A/B Tests
A/B Tests help remove the guesswork when building UI/UX flows in the app and allow marketers to optimize for conversions. It’s a powerful tool for determining optimal user flows and campaigns.
Email Add-on
When paired with our push notification system, our Email Add-on delivers a powerful one-two punch of messaging orchestration.
Welcome to our fireside chat with Shobit Singhal of Disney+ Hotstar. As we dive in, could you share a bit about your background and your current role?
Absolutely. I’m part of the product team and have spent a lot of time focusing on personalization. We want to understand our users better, communicate with them better, figure out what they want to do on our platform, and build experiences that go beyond video.
It’s been super interesting work, given we have hundreds of millions of monthly active users. In 2019 Disney+ Hotstar broke a record with 25.3 million concurrent live viewers for our New Zealand cricket tournament.
What are some of the key metrics that your team is honing in on for 2021?
There is a concerted effort to increase user engagement. We’ve pivoted from being an AVOD (ad-based video on demand) business to being heavily tilted towards SVOD (subscription video on demand).
What this means is that once users trust us with their wallets, we need to deliver on that trust — and the way we deliver is by giving them as many avenues to entertain themselves as possible. Building personalization allows us to use our incredibly diverse content catalog to deliver on that promise.
One of the big trends in North America recently has been watch parties. What is your take on that concept and the social aspect of content consumption?
We do believe that entertainment consumption is a social experience. Watch parties have been live for cricket on Disney+ Hotstar since September 2020, and we’ve seen a lot of good early traction. We’re continuing to iterate on the user experience in order to elevate and expand on it.
What other industry trends do you see popping up over the next year?
It really comes down to the surfaces we’re available on. When we present Disney+ Hotstar to users on mobile it means something different than when we’re on their TV.
We see these surfaces as distinct because users come to each device with slightly different intentions. On mobile, you’re typically watching by yourself, whereas when you watch TV you’re more likely to be with family, for example. The way you interact with the UI is different: tapping a screen that’s inches from your face versus navigating a much larger screen with a remote.
If a platform can understand that, it can solve user needs better. How can we help their journey on each device? In the future, we believe that the ways users interact with all of our platforms will change drastically. In emerging markets, voice is becoming huge, for example.
Time of day preferences is another example. If you look at Spotify, they’ve got morning playlists, afternoon playlists, evening playlists. People create routines for themselves. How do we make it as easy as possible for users to fulfill their needs? How well does the platform understand the user’s needs and intentions in that very moment? Questions like these will be critical in determining success.
What final words of advice would you give the audience? Where do you see opportunities for success?
Ultimately, it boils down to strengthening customer relationships. How do we keep users engaged over the long-term? How do we get them to spend more time with us? How do we give them more reasons to keep coming back? That’s the aspiration.
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