The "C" is for "customer"

Mar 12, 2014

CQuotient mines data for clues on improving targeted ads

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

CQuotient sees itself as a sort of Sherlock Holmes for retailers.

When customers visit a particular retail website, they leave “interesting, subtle and valuable clues,” said founder and CEORama Ramakrishnan. “We're data detectives.”

The Cambridge-based company helps online and brick-and-mortar stores with “personalized retailing” by collecting and analyzing various bits of data on customers (whether regulars or prospects), then using that information to create tailored content, ads, offers and promotions.

CQuotient assembles a bevy of information – including transactions made online and offline, web-browse data, email interactions, mobile usage, product details and promotions – to create profiles indicating how, when and where customers shop, what merchandise they like and don't like, their price sensitivity, what kinds of offers entice them, among other details.

“Fundamentally what we do is go deep into the data and extract clues, nuggets, about what customers like and don't like,” said Ramakrishnan. “It helps us understand what's really going on in the customer's mind.”

Ramakrishnan has deep experience in data analytics – in addition to running analytics consulting firms, he taught analytics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and previously served as head of R&D for the Cambridge-based ProfitLogic, which helped retailers optimize profits and pricing and offered inventory planning software. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2005 for a reported $160 million.

While at ProfitLogic and Oracle, Ramakrishnan said he found that, while retailers were looking at store and product-level data, they weren't often analyzing data down to the customer level. This prompted him to found CQuotient – the “C” in the name signifies “customer” – in 2010, starting exclusively with email personalization.

Because emails can drive significant revenue for retailers, the goal was to “figure out how to make those emails more individualized, more relevant, more useful,” he explained.

The company – now with 12 employees and actively hiring – has since broadened its data mining to encompass interactions between customers and retailers on the web, mobile apps, through direct mail, and even in physical stores.

Ramakrishnan credited the ability to delve so deeply to advancements in technology and machine-learning. The processes undertaken now simply wouldn't have been possible even five years ago, he said.

“Now we can receive, store and process an amazing quantity of data,” he said.

Going forward, CQuotient has plans to ramp up its engineering, sales and marketing teams, and use data to personalize display advertising across the web. The company is backed by $3 million from Bain Capital from a December 2010 funding round. It may pursue a second round, Ramakrishnan said, as early as the second quarter of 2014.

Although he declined to release revenue figures, Ramakrishnan did say the company is “experiencing rapid growth.” Revenues are derived from a subscription model, and the company currently has more than 15 retailers “of all stripes,” he said, including Karmaloop, The Children's Place, and Men's Wearhouse.

The latter, which has 1,100 stores nationwide, partnered with CQuotient in 2013, focusing on transaction, web and loyalty program data.

“Just as our in-store tailors alter garments to perfectly fit each customer, we (can) deliver personalized emails individually tailored to each recipient,” Susan Neal, executive vice president of e-business, marketing and digital technology at Men's Wearhouse, said in a statement.

Original story link.

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