Akosha.com: Creating a Better Customer Experience for Brands

Akosha is an online platform in India that connects consumers and brands for customer service and feedback.

A lot of people think that public naming and shaming on social media has solved the problem of bad customer experience. But it is not necessarily true. The recent Flipkart episode has brought a resonance to the topic. Besides, there are examples from other brands like SnapDeal, Amul and Zomato where many customers were not too pleased with what the brands had to offer.

In order to understand customer experience management (CEM), brands need to think way ahead (almost like internet startups) to keep up with the customer's expectations. Besides, they also need to look outside their sectors and pick up best practices across the board and CIOs, customer service and marketing functions need to speak a lot more with each other.

In comes Akosha.com that has been built to help brands attain much out of their CRM. Started in 2010, Akosha claims to receive over 75,000 consumer complaints per month across various sectors like telecom, consumer appliances, mobile, insurance, banking and e-commerce.

The firm claims that over 100 large brands use its platform and 22 of them have become paid customers. As of June 2014, Akosha has received over 790,000 customer service issues across sectors, including telecom, consumer appliances, mobile, insurance, banking and e-commerce. The company has 120 employees, of which 15 are in the technology team and over 50 are in customer service calls.

According to Ankur Singla, CEO & Founder, Akosha.com, the platform brings some unique solutions. "The OneDirect Enterprise Suite technology has been built from the ground up to address specific reasons why brands are unable to actually deliver a great customer experience. 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," he says.

Akosha OneDirect Suite can connect every social interaction with the internal CRM of the brand and enable the company's response using the OneDirect Workflow Engine. One of the key features of Akosha OneDirect suite is the Indic Crawler built specifically to track complaints on Indian complaint websites. This unique offering captures 35 per cent more complaints than any other tool in the market. Akosha OneDirect suite also offers tools and features built to support the workflow of the enterprise clients. OneDirect also offers customer service and feedback metrics to the brands - which helps in benchmarking themselves against competitors.

"Secondly," says Singla, "in many meetings with marketers, we saw a sense of helplessness in actually impacting word-of-mouth and increasing brand equity by truly creating a better customer experience. To address the above issues, we decided to start a new initiative to get these folks into a room, focus on the real issues they face on a daily basis and discuss and network with their peers. We call it Quest 2014 (http://quest.onedirect.in/) - an industry forum for CEM that will focus on what's coming from a consumer's perspective, what brands can learn from different sectors and how to handle the overlap of marketing and customer service.

Singla says that brands look at Akosha as a partner who helps them attain meaningful CEM. The company's recent wins include Aircel, MTS, PVR Cinema and Bata, who have joined their long-standing clients Voltas, Snapdeal, Micromax and Groupon, who have been using OneDirect for over a year now.

Giving an example, Singla mentions the 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, as per Singla was the immediate increase in positive word of mouth in online conversations around Aircel.

The company has recently secured funding of $5.2 million from Sequoia Capital and is using the investment to make sizeable investments in technology and to expand the OneDirect Suite. "Our aim is to make a world-class CEM product keeping in mind the Indian brands requirements. Alongside, our team strength will grow from 150+ people to 300+ over the next one year," informs Singla.