Story of Locobuzz: Unified Digital Customer Experience Management Platform

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Locobuzz leverages technology to help brands strengthen their relationships with consumers and increase the lifetime value of a customer!

It is a unified customer experience platform that uses various technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Analytics to enable brands to effectively engage with their customers and in turn form strong and long-lasting relationships. Founded in 2016, the startup aims to democratize access to technology and envisions empowering companies to foster lasting relations with their consumers.

StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Vishal Agarwal (Co-founder & CEO, Locobuzz) to get insights into the startup story and roadmap of the organization. In this artcile, you'll discover how Locobuzz was started, its funding details, services offered, competitors, future plans and more.

Locobuzz - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Locobuzz
Founders	Vishal Agarwal (CEO)
Headquarters	Mumbai
Founded	2016
Industry	Consumer Experience, SaaS
Website	locobuzz.com

Locobuzz - About and Vision
Locobuzz - Industry Details
Locobuzz - Startup Idea and Inspiration
Locobuzz - Product/Service and USP
Locobuzz - Founders and Team
Locobuzz - Launch and Marketing Strategies
Locobuzz - Challenges Faced
Locobuzz - Growth
Locobuzz - Funding and Investors
Locobuzz - Competitors
Locobuzz - Future Plans
Locobuzz - FAQs

Locobuzz - About and Vision

Locobuzz is a unified customer experience platform that uses various technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Analytics to enable brands to effectively engage with their customers and in turn form strong and long-lasting relationships. The startup likes to think of itself as a technology bridge connecting brands with its consumers.

Its mission statement is: “By democratizing access to technology, we envision empowering companies to foster lasting relations with their consumers.” 'Empowering' is a plethora of things – insights, analytics, engagement, and automation.

In the near future, the team wants to ensure that Locobuzz has all the bells and whistles needed along with important data sources to be the perfect consumer experience platform and in the long term, the startup also wants to venture into enabling brands to reach out and identify new customers and manage their marketing campaigns via its platform.

Locobuzz - Industry Details

In 2019, the entire total CX management market is sized at around 16 billion dollars but post the pandemic, data reveals that by 2023, it is expected to grow to about 25 billion dollars by 2023. It is evident that the pandemic has been a catalyst for the increased growth rate in demand and supply of digital customer experience management. Businesses have moved online and become digital, users are becoming more attuned to the concept of “self-serve” and are becoming digitally-centric when it comes to their interactions with brands while setting new expectations about customer engagement standards.

If you look at it, the CX market is vastly broken into three major services - web analytics, content management, and text analytics – this is where the majority of the market share goes and these are the areas Locobuzz operates in. With the events surrounding the pandemic in the past two years, it believes that the market will grow upwards to a CAGR of 20%. Locobuzz has always witnessed significant growth in its monthly revenues and a 100% growth in its monthly recurring revenue – which to the team, is both a sign of positivity and a remarkable opportunity to add value with their work and more.

Locobuzz - Startup Idea and Inspiration

Locobuzz was founded in Mumbai in 2015. The founders had a strong belief that unstructured social media data if analyzed and understood right and combined with the right use of technology is a powerful tool. Hence the idea of combining powerful analytics, driven by data from various social media channels gave rise to the creation of “Locobuzz – Location-based buzz”.

The founding members carried out simple but effective data analytics on unstructured data focusing on processing large volumes of real-time data and further augmenting it with sentiment analysis, location, priority, influencer, viral, etc. As the team engaged with customers soon they realized that analytics is great but communication/engagement is equally important if not more. Brands needed tools to bring their CX game to social media. Looking at this, the team realized the need to have a platform for smart team workflows, tickets management, intelligent routing, and even AI-led auto-responses and other features around customer engagement to have a better product-market fit.

Thus, Locobuzz evolved into a fully integrated, unified Customer Experience Platform. Locobuzz builds software to smartly connect brands and customers to each other!

Listen, Analyze and Engage with their customers
Automated customer interactions using AI
Realtime Data Analytics Hub, Research and Insights
Marketing and Advertising intelligence

Locobuzz currently works with close to 150 reputed clients across geographies.

Locobuzz - Product/Service and USP

Customer satisfaction can be optimally achieved with two critical factors: The use of powerful AI-led technologies that aid omnichannel digital presence, and secondly, deep customer and market insights drawn from social listening and big data analytics that propel brand growth. The most essential differentiator between good technologies and great technologies is their ability to process large volumes of data intelligently, and in real-time to propel brand growth. Locobuzz does exactly that. Without a doubt, social listening, big data analytics, and well-developed AI automation are the need of the hour for brands across sectors, with no exceptions.

In addition to which response management as a key function helps brands bridge the gaps between themselves and customers through smart workflows, rich insights, and engagement at scale. Through the right technological advancements, Locobuzz ensures brands have the capacity to serve their customers and cut past their competitors through future-ready innovation and the ability to adapt to changing demands of the market. A platform like Locobuzz works to ensure that a brand’s digital health is strong, that they remain well informed, and their digital engagement approach is effective and strategic. Mostly, Locobuzz ensures that a brand knows who their customers are, and exactly how to retain them. All efforts eventually help ensure that the brand’s outreach efforts stand out to their customers impactfully.

Therefore, to summarize what Locobuzz does is: It leverages technology to help brands strengthen their relationships with consumers and increase the lifetime value of a customer!

USP

At Locobuzz, the team focuses on building technology that facilitates brand growth through social intelligence and AI-led automation. Locobuzz uses NLP and NLU capabilities which are developed in-house which enrich customers’ data to include a variety of customer data attributes such as age, gender, opinion, location, and 18 other such attributes with 90% or more accuracy and F1-Score. Using this Locobuzz automatically recommends what response should be sent out to the customer as well.

For enterprises, data security and data isolation are some of the biggest challenges when dealing with 3rd party platforms. Locobuzz follows a multi-tenant architecture that enables it to keep each client’s data separate from other clients. Locobuzz undergoes a vulnerability assessment and penetration tests every 6 months through a leading 3rd party security firm in India to harden the security and proactively plug any vulnerabilities if found.

Locobuzz’s scalable architecture automatically caters to higher data volume and adjusts/self-corrects in case of any anomalies. The Locobuzz dashboards present data in real-time without any unnecessary overheads and reduce server costs. Its command center leverages this technology and presents insightful data for brands to act upon.

Locobuzz recognizes the role of machine learning and is investing heavily in it. In its product roadmap, many features such as, content recommendation engines, virality alerts, productivity, and workforce optimizations, etc are based on machine learning which is currently non-existent in this domain. It also has VOIP integrations to deliver a complete omnichannel experience.

"As we evolve in our capabilities, we always ensure that the simplicity of our software is maintained and never compromised" - Says Vishal Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Locobuzz.

Locobuzz - Founders and Team

Vishal Agarwal, Nitin Agarwal, and Shubhi Agarwal are the founders of Locobuzz.

Shubhi Agarwal | Co-founder & COO, Locobuzz

In her current role, Shubhi oversees product development and envisioning long-term productivity of incremental changes, upgrades, and innovations. Shubhi is responsible for creating visibility of the product and curating beneficial associations between businesses and opportunities in Artificial intelligence and digital customer experience.

Prior to co-founding Locobuzz, Shubhi has worked with Tata Motors, Integriti planners, YEN Management consultants, UTV Software Communications Ltd, Bigflix, Hungama, BoxTV- Times Internet, and Spatial Ideas. She has a degree in BE in Electronics and Telecommunications from Amravati University, Shubhi is an MBA graduate in Finance from California State University, USA.

Vishal Agarwal | Co-Founder & CEO, Locobuzz

As the Co-Founder and CEO of Locobuzz, he spearheads the strategic goals of the company and is instrumental in constructing the company’s future roadmap. Prior to laying the foundation of Locobuzz, Vishal has worked across the US, India, and the Middle East on GeoSpatial Analytics. Vishal also worked with Nitin on a tech startup before Locobuzz to ensure transparency and accountability in governance using technology. A graduate from Amravati University in BE – Electronics and Telecommunications, Vishal did his Masters in Electronic Engineering and Geography Information Systems from Penn State University, the USA in 2003.

Nitin Agarwal | Co-Founder & CTO, Locobuzz

Nitin, in his current role, is responsible for building winning teams and delivering innovative and secure technological solutions leveraging AI, Analytics, big data, and automation to streamline Digital Customer Experience. Nitin holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and has 14 years of experience in designing and developing B2B and enterprise applications. Nitin was one of the leading professionals in the industry to identify the early advantages of using artificial intelligence and machine learning in customer experience and analytics, thus placing Locobuzz at the forefront and leader of innovation in this domain. Nitin has been responsible for enabling the seamless integration of the platform with various business demands and processes. His innovation mantra is that technology should be reliable, stable, and easy to use.

Locobuzz - Launch and Marketing Strategies

The journey of Locobuzz began a few years earlier to its launch in 2015 when the idea of utilizing big data analytics for customer insights and brand upliftment was something that the market was yet to truly discover. Upon deciding to create a product and an opportunity in a market like that, it had to really sell its value to its buyers.

In a country like India, sales like these were preferred to be done in person, rather than online. The common consensus was that customers wanted to meet in person to understand the product. So, when Locobuzz had 0 customers, all it was equipped with was an idea and a product at its prototype stage. It had fitted the prototype with the public data of one potential customer and took the results with it when the team went to meet them. When Locobuzz showed them the value of their data, they loved it, and signed up immediately – gradually even increasing the scope of work over the years.

The initial formation of Locobuzz's product and its road map was very heavily governed by its client and close partners when it started out, but as Locobuzz grew to become a unified SaaS product, it was slowly able to transform from customized solutions for every challenge and embody a certain branded uniformity which could house the sector-agnostic challenges on a single dashboard.

Having said so, Locobuzz still caters to needs for the integration of diverse CRMs that are now handled easily in a plug-and-play model. After it was successful in impressing a few clients with the work it had done for other businesses, it was able to build a lot of trust and confidence in the kind of work it was doing.

The problem that Locobuzz is solving is very real – and people needed something like Locobuzz. So, initially, the startup had to put more effort into explaining the severity of the problem it was solving, however, today, the need for the world of customer experience management is much more well defined, thus the interactions Locobuzz has with people are more about pricing, timing and being there in a meeting more than anything else! Now that the need is more well-defined, what is interesting to see is that there is more uptake of products like Locobuzz in India and across the world.

"We as a startup have been able to compete with some of the market leaders in our direct space and hold our ground really well. So, now when we reach out to customers it’s quite different – we focus a lot on making sure that our inbound engine is much stronger than our outbound engine" - Vishal added.

What has worked consistently in keeping the faith of customers in its services is the support system Locobuzz offers them. The startup is more than efficient at identifying the critical needs of customers and delivering assistance whenever they need it. In terms of innovation and strategy, it has been vehemently ahead of its competitors and have never taken the short path to research and execution. They have done right by tech adoption and integration while maintaining the speed and consistency. Most importantly, Locobuzz continues to think ahead to discover and create opportunities to innovate and never forget to be there for its customers.

The overall branding and marketing of Locobuzz is a collection of efforts. Currently, Locobuzz is focused on elevating its brand image to make sure it is always relevant in the minds of people whenever they think of “Unified Digital Customer Experience Management”. It has steadily expanded its presence on all major social media platforms and other digital mediums. Through blog posts and published articles, it constantly touches upon the many topics in its domain from a thought-leadership perspective ensuring the content reaches the right audience.

Locobuzz's marketing strategies are appropriately adjusted to reach out to the overseas market. For example, e-mail marketing is a crucial part of its overall strategy of touching base with potential customers in the US and India, on the other hand, its dedicated Pre-Sales team connects with those expressing interest in this space.

For Locobuzz, participating in events – in both India and overseas – has proved to be lucrative. It has had the opportunity to share interesting learnings about its work with the clients while highlighting Locobuzz's successes and the way in which Locobuzz can improve the overall Customer Experience of other brands as well.

It has focused its marketing efforts on gaining a trustworthy and steady association with “Unified Digital Customer Experience Management” to drive innovation as thought-leaders from the space of CX.

Locobuzz - Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge that Locobuzz faces is that it will be compared to the global players in the same industry. In the initial phases of the firm’s establishment, the team were asked (all the time!) if such a small company would exist in a few years. There were times where they had to disclose its financials to close some deals and prove that they were indeed a profit-making company.

Eventually, as a matter of practice, Locobuzz focused on building its website and building the thought-leadership content, to ensure that it continues to remain in the mind space of people searching for products like Locobuzz. In that sense, the founders do believe that this mindset has changed because India is being recognized as a country that can build tech solutions for the world.

"We think this challenge is still very prevalent" Vishal continues, "There are still people who prefer to pay for expensive services with foreign companies when the same can be leveraged here in India. We at Locobuzz overcome these challenges by building trust, providing continued support, sharing our VNL, or giving free trials for months at a stretch sometimes. In a way, we believe that the confidence in the product is what is reciprocated in the experience it provides consumers"

Locobuzz - Growth

The future looks promising as the company is doing well, the team at Locobuzz is constantly building new products, acquiring new customers, achieving targets as per the expectations of the monthly recurring revenue. Locobuzz has already registered 60% of the growth over last year in just 6 months, and it is on track to a great year and push for significant growth in revenues and presence in some new key markets.

Locobuzz - Funding and Investors

In April'21, Locobuzz raised pre-series A for INR 9 Crores from SIDBI Venture Capital Ltd.

Locobuzz - Competitors

Locobuzz's top competitors are - Konnect Insights, One Direct, Simplify 360, Meltwater, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Yellow Messenger, Talkwalker and Khoros.

Locobuzz - Future Plans

Locobuzz recently received its first round of funding. Through the funds raised, it is looking at expanding its technology teams, business development team, client services team with critical hires as well as focused marketing efforts. From a product perspective, the startup believes that analytics and automation for messaging channels are going to be a big deal, so the team is focusing on creating products to increase the value and adoption of these tech solutions, eventually garnering the future potential of revenue.

Locobuzz is looking at expanding to newer geographies such as the US and southeast Asia. It has already begun to create brand visibility and engagement - Locobuzz was recently a part of a US-based Omnichannel CX event and participated as silver sponsors to the event.

Locobuzz - FAQs

What is Locobuzz?

Who founded Locobuzz?