CustomerLabs helps you recognise a potential customer before you lose them

As they say, “Who cares if we find out we lost a customer after he left?” Analytics solutions tells us about the opportunities we lost, but what we need is something in real-time which will tell us- “This visitor is your potential customer, please take some action,” before we lose him. At the same time not everyone who visits our website is a potential customer; we need to identify the visitor who might be one.CustomerLabs is a plug and play predictive customer analytics platform that provides direct value to SME’s with pre-built machine learning models. The system patterns visitors as customer and non-customer. If a visitor leaves a pattern that shows him as a prospective customer the system will start taking actions to convert him into a customer.

CustomerLabs was started in mid 2012 by Vishnu, a small town boy who eventually went to the University of Leicester to do his Advanced Software Engineering. It is his second start-up after Lapilluz, which was an Education Analytics solution providing startup that failed. Vishnu comes from a small town 80km from Chennai. He completed his primary schooling there and then moved to Chennai for his graduation. After completing his graduation from RMD Engineering College, he went to the University of Leicester, UK, to do Advanced Software Engineering. For about a year he worked with Hyundai Electronics in UK and then moved back to India and started Lapilluz. Lapilluz, however, didn't work well and in mid 2012 Vishnu started working on CustomerLabs.

The core team of CustomerLabs comprises three co-founders, Vishnu, Asim Ali and Prabhakarn. Asim has a deep understanding of the SME market. In his previous role he implemented CRM in 100+ SMEs. Prabhakrn is a Data Scientist with more than seven years of experience in building systems. He is presently pursuing his part time PhD from the University of Madras.

At present, Vishnu is putting his own money in the startup but he is looking for investors. Businesses use marketing automation software to run their campaigns for acquiring and nurturing leads but regular marketing automation software lacks intelligence. For example, if you enter any e-commerce website and leave without making a purchase you’ll be followed on the web. You visit any SaaS based companies without taking any action you’ll be targetted online when you come out of the site.

"We can’t waste money by re-targeting every visitor who is coming into our website. The idea is to identify the visitor with at least a certain threshold of intent to buy or take an action then start re-targeting him or her. At the same time you already have a set of customer. If you want to know who will make a purchase in the next three months, you’ll need a data science team’s help in crunching the data for you. “Small and medium sized businesses cannot afford a data science team, so they need a solution which can be plugged into their current systems (CRM) which can tell them who they should target in the next three months," says Vishnu.

Businesses can also identify and segment customers based on product interests, influence and purchasing power. SMEs cannot afford to have a team of people to maintain marketing automation software; it has to be easy to use without the need of an IT team.

Following are the sections in which CustomerLabs works to help you recognise your active customers -

a) Behavioural Segmentation

b) Product/Category Based Segmentation

c) Predictive models for Life-Time-Value (LTV), Engage, Churn and Convert/Buy

d) Up-lift Modelling; for identifying customers with higher probability of conversion or purchase

The market that Customer Labs in trying to approach is quite big. According to Forbes, data market is projected to grow to $50.1B in 2015, and predictive analytics will grow to $3.4B by 2018. The main focus of the company is on those businesses that are trying to acquire their customers digitally and are capable of spending minimum USD 35,000/annually on digital marketing.

The Business Model of CustomerLabs is a SaaS monthly subscription. However, they also allow businesses to run their campaigns and charge a percentage of their campaign budget. The minimum budget is USD 300.The major problem they are facing currently is in hiring tech geeks who can contribute significantly.

CustomerLabs is currently hiring. They are looking for Engineering and Data Science guys to add to their team to release integrations with widely used CRMs, E-commerce websites in-parallel to acquiring customers from various countries.

Website: CustomerLabs