| | JULY 201426CIOReview

T h e N a v i g a t o r f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o l u t i o n s

CIOREVIEW.COM

NextOrbitNextOrbitrecognized by magazine as

An annual listing of 20 companies that are in the forefront of tackling challenges in the Customer Experience Management arena and impacting the marketplace

Editor-in-ChiefPradeep Shankar

Customer Experience ManagementSOLUTION PROVIDERS

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Description:Company:NextOrbit A provider of cloud-based

platform that efficiently predicts and mitigates Out-of-Stock in Retail

Key Person:Kishore Rajgopal,Founder & CEO Mayank Shende, Co-Founder & Data-Scientist

Website:www.nextorbit.com

CEM SPECIAL

In the age of smart, connected customers, the demand for customized and personalized customer experience continues to rise across the industries. A number of customer experience-related trends are relatively gathering

steam, further raising the bar for companies to innovate products and services that deliver satisfactory experiences. Essentially, customer experience design is gaining traction. Most customer-centric organizations have embraced the process of designing excellent experiences—testing solutions and iterating improvements before scaling.

In addition, organizations are placing the customer at the heart of their strategies and rethinking their models of engagement. They are reviving their brands across all of the interaction points, looking beyond multi-channel to omni-channel, converging digital experiences with physical experiences and finally using insights into the customer’s

behavior to develop a personalized meaningful relationship. These solutions are developed around customer’s specific needs and equipped with new technologies such as big data, analytics, and cloud amongst others that provide strategies, process models, and information technology to design, manage, and optimize the end-to-end customer experience process.

In the last few months, we have reviewed hundreds of CEM providers and shortlisted some of the pioneering companies who have helped their customers tackle the challenges related to customer experience management. The companies featured here provide a look into how their products work in the real world so that you can gain a comprehensive understanding of what technologies are available, what is right for you and how they transform the CEM landscape.

We present to you CIOReview’s 20 Most Promising CEM Solution Providers of 2015.

NOVEMBER - 09 - 2015

20 Most Promising Customer Experience Management Solution Providers 2015

| | JULY 201427CIOReview | | November 201538CIOReview

NextOrbit

Out-of-Stock Alerts for Enhanced Customer Experience

The recent surge of technologi-cal advancements in the retail industry has given rise to a multitude of opportunities for

carrying out up-to-the-minute services. Perhaps the retail industry is witness-ing the best of times; however, there is still trouble in paradise. A consistent nine percent incidence of Out-of-Stock (OOS) condition in the retail stores is leading to a direct sales loss of nine per-cent for the retailers. Aware of the fact, Kishore Rajgopal, Founder and CEO, NextOrbit elaborates, “The Retail and Consumer Product (CP) companies are all about creating ‘moments of truth’—the moments when customer makes a choice to buy the product.” The retailer needs to capitalize on those ‘moments of truth’ by ensuring the availability of product or be prepared to hear cus-tomer experience concerns. “For exam-ple, customers are quite specific when it comes to HABA – Health Care and Beauty Aids. If their brand and color is out of stock, they will either delay the purchase or go to another store,” enun-ciates Mayank Shende, Co-Founder and Data-Scientist, NextOrbit. Helping al-leviate such critical issues, Frisco, TX, based NextOrbit provides a cloud plat-form that offers insights to predict and mitigate out-of-stock events in the retail business. The ability of the platform to perform fine grain OOS prediction allows the retailers to ca-ter to more customers and hence re-duce walkouts. This resultantly leads to enhanced customer experience and higher profits.

The NextOrbit platform generates out-of-stock alerts and prescriptive store orders by leveraging the power of Cloud, Big

data, and Prescriptive Data Sciences. The alerts and orders are produced by the clues obtained from retail and external data. The retail data includes information such as point of sale, store deliveries, store orders and promotions. The collected data is then combined with

external data such as weather, calendar events, income levels and social media indicators to enhance the accuracy of predictions. The resultant analytics are

utilized to produce on-demand, daily and weekly predictions of SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit). Alternatively, the alerts notify the store staff about the quantity (in SKU’s) by which the Store-Ordering needs to be updated. “The insightful analytics by our platform allows us to transform the store ordering and shelf replenishment practice into a far more intelligent process,” extols Shende.

Besides, the platform also offers flexibility to directly feed the alerts into Retail’s Store Ordering System to facilitate automated replenishment of stock. Such streamlined automation ensures the availability of stock during the times of demand and ultimately makes the shoppers happy. “With declined rate of OOS, customers dedicate less time in searching and more time in shopping. This improves their basket size,” explains Rajgopal.

The company continues to provide such myriad benefits and, stays distinguished by the virtue of their platform that is priced on the basis of a subscription model. The model enables retailers to select a category or set of SKUs, experience benefits and then include more SKUs or categories. “Our subscription model relieves the retailers and CP companies from the compulsion of signing-up long term contracts,” reveals Shende.

In the days to come, NextOrbit envi-sions serving both Brick and Mortar retail-

ers and e-commerce units to antici-pate and mitigate Out-of-Stock

events. “We are always work-ing on solutions that enable

us to provide more value to our partners and ex-pand our market reach,” concludes Rajgopal.

The insightful analytics by our platform allows us to transform the store ordering practice and shelf replenishment into a far more intelligent process

Kishore RajgopalMayank Shende

Customer Experience ManagementSOLUTION PROVIDERS

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