Trent Rossini and Michael Renzon
The FNB Business Innovation Awards 2015 underscores innovation as central to the success of any business. It is a commitment to a philosophy that is capable of driving growth and ensuring the sustainable development of the organisation. These awards recognise businesses that have delivered on the promise of innovation and created something truly dynamic and interesting for the South African market; one such organisation is inQuba.
inQuba blends technology and mature methodologies to provide a variety of customer-centric products and solutions. inQuba VoC (Voice of the Customer) is the foundation platform for customer experience and digital marketing in analytics solutions and provides granular visibility into the experience of individual customers. Each key customer experience is fed into a feedback loop that provides the insights brands need to proactively manage the experiences that customers have with the company. It also allows for the business to mine the data even further, to uncover new revenue opportunities and strengthen the brand identity.
inQuba’s product portfolio boasts an array of solutions tailored to fit any number of markets, organisational requirements and situations. inQuba Engage is a tool designed to provide rich, context-specific conversations with a business’s customer base. inQuba Wired allows the business to track, model and analyse operational effectiveness through the use of correlations between operational metrics and customer response data. A world-first is inQuba Active that leverages off customer feedback taken from InQuba VoC and the event repository in InQuba Wired through the use of pre-emptive pattern identification and event processing. The brand has also launched inQuba Performa, inQuba Social Media and inQuba UNICA.
It’s an impressive array of products from the South African organisation that started out as a customer service solution based on insights gained in servicing the international market. Michael Renzon and Trent Rossini, founders of inQuba, were developing solutions for organisations overseas and used their vast repository of knowledge to start the business.
“The challenge identified before starting inQuba was to find a solution that was capable of recognising the different needs and issues that are prevalent in another market,” says Rossini. “Based on our past experience in servicing international markets, we had to consider a completely different way of life and worked hard to create a platform that was capable of understanding the consumer, regardless of where they were from. Our hard work paid off and we won the Customer Experience Award in the United Kingdom in 2010. This made us realise that if we got this right based on insights, imagine if we could take these insights and codify them into a technology platform … and the rest, as they say, is history.
“We are passionately committed to customer service and both have track records from large organisations,” says Rossini. “We then thought — wouldn’t it be fantastic if we took all these skills and resources, embedded them into a piece of software and created a product that represents South Africa and becomes a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform? This set the tone for what we do today at inQuba.”
The company is driven by the fundamental belief that customer experience is critical to company success. Both founders are committed to transforming what customers go through when they interact with a brand, and this drives their development and innovation significantly.
“We realised early on that for our solution to really be transformative we needed to blend a variety of skills and best practices,” says Rossini. “We built a business model that’s orientated around best of breed and combines some unique skills such as quantitative statistical abilities, market research and channel skills and operational and technology skills.”
Rossini and Renzon structured the company with a high-end workforce — every staff member is a graduate, with 50% carrying honours and 30% with a master’s degree. This forms one of the pillars of the business as each person has a vested interest in taking it to the next level, and an understanding of the markets that drive it.
“We set out to take a concept and build it off a blend of people with the right experience, coupled with a workforce that believes in doing something important and that has value,” says Rossini. “A key part of this is recognising that to be innovative you need to go beyond simply idea generation. The latter is obviously important, but not as much as execution, and we’ve made sure that the organisational fabric is structured around this.”
Investment has also remained a focus for the founders and they regularly invest in the growth and development of the organisation. Adequate funding has ensured stability and long-term sustainability. The organisation has not only been recognised in the FNB Business Innovation Awards, but has also achieved remarkable results in spite of a fragile and mercurial economy.
“Over the past few years we have managed to double our annuity revenue each year and really have strong plans to continue to do that,” says Rossini. “We also operate across three continents and are now one of the leading providers of solutions in the high-end space of customer relationship management solutions. We have attained superb traction in the United Kingdom and Australia, and our goal is to continue to grow these markets.”
The structure of the business has also ensured that they are in a strong position to constantly re-examine the value and deliverables of their solutions and discover new ways of solving problems presented by the market. One of the key philosophies within inQuba is to always find new ways of taking the successes of the past and translating them into new ideas and strategies going forward.
The customer list is certainly a testament to this commitment with well-known brands in banking, investment, insurance, healthcare, telecoms and entertainment taking advantage of what the system has to offer.
“Our business takes a real problem and then asks the question about what it is that it can solve,” says Rossini. “Everything we do starts off with our asking how we can do it better and why this solution can work. We have a variety of different models that represent the whole concept of customer engagement and customer experience management and we take these as they evolve and embed them into our solutions and software.”
The system has been designed to continuously monitor what’s being said through feedback loops. These are designed to ensure that everything that’s being said can be fed back into the business and used to improve service, products and systems.
“Innovation is about identifying a need and finding a solution in a new and different way and, most importantly, the concept needs to be taken to market very, very quickly,” says Rossini. “Then get insight into how the market feels and adjust it to respond to the feedback from customers.”
inQuba is certainly taking innovation and customer care to new levels through their commitment to creating solutions that evolve alongside the markets and consumers. The company is diverse and dynamic and is one of few organisations in South Africa that has experience weighted evenly across the fields of market research, business process management, customer interaction management, customer relationship management, enterprise marketing management, business intelligence and systems integration. It’s an impressive tally of skill sets and its clear how the abilities and experience of those involved in the business are ensuring it remains dynamic and scalable.
“inQuba is powered by top-of-the-range technology and our products are designed to cover all areas within customer management, from loyalty to engagement,” concludes Rossini. “We have structured everything to provide tangible feedback that can be used to improve our client’s brand and business, to drive our products and solutions to the next level and, most importantly, create happy and loyal customers.”