SOLUS Updates - Insights

28th December 2022

2022 has been an interesting time for folks in tech– and as you well know we’ve pivoted so much to being a tech-first organization that suddenly everything happening in tech impacts us too! We pivoted to being product-first in 2020, and the roller coaster ride that followed is worthy of a small book – or lengthy blog post at the very least. But that’s for another day.

Today I’d like to touch upon one of the three main pillars of SOLUS AI – the Intelligence System. For context, the three main systems of SOLUS that work together to create magic are: Recommendations | Smart Campaigns | Intelligence

 

Intelligence Systems in SOLUS

Part of our entire pivot to being product-first meant that we had to go back to our “greatest hits” of analytics work done over the last decade+ and see if we could make them available to clients using SOLUS. But of course, better than before – configurable, always on, far richer. One decision we did take however is to not create a dashboarding platform – we’re not trying to build a Tableau/ PowerBI, but we’re bringing in our past experience of how one should look at CRM and campaign metrics, and making the best of that experience available.

I’m happy to share that the SOLUS Intelligence module has matured beautifully over the last year. This is a quick recap of where we are, and where we’re headed with it.

 

Customer Intelligence Reports

We’ve ramped up the Intelligence reports to over everything a CRM manager (or someone dealing with Retention or targeted campaigns) might need. We’re constantly adding to these reports, so while these are currently a set that would work for pretty much any industry, we’re next coming up with industry-specific reports too.

  

Campaign Performance Reports

In addition, the ability to track campaign performance has been greatly enhanced as well. We’ve focused on Incrementality measurement – which we all know is hard, but also the truest measure of impact, and what we’ve added is a whole lot of reporting that comments on what’s working, what’s the yield it’s generating, what’s consistently working etc.

 A few things we’ve added to these reports that are small, but powerful:

• The ability to filter out triggers where the Control Group is too small
• The ability to switch between Trigger X Day and Trigger X Month level of granularity for Lift measurement
• The ability to make response attribution Time relative rather than Day relative

 There’s so much more, and we’re truly helping clients see beyond click and conversions to the true impact of their customer-centric efforts.

Roadmap Stuff: Campaign Diagnostics (and soon enough – What Ifs) 

We aren’t stopping here, of course. A big ask has been – can we help diagnose what campaigns work/ don’t work better. Can we understand what aspect of the campaigns work? So we’re now coming up with a campaign diagnostic that does exactly that. What campaign attribute works? The segment being targeted? The use of Personalization? The timing? The presence of an offer? The use of a Recommendation? And so much more. This is in dev and should be part of the Feb release of SOLUS (btw, we’ve moved to a monthly release of new features which I’ll keep you updated on going forward!)

The obvious next step from here is adding a What If, going Prescriptive – recommending campaign types that give you lift and incrementals, as well as campaigns that give you coverage and absolute numbers. Answering the Q of - “What If we run these types of campaigns in the coming month”. Getting to goal-seeks “IF I want to attain X, what should I do?” Watch this space!

 

Looking ahead to 2023

Building SOLUS AI has been an immense endeavor. No part of this is easy – CRM is complex, it’s quite literally a space in which everything that can go wrong, will. Personalization and scale is notoriously hard. If you think about it however, we are driven by a not-complex goal – help brands derive the most value out of their customer data. This translates into - uplift the manner in which brands nudge customer behaviour, whether the context is brand initiated (you nudge them by sending the customer a message), or customer initiated (the customer comes to your app/ website and we need to decide what to show and how to engage them). We’ve had to break and build like crazy this last year, and the coming year will no doubt be the same. 

Thanks again, and here’s wishing you and your loved ones a fantastic 2023, in advance!

 

Cheers!

Sandeep & team SOLUS AI

www.solus.ai