Infosys Equinox’s Kunal Puri and Namogoo’s Tal Rotman

Gabriella Bock:

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the RETHINK Retail podcast. I’m your host, Gabriella Bock, and on today’s episode, we are going to be taking a look at human-centric digital commerce, which may sound like an oxymoron, but for everyone working in retail right now, they know that it is anything, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Joining me today are two experts in the subject of human-centric commerce. We have Tal Rotman, he is the VP of Partnerships and Alliances at Namogoo. And Kunal Puri, he is the vice president and head of customer success at Infosys Equinox.

Namogoo offers eCommerce brands a Digital Journey Continuity Platform that automatically compiles data on consumer behavior, website, product, device and environment so you can easily analyze each customer’s unique journey.

Infosys Equinox helps leading enterprises provide memorable and human-centric omnichannel shopping experiences with their end-to-end digital commerce and marketing platform. They serve as a headless, cloud native microservices based commerce platform that allows retailers to engage with consumers whenever, wherever they want, irrespective of the channel of engagement.

And now onto our guests

Gabriella Bock:

Tal, Kunal, thank you so much for joining the show today.

Tal Rotman:

Thanks for having us.

Kunal Puri:

Thanks for having us, Gabriella.

Gabriella Bock:

Absolutely. And it is great to have you here. So let’s just dive right in to the customer journey, which has become increasingly complex as we all have experienced I’m sure. It is crossing over into digital and physical and the line between the two have become increasingly blurred. Kunal, I would love to kick things off by getting your take on this. What challenge do you think this poses for retailers today?

Kunal Puri:

Thanks Gabriella. I think to say that consumer journeys are becoming increasingly complex is putting it mildly. Consumers today have the ability to engage with brands and retailers whenever and wherever they want. And obviously brands and retailers are actively encouraging and enabling these new models of engagement. To give you a few examples, a leading jewelry chain has enabled a virtual try on and a virtual product configuration capability that enables consumers to try on jewelry, configure it the way they want from the benefits from their own home without ever having to step into a store.

Kunal Puri:

A leading food and beverage company is talking about smart device based commerce or IoT based commerce, where the refrigerator can inform the consumer that you’re out of milk or you’re out of soda or you’re out of cheese, and thereby initiate an engagement from a reorder perspective. We’re working with some of the largest MLM companies in the world to enable conversational commerce, which is where brands engage with their members over WhatsApp, over WeChat, over Apple iMessage. Basically making it easy for the consumer whenever and however they want to engage with the brands is something that brands and retailers are actively focused on.

Kunal Puri:

Now, what this means is that the brands and retailers now not only need to be present in these new channels, but they also need to understand the consumer context from previous conversations or previous points of engagement. And an additional aspect of this expansion of these new channels is that it’s generating massive amounts of consumer data. And it is becoming increasingly important for the retailers and brands that not only do they drive these new channels of engagement and enable the personalization around that, but also take all the data that’s available through these new points of interaction, these new touchpoints if I call them that.

Kunal Puri:

And leverage this data trove to drive a more rich hyper personalized experience that carries the context across these different points. And we as Infosys Equinox have helped a number of retailers and brands to enable all of these examples that we’ve spoken about, as well as many more to drive what we call the human centric experience.

Gabriella Bock:

Absolutely. And Tal, I wanted to get your take on this as well. Are you seeing similar observations and I wanted to know if there are any purchasing patterns that you’re noticing as customers are moving through the online journey. What’s your take on this?

Tal Rotman:

Gabriella, yeah, I mean at Namogoo, our focus really is the online journey, it’s a good point. And we’ve got a great collaboration with Infosys where we help to supplement some of those capabilities around what’s going on, on the customer’s journey as they’re going through their shopping experience as designed by the retailer. And we’re seeing lots of interesting things and we’re not collecting any personal data, but we are seeing a lot of things about shopper behavior that actually stand out. Things like shoppers actually taking a pause and looking elsewhere.

Tal Rotman:

We know that what they’re doing is they’re doing some price comparison. And if the macroeconomic trends are indicating it to all of us, we know that on the personal level, we’re all a little bit more careful about what we’re purchasing, cost of living is impacting most of our consumers. And in store shopping is becoming the norm as well. And so there’s a lot of competition for the shopper, like Kunal said, in many different channels, in store, online.

Tal Rotman:

And people who are online are expecting to get that the best experience possible. And so there’s a lot of competition out there. We’re seeing a lot of experiences being interrupted by different forms of hijacking. I’m just going to back it up a second.

Gabriella Bock:

Sure.

Tal Rotman:

We’re seeing a lot of the visitors actually experiencing some form of abandonment or looking elsewhere for different reasons. And this data is also giving us a lot of information about how we can remove those sorts of frictions from the shopping experience. And we’re seeing some really great usages of this data in order to make the shoppers experience a really good holistic and positive experience.

Gabriella Bock:

Yeah, that’s fantastic. And can you share kind of some specific examples of how retailers can kind of take this data that they’re collecting, analyze it and create these human centric experiences for consumers that we’re kind of talking about today. What are some examples of that?

Tal Rotman:

Where we’re focusing on is we’re trying to look at the experience a visitor without actually having to intrude on their privacy. I mean, traditionally we’re segmenting our visitors and our shoppers by looking at what sort of audience they fit into, what gender or age, and where they fit socioeconomically. That’s not our approach. We feel that this isn’t appropriate for this day and age, and it’s not what our visitors and shoppers are looking for.

Tal Rotman:

We feel that there are better ways to create audiences and segment and provide a positive experience based on what they’re doing on the site navigationally, what their device is telling us about how it’s interacting with the site. Some examples are quite simple. Actually when you think about things like their network speed or their device strength, tell us a lot. We can say that this visitor is having some Wi-Fi issues. I know that I always have them. And if I’m on the train, going into the city, I want to have a lighter experience. I don’t want to have a very heavy difficult shopping experience.

Tal Rotman:

We can make that personalized experience to that visitor while they’re going through a little bit of a Wi-Fi challenge or a wireless internet challenge, they’re going to appreciate that. And they don’t even have to feel it without actually having to intrude on their personal information. We were able to provide them a positive experience. That’s one example. Are they interacting with the sorts of utilities like shopping extensions in order to do price comparison? This tells us a lot. We don’t need to know who they are to understand that they’ve got price sensitivity.

Tal Rotman:

And so we can actually serve that particular need and say, “Okay, let’s try to find based on that intention the right products for this person, serve them the right products, or perhaps even offer discounts that might be applied on the journey and in the shopping experience versus something external.” There’s a lot of data that we can leverage about that visitor and what they’re doing in a very positive way, without having to intrude on their privacy. It gives a lot of indication around the intent of the visitor and you need to actually give them what they’re looking for at the right time in the journey.

Gabriella Bock:

Wow. That’s brilliant. Super interesting stuff. Especially with the device strength and being able to provide a lighter experience for people who are maybe out in the country or commuting, anything in that capacity. Actually I haven’t heard that before, so that’s super fascinating.

Tal Rotman:

Namogoo provides a wide variety of these different data points that we’re actually only touching the surface of in providing a better experience without having to know what socioeconomic status they have. We don’t need to know where they live in order to provide them a good experience.

Gabriella Bock:

Yeah. That’s really incredible. And Kunal, what are your thoughts here?

Kunal Puri:

I think I echo everything that Tal said. Find it to be very, very real live contexts. And in addition to that, one of the other big things that we are seeing is this whole, what I would call as the digital divide, right? And the same consumers engaging with a retailer or a brand, both online as well as in store, the retailers and the brands need to focus on enabling what I would call as a unified omnichannel experience.

Kunal Puri:

And this spans across the new channels of engagement as well, whether they’re conversational commerce, social commerce, live commerce, IoT or device based commerce, voice commerce. I mean, the list goes on. The Metaverse is just the latest addition to this list. But it’s important for these brands to be able to recognize and to be able to deliver the experiences the consumers expect across wherever the consumer is, whether in store or online. And to give you a few examples of what we are seeing happen out there. It’s one of the largest sports brands out there, sports products brands out. Is leveraging the Equinox microservices suite to enable an endless aisle in the store.

Kunal Puri:

Now they typically have smaller footprint stores in Europe where you may not have the entire assortment available in the store, but to ensure that they save the sale and deliver a delightful consumer experience, they’re looking to enable tablet based, [inaudible 00:14:32] capabilities within the store, where either the associate or the consumer can look up the invented in nearby store, they can place an order for delivery at home or delivery to the store. But again, this is only one example.

Kunal Puri:

Another example is with the leading denim manufacturer, who during times of COVID wanted to enable a true contactless or experience where a consumer could walk into the store, pick up a pair of jeans, try it on, or any other apparel. If they love the fit, just scan the barcode on that piece of apparel, pay for it using the app and just walk out of the store without having to ever talk to an associate or go to a POS station.

Kunal Puri:

A third leading sports retailer is talking about actively enabling, firstly, they’re talking about limiting the number of partner stores that they work with, but at the same point of time, delivering a richer experience for the consumers in those partner stores. Now this would be things like when I’m purchasing products of this brand at a retailer partner, I should not only get my retailer loyalty points, but also the brand loyalty points within the same transaction, rather than the traditional model of having to step out the store, scan the receipt, upload it, and then get my points few weeks later.

Gabriella Bock:

Sure.

Kunal Puri:

These are all experiences of what’s happening in the store may not necessarily be owned by the brand or the retailer, but these are places where brands and retailers are actively collaborating to enable more omnichannel unified experiences from a consumer perspective. And I would actually say that it expands even beyond this. So some of the other experiences I talk about from a B2B perspective are where a leading lubricants brand, all in gas lubricants brand, [inaudible 00:16:07] lubricants brand is engaging garage owners and mechanics to say that, I want, they are probably these garage owners and mechanics are probably the final point of advice that the consumer listens to far beyond my advertising.

Kunal Puri:

And if I can convince them to recommend my brand, there is a win for both of us out there because I’m able to give them loyalty points. I can give them more training. I can engage them in a far more richer way and obviously sell more product. The broad answer here is that these new channels of engagement are creating much more touch points. And it’s important for brands and retailers to be able to enable meaningful interactions at all of these points. This is an example of where the Infosys Equinox microservices commerce suite as well as the Namogoo capabilities together provide a very compelling proposition to enable this end to end kind of capability for retailers and brands.

Gabriella Bock:

Yeah. All excellent points. So, you touched upon contactless experiences during the pandemic. And so I just wanted to know, like now that the pandemic has subsided a bit, people are back in store, we’re less hesitant to interact with each other as humans. Are we still seeing customers kind of choosing this option at the same rate as they were during the pandemic?

Kunal Puri:

Yeah. Gabriella I think we’re seeing a little bit of ebb and flow around this, clearly while we all hope that we are past the pandemic and can go to back to what was our normal lives. Even though we believe they all changed. There is obviously pockets of where the pandemic continues to flare up. And there continue to be individuals who want to retain the social distancing approach that they acquired in a bigger way during the pandemic.

Kunal Puri:

As a brand or a retailer, it’s important for us to be able to respect that. I mean, most of us are on airplanes very often now. And while there’s no federal mandate any longer to wear a mask, I think every airline that I’ve been on in the last month and a half is clearly said that, we respect your right, if you do want to continue to wear a mask, please continue to do that.

Kunal Puri:

And we’re seeing the same thing happen in the retailer space. Clearly e-commerce jumped in a big way during the pandemic. There was some data that was published that says it was going back to the more normal rate of growth, but then that’s now been corrected to say that it continues to be at an enhanced level. And some of us have developed habits of maybe ordering grocery online, which we never had earlier. And widely see the convenience that this brings and expected to continue. It may be whether I walk into a store and expect a contactless experience, or I’m expecting a shopper to shop on my behalf, or I’m gravitating more towards buying something online, which traditionally, I mean the jewelry example I took earlier, I couldn’t imagine a situation where you could maybe pick ring or necklace or earrings without walking into a store. But having built this experience now, it’s seamless.

Kunal Puri:

We are seeing that, the final answer is going to be somewhere in the middle. Will it continue to be as heightened as it has been? Maybe not. But is it going back to where it was pre COVID, pre pandemic? I definitely don’t expect it to go back to that level.

Gabriella Bock:

And kind of just following up on that really quick, contactless and human centric don’t really sound like they fit together. How can retailers kind of strike that right balance between creating a human centric contactless experience?

Kunal Puri:

Yeah. I think definitely those two words don’t go well together traditionally. But from a retailer or a brand’s perspective, it’s about offering a bouquet of offerings. Somebody may pick the rose, somebody may pick the sunflower. But as a brand or retailer, I want to engage all my consumers. Somebody wants a high touch engagement with a personalized shopping experience where an associate is tagged with me and is showing me the new range.

Kunal Puri:

Whereas somebody says, “I’m just here to browse. And you know what, leave me alone for a bit.” And whenever I have a question, I’ll find you, and I’ll ask you a question. But as a retailer or a brand, I need to be able to support both models. And that’s the flexibility that our combined offering is bringing where we capture the data giving the retailer the ability to drive that segmentation and then deliver the experience that the consumer is looking for.

Gabriella Bock:

Absolutely. And speaking on experience, so I wanted to touch upon, we’ve been talking about digital and blending, physical and digital retail, brick and mortar and e-commerce, and with that as well, bringing digital into the store. So digital experiences within the store, but then also these experiences online, augmented reality, immersive experiences, which we’re seeing occur both online, but then immersive experiences within the store. It’s great for capturing attention, right? I mean, it looks great on social media, it creates a buzz. Beyond just interacting with the brand, are we seeing these experiences lead to true conversion?

Kunal Puri:

I think Gabriella one big, I’ll probably call it an insight or the biggest challenge that’s facing retailers out of everything that’s happening now, whether it is pandemic related or even this explosion of new channels of engagement is the massive trove of consumer journey data, consumer behavior data that’s now becoming available.

Kunal Puri:

If I take an example of a consumer brand, I mean, across any, let’s say food and beverage industry or any other consumer industry. They’ve all taken a massive leap into what’s been called direct to consumer or DTC. And while there is definitely a revenue aspect of it, the largest driver for this jump into DTC for a brand has been around capturing first party consumer data.

Gabriella Bock:

Sure.

Kunal Puri:

They want to learn more about consumer insights. They want to understand what bundle packages work, they want to understand when does the consumer shop, do they buy a larger pack? Is the discounting model what’s most effective for them? Because while they continue to sell in a big way on marketplaces and with other retailers, they recognize that the amount of first party data they’re able to capture in those scenarios does not give them the kind of insights that a direct to consumer capability gives them, right?

Kunal Puri:

Now, most retailers and brands or most brands in this case are not only taking the direct to consumer data that they’re capturing, but they’re combining it with second party data that they’re getting from retailers and marketplaces, which is more at an aggregate level, as well as data they’re getting from third party sources, whether it’s social, whether it’s others. And they’ve got this massive data growth now, which is extremely rich, but requires some focused effort in terms of processing it, in terms of storing it, in terms of building algorithms around it, in terms of analyzing it and coming up with those insights.

Kunal Puri:

So that’s the first part of it, which I could probably call the technology challenge to bring this data in and manage it and combine it and massage it and make it insight ready. But then the second bigger part of it is how do I realize value out of all this investment I’m making into it? How do I drive a consumer personalization strategy out of this? How do I drive more effective campaigns out of this? How do I drive better promotions out of this? How do I create better recommendations for consumers that will lead to better upsell and cross sell for me out of all this data that I’m capturing?

Kunal Puri:

So to give me an example of everything that I’m talking about, one of the largest food and beverage brands in the world supporting, they have 150 brands and they use the Infosys Equinox platform as their digital hub. What this means is Infosys Equinox supports their brand engagement sites. It supports their campaigns, it supports their B2B. It supports direct to consumer initiatives. It’s all pretty much driven out of the Equinox platform. And not only that, it’s also powering some new engagement models where they’ve built a recipe site that has over 150,000 recipes over 18 million members who actively access that site.

Kunal Puri:

And we’ve kind of extended that capability to say that, you can not only look up recipes. You can also with one click, add them to a retailer partners card. So we’re even getting data from the retailer partner in this case. Bringing all this data together is the capability of what the front end experience is enabling. And then on the back end of this, the retailer of this brand in this case has initiated a consumer personalization program to bring all this data together, to drive more active recommendations, better campaigns out of it.

Kunal Puri:

To give you an example, if I am a consumer on this site, and while they have multiple brands, one of the brands is a meat brand. And if they were able to identify, I’m a vegetarian, they save all the campaign dollars that would’ve been spent on advertising one of the meat brands to me. There’s clear direct cost savings and benefits out of this, but there are also other benefits that the brand is seeing. To give you an example, they’re seeing about a 10% lift in the number of emails that are open and the number of promotion coupons that have been downloaded from the ones that they’re sending out.

Kunal Puri:

Another extension area again with the same organization is can we enable the recipe site to be accessed not only over the website and the app, but can we voice enable it so it can be accessed to Alexa and Siri. The ideas here are, there’s massive opportunity in terms of driving better engagement, but it’s also incumbent to take the data that it’s capturing through this engagement and use it to drive better experiences for the consumer as well as better revenue realization for the brand and the retailer as well.

Gabriella Bock:

Excellent. That’s very cool. And can you kind of just expand just a little bit on, you mentioned voice and we’ve been hearing discussion around voice for quite some time and how it could be leveraged within retail and shopping, but we haven’t really seen as much as I think we expected to see voice being enabled. How are customers able to use voice within that experience? Are they able to kind of just list off ingredients they need or can they request recipes to be read back to the user. How does that work?

Kunal Puri:

Yeah. I think it’s an evolving space for sure, but three or four different examples that I can quote. One is like we just said about looking up a recipe while I’m cooking, that’s clearly a massive use case that we all see the value of something like that. Do I expect somebody to create a full grocery list using voice? Maybe not. Because there’s a variety of different options and replacement items and things of that nature.

Kunal Puri:

But we are starting to see people create their shopping list or saying, “Siri, add orange juice to my monthly shopping list or weekly shopping list.” Or well, I’ve just used up the last block of cheese, Siri, add cheese to my shopping list. Those are the ability to add something to an existing shopping list is something that voice is being actively used for. The other big use case we are seeing is I briefly quoted an example with garbages and mechanics earlier.

Kunal Puri:

Think about somebody who’s working in a workshop or on a shop floor and can place a voice activated command or a voice activated order to add something to a cart. These are, again, examples of somebody’s fixing a car, somebody’s working on any machine. And there’s capabilities around that that voice can help enable.

Kunal Puri:

Another example would be while I don’t expect the ability and if I take a simple example of searching for a white shirt and an apparel marketplace or a retailer site, I don’t expect to complete the entire transaction online using voice. But I could very well start the process by saying, “Hey retailer.com, can you find me a white shirt?” And it’ll help me narrow my search options, allow me to do a lot more stuff while I’m on the go and carry that conversation forward. So start it over voice completed or web completed over the app or completed over WhatsApp are all going to be the models of the future.

Gabriella Bock:

Yeah. I know, especially in China, WhatsApp is being leveraged just more and more every day we’re seeing with brands and like big name brands, CPGs. I believe Revlon and Loreal, so fascinating stuff. I do want to move on to our next question. And this is kind of leading from Kunal, we are talking about the eruption of DTC and digital commerce. And that has created just more choices than ever before. And so Tal, this question is for, how do you see this impacting retailers and also how is it impacting the consumer?

Tal Rotman:

I think that just to reflect back on what Kunal was saying earlier, that I think we can all expect that we’re not going back to pre pandemic behaviors. And all of the experiences now around a contactless and human-centric experience have indicated to us that the consumer has evolved, right? They’re not thinking like they did two, three years ago. And when they’re online today, they’re all online. We’re not talking about any particular group or people who are more digitally native, everybody is shopping online to the point made earlier.

Tal Rotman:

Everybody has done their grocery shopping online. That’s a norm at this stage. And so now what’s going on is we’re seeing people being a little bit more savvy. They’re aware of the massive amounts of competition. If we’ve seen the rise of the Shopify store, completely invert some of the experiences that some of the retailers are having in terms of the competition of where they usually expected their competition to come from.

Tal Rotman:

Today they know that it can come from many different angles. And so they know that their competition is out there to disrupt their buyer’s journey. And there’s many different ways to disrupt that journey. What we are seeing now is that the visitors themselves are actually looking to optimize their shopping experience. Many people, just like when we used to go to the store and we would say we want to make sure we get the best deal. That’s what they want to do online. Or maybe it’s that they want to make sure that they got the best in class.

Tal Rotman:

It’s not always about make making sure that they got the best price, but they want to know that they optimized that experience at that given moment. Every one of us wants that. And so any little distraction, anything that can cause people to go down that rabbit hole, we are all subject to having the squirrel effect, chasing that squirrel around. And so we’re seeing things happening on the journey, more and more technologies that are interrupting the visitor’s journey, whether it’s something that’s legitimate like an intentional shopping extension to compare prices or see what the price is on some of the larger retailers or something that’s a little bit more illegitimate, which is actually hijacking the session, interrupting the session and trying to divert the traffic to other sites.

Tal Rotman:

And so what we are seeing at Namogoo is that some of the shopping extensions, including the ones like Amazon Assistant are actually driving traffic away from retailers, and they’re really suffering from that. Whereas others can actually be leveraged for a positive experience. If you really engage with the data that some of those shopping extensions, we can analyze Namogoo, we can actually analyze the impact, the experience and the interactivity with the shopping extension.

Tal Rotman:

We could actually leverage that data to create a positive experience, to ensure that the visitor gets the right promotion in the journey, to ensure that they get the right messaging at the right time in the journey versus having it interrupt what your designed experience was. So if you can actually use that data point and use that knowledge to actually improve the experience with this interruption, then you’re actually really going to make that customers experience a lot better.

Tal Rotman:

Whereas those more illegitimate ones, in some cases you just want to block them. You want to block those illegitimate interruptions that are hijacking away your traffic. And we’ve seen that, for example, at our great customer, Eddie Bauer, we actually were deployed at Eddie Bauer. We saw that they were actually experiencing 22% of their sessions with some form of hijacking happening in that session.

Gabriella Bock:

Oh, wow.

Tal Rotman:

20% of the visitors were actually having some sort of advertisement placed in the session often for a competitor and it was diverting the traffic away. So in my case, if it’s diverting traffic away, that’s a no-no, you don’t want that to happen. And so we blocked those for Eddie Bauer and by doing so, we kept the visitors on the site. They weren’t distracted. They kept on going down their journey. And we actually saw by running a data based test, an A/B test, an increase of 3.82%, nearly 4% increase in conversion just by preventing those illegitimate distractions from appearing in the visitor’s journey.

Tal Rotman:

Just it boggles the mind that people aren’t even aware that this is happening or that it’s happening to this extent. And really the visitors, they don’t know what’s going on. All they know is that they’re easily distracted. They chase that squirrel. Now the retailers lost the connection with that particular journey.

Gabriella Bock:

Wow. That is fascinating. I had no idea. Yeah, it absolutely does. I wasn’t really aware that this was as much as an issue as it is, so really incredible stuff. And I know as we’re talking about data as well and how retailers can leverage data to capture the attention of consumers since we were just speaking about the paradox of choice and how consumers are easily distractable, or might even get fatigue from there being just so many choices and with the choices. There’s speaking on the overwhelming amount of choices, but there’s also an overwhelming amount of data available. And so we know that retailers are capturing just so much data, but do you have any suggestions for ways that they can begin to really analyze that data and organize it? What are your thoughts there?

Tal Rotman:

So from the side of Namogoo, we’re very focused on ensuring that the visitor and the retailer actually is not exposed to any personal data issues. Any personal data is obviously both very topical, but also from a regulatory perspective, it’s very important and becoming even more of both a risk and also requirement of their visitors. Everyone’s becoming a lot more savvy about their personal data. And so while, to your point, there is a lot of data, a lot of that is data that should not be accessed or at the very least should be treated appropriately.

Tal Rotman:

And so whether we look at, for example, the deprecation of the cookie, or changes in iOS, that third party data that a lot of retailers used to rely on, that’s going away. That’s not data that can be relied on anymore. And so there’s other places you can look for data in order to run tests and run and understand behaviors without having to rely on those data points. The first party data is incredibly important and it’s becoming harder to collect.

Tal Rotman:

The other thing is your vendors who are actually looking at that data, you don’t have full control over all those vendors today in a very SaaS oriented world. A lot of those vendors could accidentally put you in some form of exposure as a retailer. They could make a change without being aware, or there might be just some sub segment of the traffic that’s actually experiencing this type of exposure. And because there is so much data, you aren’t aware of it. There’s only so much you can collect.

Tal Rotman:

So actually being able to identify that data and we do have the ability at Namogoo to help retailers to say, “Hey, look, this particular section of your data set of your traffic is actually putting you in exposure. You need to go and remediate it. You need to go and find the way to mitigate it, whether it’s working with your vendor or it’s your own first party technology, you need to go and actually fix this and avoid those sorts of regulatory exposures.”

Tal Rotman:

The other interesting thing is that those third party vendors are each of them collecting their data in a silo. They’re not actually sharing that data. And what we, our vision at Namogoo is actually to be that one roof, one location, where you can share that data from various vendors in one hub, under one roof. And therefore you’re going to eliminate blind spots. You’re going to be able to connect those two data points from two different vendors or three vendors, again, which is PII compliant. And then you can act in real time in the journey and ensure that you have a positive experience by actually owning your data, not letting it reside in the silo at the vendor side, but actually on the journey itself on your own, within your own first party data set.

Gabriella Bock:

Absolutely. Certainly important things for brands to consider as we shift further to digital. So it sounds like retailers all around could use that service. So, excellent insights all across the board. And as we wrap, so I know that Namogoo and Infosys Equinox, are working together, you guys are partners. I did want to hear how the two of you are working together to create and deliver these human-centric digital experiences. Kunal, I will have you start first.

Kunal Puri:

Sure. I think Gabriella to kind of summarize a lot of what we’ve discussed, brands and retailers need a flexible agile commerce or an engagement capability that obviously allows them to engage with consumers in any channel. Now, this coupled with the personalized strategy, with all the data and the analytics that we spoke about will enable the brands and retailers to drive deeper engagement and loyalty and repeat purchases.

Kunal Puri:

Now, what we see together at Namogoo and Infosys Equinox is that while there have been investments in silos on improving the experience, capturing some of the data, preventing hijacking, there is a need for a holistic view to view this landscape holistically and see how you can deliver an end to end consumer journey that could start from one of variety of different touch points, or also end with the one of variety of touchpoints.

Kunal Puri:

The number of touchpoints have expanded, the hijacking opportunities have expanded. It’s important for retailers and brands to think about this as one holistic continuum, and to be able to protect and enable the entire continuum for their consumers. I think the one last point I would make is it’s also important, one additional aspect is it’s important to think about your consumer’s journey across these multiple touchpoints in terms of an ongoing process. You don’t want your consumer to have one journey and stop. You want repeat purchases. You want them to come in and upsell and cross sell and all the other good things that you would want to do.

Kunal Puri:

And from that perspective, it’s important to think about enabling or working with a partner organization or a set of partner organizations that work well together to deliver to your business outcomes. It’s one point to say that I’ve got a partner who helps me implement a platform, or I’ve got a partner who brings a platform for me, but it’s important to think about a partner who can give all these capabilities as well as bring the right partnerships so that I can get an end to end capability that delights my end consumer.

Tal Rotman:

Yeah. Well, I completely agree with you Kunal, and being able to work together with Infosys who have a deep integration, I’m sorry, working together with Infosys Equinox who have a deep understanding of retail and CPG experiences and challenges, what it is that keeps them up at night helps us to deliver the technology for the online journey that gets them to their next iteration, their next generation of their customer’s digital experience and a deeper integration with Equinox will only lead to more insights, more capabilities. And we’re really excited to partner with them.

Gabriella Bock:

That’s fantastic. And it sounds like two companies, Namogoo and Infosys Equinox are a powerful pairing. And if our listeners wanted to get in touch with either of you, how would they do that?

Tal Rotman:

With Namogoo, it’s very easy. You can reach us at partners@namogoo.com or just go to www.namogoo.com. That’s N-A-M-O-G-O-O.

Kunal Puri:

And it’s equally easy with Infosys Equinox, our website is infosysequinox.com, and you can drop us a note at sales@infosysequinox.com.

Gabriella Bock:

Fantastic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you both coming on this show today. Tal, Kunal, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you both.

Kunal Puri:

Thank you, Gabriella and Tal, always a pleasure talking to both of you as well.

Tal Rotman:

Same here. Thanks for having us.