Hi Alon, Tell us about yourself and share some background about Namogoo (how you ended up joining the company)
I’m Alon Rozenberg, SVP Customer Success & Solutions at Namogoo. Before joining Namogoo, I held various customer success roles in both small startups and large corporations. My wife and I decided to return to Israel from the U.S. with our children, and I began looking for a start-up opportunity where I could take part in building a successful brand. After finding out about Namogoo, I met with the co-founders and immediately knew this was the place I’d been looking for. Since then, we’ve experienced amazing growth as a team.
Namogoo is the world’s first Digital Continuity Platform, helping eCommerce brands keep their customer journeys flowing. Namogoo accomplishes this with two unique and incredibly powerful solutions, removing all customer journey obstacles and curating hesitation-free online journeys.
Namogoo’s primary offering until recently was our Customer Journey Hijacking Prevention solution, which prevents injected ads that promote competitor products from being featured on retailers’ sites. These ads can impact up to 20% of site visitors – they are displayed only on the customer device. Hence, the retailer is not even alerted that the ads are impacting the customer journey. Once the ads are blocked, online conversion rates increase between 2-5%.
Namogoo’s newest product is Intent-Based Promotions, which, as the name implies, predicts shoppers’ intent by learning from each visitors’ unique signals and digital behavior in real-time, autonomously delivering the optimum promotion needed on each and every session to ensure that online shoppers complete their journey – even first-time shoppers.
eCommerce was booming in 2020; how did it affect Namogoo? – What are you going to focus on this year?
2020 was unquestionably a monumental year for eCommerce, with lockdowns and public restrictions greatly impacting physical store locations’ ability to generate revenue. With brick and mortar limited, brands turned to their eCommerce offerings – which, for many, had been a secondary focus – to serve as their primary sales tool. While some companies were able to successfully pivot and promote their online offerings, many others, unfortunately, were not. As the world began shopping online and visitors to sites skyrocketed, the competition for each shopper increased, and brands immediately began investing in tools that could quickly demonstrate their impact. At Namogoo, we were well-positioned to come to the help of brands: our solution can be set up in hours, and the impact, as mentioned before, is a marked increase in conversion rates and can be seen within days. As brands online received major traffic, we received new customers and exposure to additional retailers. We made a strategic acquisition of Personali and launched a new solution utilizing some of their technology to help our customers change their approach towards successful conversion strategies. The successes that we had achieved before COVID positioned us for enormous growth in 2020, and we are still riding that wave.
In 2021, we plan to continue growing our customer base for our Customer Journey Hijacking Prevention solution and focusing on bringing our new Intent-Based Promotions solution to new and existing customers.
The evolution of the CS industry
How much has the CS industry evolved in the last 2-3 years with the arrival of automation, customer experience, and enterprise apps?
In short, a lot. Adding automation to the customer experience allowed our CS teams to focus on their main role of building stronger client relationships and increasing our engagement levels. We provide automation tools for our customers to see exactly how they engage with the solution, what is most important to them, and what we can still improve upon. New automation solutions not only enable CS to cover more ground but increase the level of attention they can pay to teams that need more assistance.
Tell us about the CS role in a pandemic crisis – what role digital transformation has in this crisis?
COVID showed us how important the CS role is. Being there for our customers, sometimes just listening, offering advice, and showing empathy, are some of the main elements in the CS role even before the pandemic. These traits helped us shine during this period, and I am sure our customers will remember us going above and beyond.
This pandemic also made a lot of changes, not just with regards to the digital transformation but also on a personal relationship level. For example, the increased use of Zoom allowed us to break the walls between us and the customer – more “face-time” with them, if you will. Additionally, having our kids at home running around in the background during meetings and seeing people in their homes all helped us create interactions that moved beyond solely business.
How is Namogoo changing the eCommerce landscape?
Namogoo was founded to help solve issues that were impacting the customer journey. Initially, the focus was on educating the market about the damage that injected ads were wreaking on brands in terms of image, loyalty, and revenue. Since Namogoo’s founding, it has helped our clients recoup over $5 billion in online revenue. But that was just the beginning.
To empower our clients to truly maximize every shopping session’s potential, we embarked on a mission to add a promotion solution to our customers – but not just any solution. We knew that many of our customers were unhappy with the promotion tools they were using and realized that with the right tool, more customers could be shepherded to making purchases. In early 2020, we acquired Personali and have since developed the first of its kind Intent-Based Promotions machine. The first-of-its-kind solution utilizes machine learning to pinpoint the most effective promotion for each visitor session. With the solution, brands can expect at least a 25% reduction in promotion costs while achieving a 15% increase in revenue.
Do you think working from home is good or bad for employee experience? How is Namogoo planning its office strategy in Post covid19 days?
Just like everything in life, it has its pros and cons. There have been many pros, such as giving our employees more flexibility to determine what schedule works best for them and having the opportunity to know our employees even better (meeting their dogs on a zoom call or getting to see their new artwork in the home office).
However, it’s important to recognize that work from home during COVID-19 is not the work from home that any forward-thinking company envisioned. Childcare concerns for parents, lack of socializing for those who may live alone create a situation where it is unfair to say that WFH is only positive. One lesson that we have learned over the course of the year was a new level of appreciation for the act of gathering in an office. As productive as Zoom meetings can be, and despite all the programs that we at Namogoo have to keep morale high, happy hours, work hour flexibility, the act of sitting with your team and creating is harder to do when separated.
I believe that as the vaccines roll out and a return to “normalcy” becomes achievable, we will still want to maintain a hybrid model in a post-COVID world, where our employees have the flexibility that remote work provides but can also make full use of our office space.
