CXBuzz Interview with Boaz Grinvald CEO at Revuze

Hi Boaz, tell us about yourself and share some background about Revuze (how you ended up joining Revuze)

Boaz: I’m a serial entrepreneur who loves to bring something new to the world while helping businesses with real challenges. I’ve been fortunate to build several companies from an idea to sizeable businesses across different industries and geographies. I was lucky to meet Revuze’s founder (and then CEO), Ido Ramati, several years ago when he was looking for an experienced partner. He introduced me to this amazing opportunity to change the world of consumer understanding. We started to work together in 2018, and the results have been amazing.

Revuze offers anyone that works within a consumer brand a deep understanding of their entire industry – brands, products, features, and why consumers buy. The unique AI technology can collect, clean up, and analyze masses of opinion data from online reviews and other sources and turn them into quantifiable intelligence for any business role. This is a functional and financial revolution as this type of automation eliminates the need to get intelligence via experts and dramatically reduces the cost of intelligence.

eCommerce was booming in 2020; how did it affect Revuze? – What are you going to focus on this year?

Boaz: Everyone is aware that eCommerce is booming and was leaping forward 3-4 years at once during 2020. Revuze also enjoys these trends as our AI driven intelligence discovers “why consumers buy,” which is unique. Many analytical solutions focus on what/when/how much consumers buy, but 97% of consumers will walk away from a purchase to buy something else, and brands don’t know why. This is the gap that our AI fills. It is based on automated sentiment analysis and topic discovery within consumer opinions of verified buyers. This is what makes it unbiased and highly detailed.

The evolution of the consumer insights industry

How much has the consumer insights industry evolved in the last 2-3 years with the arrival of automation, customer experience, and enterprise apps?

Boaz: We’re living in exciting times in the consumer insights industry. Today there are many alternatives and price ranges for different consumer insights channels like surveys or feedback solutions, and brands can pick and choose. There’s also lots of progress on omnichannel analytics to gain a holistic view of the customers and industry, intending to show consistent experience to buyers and customers, recognizing that they may use multiple engagement channels with a brand. Across all of these, though, there is the challenge of automated UGC analysis and raw consumer opinions. This area is still mostly relying on industry experts, language experts, and analysts to train and set up enterprise solutions to report back on what consumers discuss across channels. This makes the whole consumer insights outcome expensive, slow, and reactive in nature. And this is where Revuze comes in, delivering complete automation of sentiment and topic discovery, which is industry and language agnostic, allowing brands a near real-time response loop to industry events such as competitors, changes in consumer tastes, new product launches, etc.

Tell us about the CEO’s role in a pandemic crisis – what role digital transformation has in this crisis?

Boaz: In general, the CEO’s role in the crisis is to assure stability across the board, to shareholders, employees, and partners. In this particular crisis, employee’s and customers’ personal safety became front and center, which meant digital transformation was a means to continue to operate – allow WFH, meet suppliers and customers, provide all the enterprise capabilities remotely, etc. In many respects, this is why the world had to adapt quickly and leap forward in adoption years ahead in a very short time. Once things stabilized, many businesses discovered that they need to change their traditional models to the new age. Restaurants started to sell curbside pickup, brands like Nike and others invested heavily in D2C to compensate for the retail slump. These things are all heavily relying on digital transformation as an enabler to the business needs.

How is Revuze changing the customer experience landscape?

Boaz: Revuze offers the first consumer opinions automated analyzer, and this automation allows Revuze to cover entire industries at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. This means near real-time intelligence at the product and feature feedback level across an entire industry so that brands can be more competitive and successful. Launching a new product? You don’t need to wait 6 months to know if you nailed it. You can know in days. Now imagine if everyone within a brand had access to this type of granular intelligence? It’s like supercharging your business workers. That’s the revolution of Revuze.

What makes Revuze different from your competitors?

Boaz: The unique AI technology that we built across several years is a very ambitious technology that turns unstructured consumer opinions in any format, vertical, and language into deep intelligence. The typical areas consumers share opinions on are the brand, the shopping experience, the specific product, and customer service. The Revuze AI surfaces these for any business role within brands without the need to speak to anyone else – no IT, experts, or analysts. This makes brands more competitive across marketing, product, customer service, eCommerce, etc., as they respond in near real-time to industry shifts.

Do you think working from home is good or bad for employee experience? How is Revuze planning it’s office strategy in Post covid19 days?

Boaz: I think when the dust settles, most companies will stay with a hybrid model. Meaning employees will come to the office part of the time and will have more flexibility around WFH. We have not been able to assess the long-term impact of WFH, but I suspect it doesn’t influence well on innovation, peer bonding, company affiliation, and other areas. On the flip side, the world saw firsthand that business could function (if must) with WFH. This is why hybrid is the way to go.