With innovative multi-channel content-rich customer engagement, South Africa-headquartered InsideData enables companies to measure and improve business communication efficiency, increase sales and build their brand. “It’s a unique and universal concept that we have hit upon,” says CEO Pieter Snyman.
At the height of last year’s South African postal strike, three communication companies were deep in merger talks, forshadowing the imminent importance of electronic communication.
“We were trying to bring print and mail together with the electronic world, and the lessons we learnt from that period uniquely positions us to be agile and quick,” said Pieter Snyman.
A former CIO for South African Airways, Mr Snyman is CEO of InsideData, the Johannesburg-headquartered business communications company that emerged from the amalgamation of the three companies sharing separate but inter-related competencies; Business Genetics – of which he was CEO – Tunleys Print & Mail and LaserCom.
InsideData enables businesses to measure and improve business communication efficiency. “We determine customer behaviour by analysing the response rates and successful delivery of communication elements.
“Marketing campaigns, portal usage, statement presentations and invoice payments are analysed to render a customer profile that allows personalised engagements and re-engineer business communication.”
In a sector of largely stand-alone single media conduits – print for instance, or electronic communications – the scope of InsideData’s integrated multi-channel offering is unique in South Africa. With branch offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Centurion, this is a “a sizeable company that specialises across numerous different channels from print and mail all the way through to very advanced mobile technologies.
CHANNEL-AGNOSTIC
“And in all these cases we can be flexible and consumer-friendly. Being completely channel-agnostic with no paper or electronic preference, we send what you like. And if there’s a mechanism where you can express your choice we will pick that up and make it available to you.
“There are bigger companies out there, in the print channel for example, but if you combine all our channels, that’s where our uniqueness comes in.”
Current clients include HSBC, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Telkom, Vodacom and the Mr Price Group. Retailing, said Mr Snyman, makes a perfect fit for the InsideData model, with current initiatives in this niche “very positive. Retailing represents a huge opportunity for us and we are bullish that our product stands out well.
“In retailing there’s a very big marketing drive on one side, with the shopping or e-commerce on the other. The two are somewhat disconnected and I believe we are uniquely positioned to bring these two worlds together as a single point of communication.”
InsideData’s electronic content can be movie based, graphic-rich, and personalised to digital magazine quality. It is also crafted for individual consumer preferences and usage/buying patterns and profiles such as gender, education and spending habits, enabling the client to fine tune campaigns and communications.
“Taking the data and insights from these, we might say to the client’s marketing team: ‘notice this usage pattern changing, did you see that when we sent this advert to the customer base this month the consumption rates suddenly went through the roof because of the change in your marketing message?’
WINNING APPROACH
“It’s this analytical approach that is now taking our business into a very different direction. Core services remain the same – print and mail, email, mobile, data and infrastructure – but the analytical scientific approach layered on top is really changing the face of what we are doing, and I think our consumers and clients are noting this.”
The big challenge, said Mr Snyman, is to deal with a world that is simultaneously growing and shrinking and dealing with a legacy that has to be kept functional. “An ability to grow in electronic messaging requires a very different mind-set from the printing environment. And the key is to handle both at the same time within the one business.
“The exciting part is that our analytical approach to the world, along with our vision, is taking us in the right direction.We find a lot of our competitors are confining themselves to just one or two of the channels we service, and it’s ourcombination of the analytical and having all the channels in one house that I believe position us uniquely.”
In the meantime, bandwidth has increased dramatically in Africa and, with the continent edging closer to one billion mobile subscribers, a report from the international research firm TeleGeography shows Africa’s internet capacity is growing faster than other world regions.
“Getting connectivity between South Africa and Kenya for example, is now vastly different from what it was a couple of years ago, and the options available to internet-based local users are of a far higher quality than ever before,” said Mr Snyman. “You can now serve and reach engaging content so what you can offer people is now very different from in the past. Netflix for example – global provider of on-demand streaming movies and TV series – has all of a sudden decided to look at emerging markets and is now rolling out across Africa.”
And with recurring problems in the South African economy impacting on business and industry, InsideData is also outward-planning. “We are looking to service customers across the border especially into the rest of Africa, and are making very good progress there.
“It’s still in its infancy, but it involves big corporate banks that have a real need in Africa for the types of product we provide, and which are very different from what they have been provided with – or self-provided – in the past.”
But InsideData is not stopping at Africa. “We are seeing opportunities not only to cross the continent but reach out as far even as far as Australia for example, where we are beginning to serve clients.
“It’s quite a universal concept that we have hit upon. And this is where we start to de-couple ourselves over time from being dependent on only one economy to being dependent on the world economy. And again, although this is in its early days, this is a big target for us.
A GOOD SPACE TO BE
“We have grown legs quite quickly and this is exciting for me because it allows us to gain foreign revenue which is good for South Africa where the currency is currently under quite a bit of pressure, and gives us an international exposure. All in all I think we are now in a very good space.”
Just a year ago InsideData was based solely in South Africa. But such has been the growth that it now has a two-to-three year strategy to deliver the same types of volumes to a fifty-fifty customer base spread over other currencies and geographical locations.
“I think it’s good for Africa that what was born in Africa – and specifically South Africa – finds its footprint across the world and remains successful. And for InsideData this is a journey proving to be both challenging and very exciting.”