The Big Leap: The Role of Technology to Increase User Retention Through Personalization

Issue tech winter still hotly discussed, given the continued flow of news layoffs  from tech startups. Startup companies are now tightening their belts and focusing on corporate strategies to gain profits. Starting from maintaining the retention of existing users on the platform.

CleverTap customer management platform in collaboration with e27 convenes The Big Leap Roadshow in 6 cities in Southeast Asia, including Jakarta. The event entitled "The Indonesia Retention Pinnacle: Personalized Customer Journeys with Innovative Technology"It aims to help industry players increase customer growth and retention.

Several industry players who attended this event were VP of Brand Communication Kitabisa.com Iqbal Hariadi, Co-Founder & CMO Sociolla Chrisanti Indiana, and VP of Marketing Rukita Lika Aprilia Samiadi. They represent startups in Indonesia who are also struggling to maintain user retention.

Build personal relationships

Providing a personalized experience to users is a very important business strategy, so that each user feels they are known personally and feels confident they can rely on a product. brand for every need. If the company can seize this opportunity, sales and customer loyalty will automatically follow.

Startups retailer Sociolla beauty revealed that they have a mission to be user's best friend or the user's friends. Every campaign promoted is always tailored to the preferences of its users. This is in accordance with its mission 'liberating self-care for everyone', reach more and more beauty enthusiast throughout Indonesia.

Regarding this personal approach, Chrisanti spoke, "We want to create value in the products we distribute through Sociolla. We want to be an authentic brand. This does take a long time, but we feel this is important to be able to survive in industry."

Sociolla itself is currently focusing on solutions omnichannel by combining experience online and offline that seamless. From there, companies can remove all barriers and limitations for customers to shop the way they want, anywhere and anytime.

Plus, strategy omnichannel become more relevant to today's customer behavior. The persistence of digital preferences and omnichannel among Indonesian consumers is one of five new consumer themes that are expected to continue post-COVID 19.

Focus on solutions

One of the startups that was also present at this event was Rukita, which is known as a long-term residential rental platform. The company is considered to have a fairly rapid growth rate at a relatively young age.

Rukita is currently focused on many things. One of them is about how Rukita's technology product development is able to improve the experience of economic actors in its ecosystem, from consumers (renters), property agents, to colleagues or partners.

In marketing brand Sometimes marketers also focus too much on company performance. "Focus on what can be done brand in providing solutions to users, rather than simply what can be done brand," emphasized VP of Marketing Rukita Lika Aprilia Samiadi.

Going forward, the company has long term goal to be able to provide a comfortable, affordable, and affordable place to live assle-free throughout Indonesia. Some time ago, Rukita too recently acquired Infokost which is a startup engaged in the online listings for residential rentals such as boarding houses and the like.

Leverage data

Regardless of the industry, leveraging data has been recognized as the key to intelligent decision making. In addition to accurately measuring retention rates and improving metrics, data provides everything needed to measure performance and identify strategies and features that are making an impact.

Kitabisa.com also shared the company's strategy for maintaining retention and encouraging user growth. One way is to develop automatic donations that can be personalized according to user preferences. In this case, we can focus on the application mobile devices and using marketing technology to remind users to make donations.

Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) has also become a technology that is being widely developed by technology companies. Seeing the success of ChatGPT, quite a few startups are trying to apply AI technology to the solutions offered by the company. Even so, some companies still believe in a personal approach to reach and maintain user loyalty.

One of the example is chatbot which has been widely used as a substitute customer service (cs). For basic questions, this technology is very helpful, but for more specific questions, chatbot is not a solution. "Your users are humans, so serve them like humans," stressed PT MNC OTT Network COO Roy Debashis.

"Starting from a sense of empathy to be closer to users. From there, we will start to get data, because data is the basis for creating solutions. Also remember to invest in customer service or customer service," added Chrisanti.