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Today we speak to Murali Balan, Co-founder of Tenovia to understand how Tenovia is shaping the retail and D2 industry through its innovative product offerings.
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.
Murali Balan: Tenovia is an e-commerce analytics and consulting partner for retail and D2C brands with a focus on building and scaling their e-commerce revenues. We’re constantly guiding clients and working with them to take full advantage of the e-commerce channel economics that we have mastered over the years.
From leveraging technology, identifying the right mix of digital channels, unlocking new revenue streams, and streamlining supply chains to providing a stellar experience to end users, we ensure our clients scale up in the e-commerce space.
We have an e-commerce Analytics SaaS product called Tensight – through which brands can get insights on merchandising, supply chain, warehousing, competitor tracking, e-commerce, and digital marketing, customer insights, and aggregated reviews/ratings.
We provide Consulting for data-driven actionable recommendations that should be prioritized by brands to maximize their e-commerce revenues.
TechGraph: Can you elaborate on the eCommerce analytics market? How big is the e-commerce analytics market?
Murali Balan: The e-commerce business is still relatively in its early years in India. There’s a large base of potential buyer base that’s yet to be tapped in its entirety for online transactions. While in mature markets e-commerce channel contribution is around 30% of the business, in India it still hovers in the single digits for most brands. Some categories lead others in online adoption.
This is expected to shoot up over the next few years with more brands recognizing that online is an important channel to scale and nurture.
In 2022, most of the brands have done the basics for e-commerce. In the initial years, they grew aggressively year-on-year. But as the business got to a certain size, the rate of growth slowed down. This is where Analytics steps in e-commerce Analytics give the brands a competitive advantage that can sustain the aggressive growth rates online.
Brands that consistently study their data, invest in analytics, and make day-to-day decisions based on analytics are definitely on the cutting edge in this space. Delayed decision-making is probably the single largest eroder of revenues in the e-commerce space.
That’s the space in which we exist – democratizing the access to analytics across all stakeholders in the e-commerce team – enabling timely data-driven decisions that leads to increased top lines and healthier bottom lines.
We believe that the acceptance and demand for e-commerce Analytics will be widespread in a nine to eighteen months window.
TechGraph: Who are some of the top industries/sectors adopting data-driven culture?
Murali Balan: Any brand irrespective of the sector it comes from – Fashion / FMCG / Healthcare or the likes, if its presence online and has e-commerce revenues is compelled in adopting a data-driven culture without which it lags and wouldn’t find success online.
The brands that have succeeded in scaling their revenues online are the ones who have been able to tap into the story the data points to and have been able to take proactive timely decisions that have given them the edge over the competition.
TechGraph: What is the major factor driving the growth of the e-commerce Analytics Market?
Murali Balan: The short answer – Data and ease of access to it.
Unlike offline, the online has a plethora of data sources that provide rich insights into different aspects of the business – be it customer insights, product portfolio understanding, competition, or general industry trends. And online the pace of operations is much faster than traditional offline businesses; and any brand seeking to be successful needs to be agile in terms of taking the right decisions based on the right insights.
This is a big driver for eCommerce Analytics right now; with the explosion of D2C Brands and with the impetus of the pandemic for e-commerce, businesses simply cannot ignore what is the story the data is telling without risking future revenues.
TechGraph: Do share some updates on your client base and the work you have been doing lately?
Murali Balan: We’ve been able to build our expertise working with diverse brands across domains, namely Century Mattress, Maharishi Ayurveda, Emami, Dixcy, Levi’s Innerwear, Tata International, Paragon, Soch, 24 Mantra to name a few.
We’ve recently deployed Tensight for Soch, a one-stop clothing brand for ethnic needs. The solution offered was aimed to address an industry-wide problem of listing efficacy, especially in the fashion space online. Most brands aren’t aware of the leakages in their catalog from warehouse to portal front-end.
We helped Soch automate and centralize the listing % and stock exposure %. The analytics thus enabled their product teams to take timely and precise decisions in ensuring maximum exposure of their catalog across portals, thus opening up an incremental 20% revenue uptick.
TechGraph: How does your company/product assist in the digital transformation of an e-commerce player?
Murali Balan: We have a very analytical approach to driving business revenues and optimizing the bottom line for our clients. Our intellectual property is the internal scorecards we build for brands and the subsequent analytics that gives a precise overview of the channel health and thus, the brand’s ability to drive scale.
Through our centralized analytics platform Tensight – we are better poised to derive insights from data across diverse touch points which brands typically don’t have access.
TechGraph: What do you think will be the key trends that will drive the growth for Tenovia and the industry at large?
Murali Balan: The growth of the e-commerce business with expansions into the smaller tiers, villages, and towns having access to cheaper internet, and brands willing to invest online – these are all trends that will enable us to scale.
Businesses will need insights and analytics to make decisions online – which operates at a much higher clip than offline, and thus there will be a need to enable analytics across the board. We believe this is the prime period to ride the wave and add tremendous value to our clients in their journey.
TechGraph: Can you please elaborate on your business strategy and growth plans?
Murali Balan: We are keen to enter into international markets with our analytics product Tensight as there is a commonality of problem statements that businesses face across markets and Tensight can solve them efficiently.
Our top priorities would be to build expertise around deeper recommendations as our product AI gets more intelligent and thus deliver high-value insights to our clients. In the long term, we would like to be positioned as an advanced ‘analytics and recommendation partner’ globally for digital businesses.
TechGraph: How are e-commerce analytics platforms enhancing customer-brand engagement and experience?
Murali Balan: Analytics can unlock revenue that is potentially left behind on the table, untapped. Data can pinpoint the areas that are holding the brand back from achieving higher revenues.
In the case of customer-brand engagement, our in-house experts deep-dive into the business to identify the hiccups in the customer experiences. By providing smart insights to the marketers/retailers, they can quickly turn them into actionable decisions.