CIEK Solutions: CIEK Solutions is Smart Humans @ AI for Transparent, Predictive Insights

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Neeraj Kulkarni, President & Chief Data Scientist

Business leaders are under immense pressure from internal stakeholders and investors to generate incremental sales, create higher return on investment (ROI) for their marketing spend, and accelerate customer growth and market share. However, most growing mid-size companies and agencies significantly lack the right data and technology resources required to derive comprehensive insights for driving consumer engagement. CIEK Solutions (pronounced “seek”), is primarily targeting these growing mid-size businesses by providing affordable access to advanced data science servicaes and solutions to drive their growth. We spoke with Neeraj Kulkarni, President/Chief Data Scientist, CIEK Solutions to learn more about the company and its growth plans for 2019 and beyond.

Could you give us a brief on what spurred the founding of CIEK Solutions?

CIEK Solutions is an advanced data sciences consultancy founded on the belief that the best business decisions are taken by incorporating customer intelligence data and human experiential knowledge. Using powerful machine learning algorithms, CIEK Solutions utilizes both big data and human expertise to provide valuable analytics insights and technology solutions to maximize ROI for our clients.

Could you elaborate more on the company’s core offering and some of its unique features and functionalities?

CIEK Solutions primarily focuses on advanced predictive and prescriptive business analytics space in three specific domain areas:

Predictive Optimization Solutions: CIEK Solutions utilizes proprietary optimization solutions which incorporate Bayesian machine learning and econometric time series techniques to integrate structured datasets and semi-quantitative/ qualitative data like surveys, interviews and research studies in the analysis. Incorporating feedback from domain experts and key stakeholder is a critical part of CIEK Solutions’ data discovery process. We don’t want to develop black box models which are difficult to understand and implement. Our insights are collaborative, transparent, and highly predictive and forward looking in nature.

For a mid-market retailer, utilizing CIEK Solutions’ marketing mix optimization models have helped improve the ROI of their marketing investments by over 30 percent in the last two years. A business-to-business (B2B) logistics provider utilizes CIEK Solutions’ marketing mix and pricing optimization solutions on an ongoing basis. This has improved their commercial sales by 12 percent and provided major decision support for product pricing. For an e-commerce company, CIEK Solutions’ attribution analytics solutions have aided their online sales to grow over 30 percent in the last year. In addition, it has enabled their C suite to provide future quarterly sales projections to their stakeholders and investors.

Customer Experience Analytics: Understanding your customer’s experience will help improve how they would interact with your brand and ultimately promote brand loyalty, customer retention and engagement.

We don’t want to develop black box models which are difficult to understand and implement. Our insights are collaborative, transparent, and highly predictive and forward looking in nature

However, before you begin planning and strategizing about customer experience improvements, you need the right data and metrics to help you establish goals and initiatives as well as set benchmarks to see what kind of impact these goals and initiatives have on your customers. CIEK Solutions provides variety of advanced analytics serves and solutions to get detailed insights on key customer experience metrics. CIEK Solutions’ predictive solutions aid in improving long term customer life time value, reducing churn, improving high value customer acquisition, and driving one to one personalized marketing experiences. To truly unlock the value of personalization, CIEK Solutions’ data consultants work with client management teams to understand the key data sources and develop a data management system to create a unified view of their customer base. In many cases, the CIEK Solutions data team develops API’s in connecting client’s first party data with additional third-party data sources to provide rich insights on consumer purchase behavior, demographics, psychographics, and media usage.

This allows CIEK Solutions’ clients to provide seamless, highly relevant content and offers to their customers across both offline and online media. We recently completed a major segmentation exercise for a mid-size hospitality company which integrated both their first party customer transaction datasets and customer survey data. This analysis led to deeper insights about their high-value segment, bargain hunters, one-time transactors and mid-value customer segment. We have identified growth areas which can potentially lead to a 14 percent increase in sales. Moreover, the qualitative insights on customer opinions and perceptions across various key customer segments provided them rich content to develop relevant product and messaging strategies for both offline and online digital media platforms. We are now in the process of developing further micro-segments and targeted campaign strategies in collaboration with their creative agency to develop holistic marketing plans that can transform their business.

Innovation analytics: CIEK Solutions focuses on providing organizations with new ways to analyze, visualize and measure new data sources. CIEK Solutions’ current and potential clients are trying to integrate and analyze additional data sources whether it is social, voice, image, apps, augmented reality and Internet-of-Things (IoT) and much more in better understanding and improving the customer journey. The company is constantly innovating and researching new methodologies in these areas along with business partners and academic institutions. The company intends to develop modular packaged solutions based on advanced machine learning techniques that can be quickly customized and deployed based on client needs.

What is the unique feature that sets you apart from other players in the market?

CIEK Solutions also hires and collaborates with the best subject matter experts in brand and consumer behavior strategy to ensure that clients can easily and effectively implement these insights in their business and marketing strategies. In addition, they have developed a vast network of agency and consulting partnerships to implement end-to-end business services and solutions to fulfil client needs.

A data driven approach to creativity helps our clients create the right content, deliver that content to the right customers, across the right channels, at the right time. So, we are continuously looking to partner with leading creative, digital, crm, consulting, and media agencies to enable story building and effective implementation of business insights into strategic actions.

What does the future hold for your organization? Any footprint expansion plans or any new solutions that you are coming up with?

Since its genesis in 2016, CIEK Solutions’ data sciences services and solutions have been responsible in helping drive tremendous growth for their clients. To be recognized as a thought leader in advanced analytics means CIEK Solutions is constantly evolving and learning from their clients, competition and business partners. In addition, CIEK Solutions is developing a new range of digital optimization solutions in collaboration with a technology partner to be potentially launched in the next 1-2 years. CIEK Solutions also has aggressive growth plans in Asia and Latin America and are looking at potential business partnerships to fuel our growth.