A pioneer in the fast growing accountable marketing space, Xerago was founded on the philosophy that any business transaction has a direct or indirect customer impact and can be isolated, evaluated, defined, optimized and eventually automated. The Chennai-based mid-sized company that specializes in offering analytical, direct and interactive marketing services, grew exponentially since its founding and today it has over 250 employees spread over six locations in three continents.

Xerago specializes in offering analytical, direct and interactive marketing services.

Along the way, Xerago has notched up many firsts that have rare parallel in the Indian marketing services space. The company has evolved and works through a world class proprietary service model called “Customer Value Maximization ’that delivers unprecedented marketing returns. In the last one decade, Xerago has built a client portfolio of some of the world’s most reputed brands and companies including Intel, Citibank, Microsoft, HP, Vedanta Group, HDFC, ICICI and Hindustan Lever among others and today, Xerago figures in the list for almost any global RFP floated by Fortune1000 and large organizations.

Overcoming Barriers

Srinivas Chari, Co-Founder and CMO, Xerago points out that a key challenge the company had to tackle initially was building a talent pool. “We started with a core crack team but identifying, nurturing and retaining a talented team that would help us in scaling up was a key challenge. Particularly the kind of hard skills that the line of work needs is always scarce. Owing to this, we had to heavily invest in creating process IP to building a mature delivery model, to overcome this challenge.” Chari elucidates the next hindrance was selling the concept. “Driving the concept of accountable or ROI based marketing was truly a big challenge as marketers were used to a conventional ‘spray and pray’ kind of traditional advertising led marketing models. It was hard to convince marketers to switch from traditional thinking about media choices and marketing,” he says.

They were restricted by the financial capacity to expand and set up sales-servicing offices initially.

Bringing Innovation to the Fore

Using the four pillars of technology, analytics, creative and a robust process, Xerago executes marketing interventions and programs that solve segment, channel, lifecycle and functional marketing problems for brands. Xerago’s comprehensive services solve direct marketing challenges faced by marketers.

Xerago has a niche Products Suite; X-Alt that drives integrated high powered RoI led marketing. Fusing cutting edge technology, deep domain expertise and compelling feature set, X-Alt is a truly unique Marketing Platform that can give a very high ROI.

Maximizing Customer Value

Over the past decade, Xerago has created IP both tangible and in-tangible that enables it to retain the unique advantage of being among the few entities globally that has stellar depth of consulting with large scale marketing outsourcers.  We work through a world class proprietary service model that delivers unprecedented marketing returns. Called  “Customer Value Maximization’, the model consists of a series of well-crafted marketing interventions administered seamlessly across numerous customer interaction channels, driven only by customer “wants” and a frame work that allows marketers to objectively measure effectiveness.

Additionally X-Alt, Xerago’s Integrated Marketing Platform which magnifies marketing effectiveness helps drive seamless marketing programs. “Technology is a key enabler of present day marketing. And this can hardly be overemphasized! The challenge however is to understand that technology is just a means to an end like marketing. Unfortunately present day marketers are getting locked in with technology as the end…which is ever changing,” says Chari.

He believes that operating at the cusp of technology, creative and analytics, Xerago is constantly evolving newer ways of leveraging technology to deliver marketing lift.  “We have pioneered in several marketing breakthroughs by leveraging technology. For example using remote scripting for asynchronous scoreboard refresh [i.e. AJAX] in 2002 for Cricinfo or enabling multichannel marketing triggering 2,000 campaigns across channels and touching 50 million customers through a workflow integrated MDM in 2005, for HDFC Bank are some cases in point.”

Xerago has offices in Chennai and Mumbai in India and in Singapore, San Francisco, Dubai and London. While Xerago’s centralized hub and marketing infrastructure is based out of Chennai, the company works across the globe on its mature ‘right-shore’ delivery model. The company has clients in India, US, Europe, Japan, Asia, Middle-East, and Australia. These clients range across several industries including banking, telecom, technology, retail, consumer goods and media to name a few.

Company Roadmap

Overcoming barriers, the company has grown exponentially over the years and has a lot of plans in the pipeline. In the next 3-4 years, the company is sprucing X-Alt, and building products that encompass specific Direct Marketing challenges. In the pipeline are products like CRM in a Box that ensures a zero capex and no tinkering plug-n-play affordable solution for Marketers. It plans to consolidate and scale its Digital Center-of-Excellence, from a dozen countries to more and extending beyond Portal management to ancillary value added services like Digital Analytics, Optimization etc. We are also augmenting high skilled staff, and replicating our growth trajectory, quips Chari.

Milestones

Here are some of the key milestones of the company

2002 – Commenced operations, and facilitated World’s Biggest Financial Services entity’s quantum leap on Digital

2005 – Expanded into Analytical Marketing and started enabling India’s #1 Private Sector Bank on Multichannel Marketing

2006 – Launched X-Alt, the marketing platform

2007 – Set up Digital Center of Excellence for World’s Biggest Financial Services in multiple countries

2010 – Consolidated multichannel analytics services with inclusion of Asia’s Biggest Bank

2011 – Continued expansion with entry into North America for Digital Production outsourcing