Capillary Technologies consolidates global position, signs agreement with American Express

Capillary Technologies yesterday announced a joint marketing agreement with American Express. American Express will introduce Capillary’s Intelligent Customer Engagement™ solutions to select medium-sized retail merchants in the US. The solutions primarily enable merchants to engage with their customers across in-store, social media, e-mail, local and mobile channels, with a view to increasing shopper loyalty and fuelling online and physical store sales.

Capillary Technologies is SaaS company giving consumer engagement solutions that was founded by Krishna Mehra, Aneesh Reddy and Ajay Modani in 2008. One of the Tech30 companies of 2011, Capillary is one of the most successful startup stories from India of recent times (also a case study in HBR).

YourStory spoke to Krishna Mehra to learn more about this move.

YourStory: How has the response been since you've gone international? How many countries do you have presence in now?

Krishna Mehra: It's been tremendous. The sun never sets on the Capillary customer base now - we have customers all the way from New Zealand and China in the far east to US and Mexico in the far west. Last we counted a few months ago, we were doing business in about 14 countries (smiles). It's a bit of crazy maintaining the 24x7 operation, but there's been massive transformation in the company so that we can support customers round the world and in different languages. We have been busy building sales and customer success teams in all major continents and servicing customers and changing the way they think about marketing.

YS: This partnership is huge, what do you think clicked for Capillary to crack this?

KM: At the end of the day, its the value proposition and how customers benefit from our solution. American Express is always looking for ways to add more value to their merchants and innovative solutions that actually show results in the marketplace. Our solution is quick to implement and shows ROI quickly after deploying- and they really liked what they saw. Finally, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and what followed was an arduous process where we conducted a pilot and showed with a controlled set of merchants how strong our value proposition is. The results were really encouraging and that is what made this partnership happen.

YS: Can you share some of the lessons you've learnt selling to big brands across the globe?

KM: One of the biggest learnings has been in how we have to localize our story, and our approach in each individual market. Each market is unique and we have had to tailor our approach, understand how to amplify the benefits for shoppers in that country, and how to build a customer success model so that our customers start seeing results quickly. At the same time, selling to big brands and well known logos is always a test of patience, so we have learnt to be a lot more patient and invest for long term success in each relationship.

Read more about the deal on Capillary's blog. Capillary has raised a $15.5 million Series A round and has grown to over 400 employees in five years. Read more about their culture.