How MoEngage, powered by AWS, is processing 1 trillion data points monthly to drive insight-led customer engagement

A recent study by Statista shows that there are over 3 billion smartphone users in the world and another study by RescueTime shows that people use their phones 58 times a day on average. For mobile-first customers, their lives revolve around mobile phones, switching between devices, locations and channels and they expect brands to always be on the same page with them, and deliver personalised experiences at each touchpoint. With these changing preferences, brands need to identify how to engage customers at every point in their journey to improve user experience. Marketing and product teams often struggle to meet these expectations as most of the available tools only provide campaign automation and reporting, and don’t deliver any insights into customer behaviour, that can help brands craft personalised messages.

Recognising this market opportunity, Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar built the customer engagement platform - Moengage. In just a few years, it has become a global brand that serves Fortune 500 companies.

A platform for consumer brands' evolving engagement needs

Raviteja Dodda, Co-founder and CEO, MoEngage says, “As one of the earliest mobile-first customer engagement platforms, our mission is to support the digital growth for user-centric brands across e-commerce, retail, travel and hospitality, BFSI, media and entertainment, telecom, food delivery, mobility, and more."

The MoEngage platform, using its proprietary AI tool, recommends the best time, message content, and format to communicate with each type of customer. MoEngage works with 1000+ customer-obsessed brands across 35 countries, analyses more than a trillion data points, and transforms the customer experience for more than 500 million users on mobile, web and email every month. Brands such as Flipkart, Oyo, Future Retail, Samsung, McAfee, Bigbasket, Gaana, OnlineTyari, Nestle, Deutsche Telekom, Ally Financial, CIMB Bank, and more engage and retain their customers with MoEngage.

Marketers can leverage tools such as behavioural trends, cohort analysis, and RFM to analyse their customer needs. User Paths helps visualise how users are navigating the app by providing Sankey Analysis, thus identifying the most popular paths users take and the bottlenecks in the user experience. Deep segmentation, coupled with the ability to build multiple flows, enables them to map out engagement journeys unique for each user. AI-enabled recommendations can help choose the right message, right time and the right channels for engagement.

Working with AWS

The founders of MoEngage envisioned a global operation from day one and needed a secure, scalable infrastructure to smoothly run their business. As they capture and process millions of customer engagement events for customers, security was also a key factor. They chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud for its reliability, ease of use, and rate of community adoption.

MoEngage uses Amazon GuardDuty and other built-in tools such as multi-factor authentication, and identity and access management. It also uses Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to generate actionable insights and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) in conjunction with AWS Lambda for serverless computing and the auto-execution of algorithms. Recently, MoEngage has adopted Amazon Athena to refine serverless queries, which has helped reduce their search time from 15 minutes to less than 30 seconds.

The US and European Union are both rapidly growing markets for MoEngage. For enterprise customers here, having in-country data centres ensures compliance with data sovereignty rules such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“When we say that we are using AWS, most prospective customers’ security questions are already answered. When they need certification, we send them the ISO 27001 compliance certificate and the SOC 2 report that has been achieved by AWS,” says Yashwanth Kumar, Co-founder and CTO, MoEngage.

Scalability, reliability and compliance with AWS

With the deployment on AWS, MoEngage customers have benefitted immensely. It enables global expansion with secure data centres abroad, reduces log-searching time, and minimises the number of personnel required by leveraging managed services.

When MoEngage was launched, time-to-market and funding were top concerns. The AWS Activate program for startups provided them with credits, training, and all the business support they needed to quickly get the operation up and running.

Since its launch, MoEngage has maintained a consistent service level agreement of 99.99 percent. The startup’s daily traffic is often unpredictable, going from 3 million requests per minute to more than double at times. With AWS, they are able to launch as many machines as needed at any given time to serve their traffic.

“With AWS, we have complete transparency around our build and usage, and the AWS team is more than happy to give us suggestions on how to reduce costs,” says Yashwanth.

MoEngage also supports continuous innovation, bringing users new features that are designed to enhance conversion rates and better track customer behaviour. They recently launched a recommendations engine for retail users that is built on Amazon Personalize, a machine learning service from AWS. They would have needed a dedicated four to five-member team to build their own recommendations engine, but with AWS, they were able to minimise staffing levels and guarantee a reliable solution from the start.

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The road ahead with AWS

MoEngage is the youngest company and the only ‘Strong Performer’ to be featured in The Forrester Wave: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020. It is also recognised as a Leader in 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Automation - one of the first few Indian SaaS companies to do so in any category.

Last year, MoEngage integrated with the AWS ecosystem as a Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Competency Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). The startup is leveraging the APN program to multiple ends. The DCX market development funding helps create awareness about MoEngage’s products to build pipelines in existing and new industry verticals. Also, MoEngage management is able to craft integrated go-to-market strategies with other DCX partners offering complementary mobile solutions.

“We are a happy customer of AWS and are excited about the innovation that keeps happening. I can’t imagine building MoEngage without AWS,” concludes Yashwanth.