How this serial entrepreneur is solving customer feedback problems for enterprises and SMBs

One of the US’ greatest inventors, Thomas Edison, once said, “Focus on how the end customers perceive the impact of your innovation, rather than on how you, innovators, perceive it.” 

Entrepreneur Monalisa Saxena is doing this by helping businesses hear their customers through her market research firms, Pixights Consulting and Inxise Datalabs. 

The 42-year-old has been conducting market research and communications for over two decades, working with the likes of British American Tobacco, Marico, L’Oreal, Mondelez, Pepsi Foods, Vodafone, ICICI Bank, Unilever, Novartis, Nicholas Piramal, Zee TV, Star TV, Castrol, Mahindra, and Philips, among others.

A marketing communications graduate from MICA, Monalisa is especially passionate about understanding consumer experiences in rural areas and has also worked with clients like UNICEF, International Labour Organisation, and Give India, among others.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed businesses to adapt to the new normal, which presented an opportunity for Monalisa to launch her latest venture, Merren. 

The startup claims to be the world’s first end-to-end platform for messaging-app based surveys by leveraging the existing features of such messaging apps. 

It brings together survey creators, panels providers, customers, and the data analysis engine — all on a single platform. 

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How Merren works?

Based in Mumbai, Merren carries out conversational surveys with customers across metros, Tier I, II, and III cities, and rural areas. It can penetrate the non-metro areas and garner genuine response by leveraging channels like WhatsApp and Messenger. The startup also analyses and generates real-time insights from the data for its clients.

While an easy plug and play service allows anybody to create surveys easily, it can also be used by companies to simply stay in touch with customers, education companies, or institutions to develop quizzes, among other things.

Merren runs surveys through tie-ups with a database company, which shares the contacts automatically suppressed and converted into alphanumeric hashtags by Merren’s server. 

This means the number is not visible to anybody within the startup’s team. The surveys can be administered via multiple languages as facilitated by the apps. 

"Instead of sending a link to a long survey, we manage to push small and quick questionnaires through WhatsApp. It is a familiar medium, and we can reach them exactly where they are in a language they understand,” Monalisa explains.

Considering data handling is becoming increasingly sensitive, Monalisa says the first thing she did was build a dedicated team to look after data privacy and security and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The idea behind Merren is the ease of collecting customer views and opinions. 

“The process needs to be effortless for the customer. If you send them a link for an online survey, then there would be a connectivity problem and they will stop in the middle,” she adds.

Most of Merren’s business is driven by B2B clients like larger enterprises and small businesses, who comprise 90 percent of its business. However, individuals and academicians looking to run surveys for various studies also form a small part of its clients.

With a core team of five members, it is looking to build the internal team further.

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Challenges and the way forward

Marketing the Saas product has been an initial challenge for the startup as the team is more used to enterprise sales than Saas marketing. Now it is dealing with challenges associated with going global and building a team for the same.

Bootstrapped so far, the founder declined to share finance details as the startup is in its early days.

Moving ahead, the startup hopes to deploy its services beyond WhatsApp and Messenger and make it platform agnostic. Claiming to be first of a kind, the startup sees little competition in the global survey management market, expected to reach $1,804.64 million in 2021. It also hopes to raise funds to support its global expansion plans.

Advising budding entrepreneurs, she asks them to let go of their fear of failure and embrace the process of unlearning and relearning. “This might apply to entrepreneurs irrespective of gender, but from what I have seen, this is especially true for women who have more fear and guilt," she adds.

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