How Kameleoon helps enterprise customers investing in experience optimization
The Forrester Wave™: Experience Optimization Platforms Q4 2020 report has just been released, with Kameleoon a new entrant in the 10 vendor evaluation. To find out more about what it means for the company and for an overview of a fast-changing market, we interviewed Jean-René Boidron, Kameleoon CEO.
1 How is the experimentation and personalization solution market evolving?
We’ve all seen how lockdowns have accelerated the move online, with more and more people switching to digital channels. The current crisis is dramatically increasing the importance of digital to all of our lives, changing people’s habits and spending for good. Our own Kameleoon research found that 37% of US consumers said they were spending more time online - and that 29% said they’d not go back to offline channels. Existing online users are widening the range of activities that they do online, such as taking online classes or accessing medical consultations, while new users are adopting online grocery shopping and banking for the first time. It really is a watershed moment in attitudes and behaviors.
We see this as a tremendous opportunity for brands - they have the chance to build new, long-term relationships with consumers - but only if they offer their visitors an optimized, personalized experience, tailored to their individual needs. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers we surveyed said that the online experience provided by brands would change their future purchasing behavior - with 42% saying they’d switch from companies that offered a poor experience.
Consequently we’re seeing an enormous increase in interest in our full stack experimentation and personalization platform, both from existing customers who want to do more testing and optimization and those looking to invest for the first time. What we think at Kameleoon is that brands that don’t deliver a personalized, tailored and reassuring online experience now will suffer down the line, missing out on a slice of the growing digital spend from an increasing online customer base.
Brands are at different stages with personalization and experimentation. So, as the market matures they want a solution that will grow and scale with their needs. This is why we’ve deepened our functionality to provide both client-side and server-side experimentation, with a single, full stack platform that can be used equally by front-end marketers and back-end developers.
2 What does Forrester say about Kameleoon in the Wave™?
This is the first time Kameleoon has been part of the Forrester Wave™: Experience Optimization Platforms Q4 2020. We believe that it validates our product vision and strategy of building a point, best of breed experimentation and personalization solution that combines high performance, reliability and security. As a company, we can be really proud about entering Forrester’s ranking. It really is the result of a constant team effort and reflects our culture, hard work and commitment to AI and innovation, along with the robustness of our engineering, the quality of our technology and the rigor we put into every project.
Forrester identified the 10 most significant ones — each of the vendors in the Wave has a mature EOP product strategy, a successful EOP business (with revenues of at least $15 million, and market visibility in the experience optimization space. Through a 22-criterion evaluation of experience optimization platform (EOP) providers, Forrester researched, analyzed, and scored them.
According to the Forrester report, “Kameleoon’s ability to execute on its ambitious product road map and the strong performance of its experience optimization business are noteworthy for a new entrant into our EOP evaluation.”
The report also states that, “Kameleoon’s deployment options impress… Kameleoon employs its multiple product strategy so that it can serve the experience optimization needs of clients at many maturity levels. …The vendor offers an impressive array of deployment options, including SaaS, and full-on-premise. … And the products’ multiple deployment options are a boon for enterprise customers. … With its real-time browser-based predictions and performance- and scalability- oriented architecture, Kameleoon’s solution is a good fit for the healthcare, finance, and e-commerce industries.”
3 Are there specific technical areas highlighted in the Wave™?
The Experience Optimization Platforms Q4 2020 Wave evaluates the strategy, current offering and market presence of vendors against 22 criteria, spanning current product offering, strategy and market presence.
For Kameleoon our top scores were in the performance, platform integration, execution roadmap, and experience optimization technique innovation criteria. The report noted that, “Kameleoon has focused its product innovation efforts on providing real-time propensity scoring of visitors, flicker free performance, and flexible consent management.”
From our point of view it is good to see our ongoing R&D investment being recognized - we have a team of over 60 developers continually introducing new innovations, from our artificial intelligence-based personalization engine to a switch from JavaScript to TypeScript which has reduced the size of scripts deployed on visitor browsers by 30%. Our R&D team is dedicated to meeting the changing technical, functional and business needs of the biggest global digital brands when it comes to experimentation and personalization, now and in the future.
4 What are the next steps for Kameleoon in its growth?
Kameleoon is increasingly targeting larger, enterprise brands looking for a scalable platform to underpin their experimentation and personalization strategy for the long-term. We’ve proven the value we deliver for these enterprise brands - we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) for enterprises. Based on its rigorous methodology and interviews with customers it found that Kameleoon delivered a 15% improvement in conversion rates, a 30% increase in cross-sell revenues and a 49% reduction in campaign setup effort. This adds up to a three-year ROI of 291%, with payback within three months. We’ve seen similar results from talking directly with our customers.
As we move into 2021 we’re expanding in all geographical markets. Our partner-led approach is helping us grow across multiple sectors, winning new clients in areas such as healthcare. We expect this momentum to accelerate and look forward to helping new and existing customers deliver the personalized, optimized experience that their customers demand well into the future.