Intense Technologies produces software products and offers consulting services for digital transformation through their platform UniServeTM NXT. Their products and services are used globally by Fortune 500s for digitalization of customer experience life cycle, resulting in greater customer-centricity, reduced operational expenses, and improved revenues. They have more than two decades of experience in helping enterprises digitalize their customer interactions and have proven capabilities in data management, customer communications, customer onboarding, customer identity management, B2B customer experience, and financial reconciliation domains.
They have strong domain knowledge in telecom, banking, insurance, and government verticals. They understand the need for enterprises to provide a multi-dimensional experience that is consistent, personalized, and contextual to their customers. With the platform that brings together a bouquet of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, API management, Microservices, Business Process Management amongst others most complex enterprise applications can be built without having to code and business processes can be automated very fast.
The company’s consulting services help enterprises build a competitive advantage by delivering clear KPIs of reducing operations costs, improving revenues, and enhancing customer experience. From providing solutions to consulting services with our platform, Intense Technologies makes businesses more agile and helps them adapt to digital.
They have improved business processes for some of the leading players in telecom, banking and finance, insurance, and other sectors. Bharti Airtel, Vodafone UK, Rjio, HDFC bank, Idea Cellular, Omantel, Etisalat, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, GE Money, Bharti AXA Life Insurance, HDFC Life Insurance, and many more are our customers.
Their products and consulting services are designed for process automation, Big Data Analytics, and personalized digital engagement. Today, they process 25 billion USD worth of client revenue data, help onboard 2.5 million customers daily, send more than 500 million customer communications across their engagements. They serve customers in 45+ countries across 4 continents, with a 70% market share in the telecom domain in South Asia; have 10+ years of experience in telecom and insurance domains, and an award-winning product portfolio.
As a recognized player they have received many Awards and Accolades. Some are listed below
- Aspire Leaderboard™ CCM-Overall positioned as ‘Focused’ & Business Automation positioned as ‘Leader’ for 2020 and 2019
- Gartner published us as a Niche Player in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management(2019)
- Intense Technologies won the iCMG Architecture Award of Excellence 2016 in the category, ‘Future IT (Emerging technologies)’
- Forrester prominently published us in their report titled “Hot Emerging Indian Business Technology Vendors to Watch in 2015”
- Their solutions are featured prominently in “Indian Enterprise Software Products on Accelerated Growth Path”, a research conducted by NASSCOM and FROST & SULLIVAN
In a conversation with Mr. C.K. Shastri, Founder and Managing Director of Intense Technologies, we discussed the current industry scenario and how Intense Technologies are empowering businesses with their top-notched offerings.
What were the initial challenges you faced?
At the start, capital and brand building was major challenge. Our solutions and services were mission-critical for large enterprises and they always preferred to engage with big brands. To overcome this and win the trust of our customers we partnered with multi-billion-dollar system integrators. They helped us penetrate global markets and deepen our understanding of the domains.
Another major challenge was that our solutions and services had long sales cycles. Because of the B2B nature of our business and the domain of our offerings being critical to business operations we had long sales cycles. To overcome this, we expanded our scope to many verticals and have launched SAAS models of our offerings.
Which was that point that triggered the growth of Intense Technologies?
In the year 1999, India was witnessing a change, a change that started with welcoming technology. It also saw a vibrant entrepreneurial sector coming into being. Intense Technologies was started with a belief that India can create capabilities for growth and new solutions, and the opportunities are limitless. And this called for building skills and capabilities necessary to drive innovation. Two decades hence, we are seeing a large digitally enabled population that has embraced the digital-first strategy seamlessly.
Intense Technologies has always been driven by the belief that adopting a digital-first strategy is a giant leap for any enterprise and economy. Our continuous innovation with technology innovators like AI and ML has been breaking new ground by deploying solutions for rapid, sustainable growth. Intense Technologies continues to build new capabilities and the Covid crisis today has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital technology and solutions that can support customers through collaborative platforms that include user-focused solutions and customer engagement.
We also understood early on that customer centricity was very critical to our growth. Satisfied customers, continuous investment in technology, and consulting services for customer-centricity led to the growth of Intense Technologies. We realized that our Customer Communications Management solution had gained traction in the market and started evolving other solutions and services that helped automate journeys of customer experience lifecycle.
We quickly expanded our portfolio of products and services to include business-critical aspects such as customer onboarding, B2B customer experience, centralized engagement hub, and financial reconciliation.
With customers always being our focus, we built solutions that enhanced CX by providing consulting services where we could quantify the ROI and CX improved revenues.
Through the platform we were continuously delivering the KPIs of reducing operations costs, increasing revenues, and enhanced customer experience and started building an excellent customer base with Fortune 500 clients. The focus on enhanced CX was surely one of the turning points for us. The demand or the need of enterprises made way for us to innovate with technology offering new solutions.
Today, with our platform we help ease the Digital Transformation journey of enterprises with enhanced CX being a significant result of the transformation
How have Intense Technologies graphs changed since the foundation? Can you share a few statistics?
To continuously improve our services to our enterprise customers has been the only goal for us. We have grown to be Leaders with a 70% market share in the telecom domain in South Asia, and the world’s leading insurance companies and banks trust us with our digital engagement solutions.
While we have come a long way with the way we conduct business and the products and services offered, I can definitely and with pride say that we are moving in the path of growth. In the last 4- 5 years our profits have increased from a 29.65% profit in 2016- 17 to a 98.51% profit in the last fiscal year. Nothing else could have been a better indication of our growth.
What is the reason behind Intense Technologies’ long-standing success?
Technology innovation and customer focus. Customers have always been our Advisory Group, from creating roadmaps to understanding their pain points and challenges, we ensure that the customers are always heard and trusted. We believe in the voice of the customer and continuously innovate and work on advanced technologies to build products and services.
Customer focus and innovation are possible only when we do what we love with the extra zeal, go through the challenges and everything that comes with running a successful business. I have always believed that optimism, the right teams, and a hunger to achieve more are what drives Intense Technologies.
What are the products/services Intense Technologies focuses on?How are your services different from those in the market?
Today’s enterprises need to continuously reinvent themselves and explore new business models to remain relevant to their customers. A partner ecosystem built around the digital platform is soon becoming a reality in many verticals like banks, insurance, retail, and health. Our consulting services built on UniServeTM NXT, Rapid Enterprise Application Production platform helps in bringing out the business model transformation that aligns with changes to operating processes, exploring business models and IT systems. A Platform is a binding force that brings together multiple stakeholders including connected things with varying objectives to co-exist.
High-productivity application development platforms like ours- UniServe™ NXT, essentially accelerate the entire process of collaborating with partners in a secured way, redefining customer experiences and bridging legacy systems for business agility. We enable enterprises to enable their services through digital channels and also collaborate with external players to build a competitive edge and explore new business models. It helps enterprises to reimagine themselves to be more responsive to the demands of the market.
The platform with its open, modular architecture supports the co-existence of various technologies like BPM, user experience design, data management, configurable API engine and AI capabilities on a single platform and enterprises can leverage various functionalities to build custom solutions or digitalize business processes with required flexibility and extensibility.
Our business model of directly engaging with large enterprises in the domains and markets where we have a strong presence and partnerships with System Integrators to increase reach into global markets and newer verticals will help us in leveraging the opportunity. Our platform will help organizations lower customer support costs, improve revenue-generating avenues, enhance customer experience, reduce operational expenses of technology and collaborate securely with other players in the ecosystem. All of these are essential elements of reimagining the value proposition our customers deliver.
How do you decide to take Intense Technologies a step further in terms of your products/services?
Our strategic objective is to build a sustainable organization that remains relevant to our customers, while creating growth opportunities for our employees, and generating profitable growth for our investors. Our customers are dealing with the challenge of reinventing their core offerings, processes, and systems to adapt to the digital age. The journey of the digital future requires not just an understanding of new technologies but an appreciation of existing technology landscapes, business processes, and practices. At Intense Technologies, we have always believed that the future belongs to those who reimagine and transform. Resilience and embracing the change are certainly needed at the moment.
While challenging times have made it risky to travel, or even shake hands with people, digital is the best bet for your business to remain connected with your customers. And, we offer solutions that will help you move forward in these challenging times with digital customer onboarding and personalized interactive communications. While employees are safely working from home, we empower customers with self-help and interactive digital communications powered by UniServeTM NXT.
Our consulting services help our customers execute their journey to the digital future at a fast pace in a unified, consistent, and rich way enabling digital channels to consume the underlying technology capabilities and services of legacy systems to produce next-generation digital customer experiences. They can build new enterprise solutions in swifter timelines, experiment with new business process logic, and build new partner ecosystems with our platform.
Is there any new addition to the list of products/services? Anything exciting you would like to share?
Intense Technologies continues to spearhead innovation in solving key business problems with UniServe™ NXT. With rich user interfaces, workflows, and forms that deliver interactive applications, the use of advanced AI/ML capabilities of the platform, and leveraging DevOps for continuous integration/deployment pipeline management, UniServe™ NXT enables enterprises to embark on a digital transformation journey seamlessly. We believe that leveraging technology to deliver mission-critical enterprise-class applications at scale is the cornerstone of the business impact we deliver.
As the world increasingly confronts technological change and sustainability challenges, our platform has been selected for the largest, mission-critical e-governance project through a large System Integrator, impacting billions of dollars of revenue and being deployed at a national scale. We are in the process of implementing a Citizen Services Management Solution for the Revenue Department. The comprehensive data capture and dissemination application built on UniServeTM NXT Platform helped the Revenue Department to digitalize mission-critical Citizen Services in partnership with a large System Integrator. The project is aimed at boosting the digital adoption of critical services amongst citizens by making services accessible across multiple devices.
We are energized and humbled by this opportunity and the benefits that can flow to India’s citizens, its businesses, investors, and the government. Who’d have ever imagined that Artificial Intelligence will change the way we interact with customers with chatbots, algorithms, the Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, predictive behavior, and more. Intense Technologies is incorporating these advanced technologies into their platform to make it simpler for enterprises to leverage these technological capabilities.
A great team, persistence, and technological innovation helped us sail through our challenging times.
Enabling digital transformation for enterprises through consulting services, customized solutions, no-code platforms, AI, RPA, and more, Intense Technologies has not only adapted to changing technology landscapes but has been a step ahead with reinventing and reimagining the future.
Intense Technologies is now innovating with new frameworks to extend its services to other verticals in the small and medium business segments. They are adopting the cloud to host their solutions and ensure greater penetration into the markets. Intense Technologies is planning to invest in promoting its brand image by participating in global events and undertaking digital marketing activities.
We are having plans to partner with the government to play an important role in building ‘AtmaNirbhar Bharat’. Intense Technologies has been featured prominently in analyst reports of Aspire and Gartner in the domains we operate. With our innovative offerings, we have added new customers in the customer experience management domain and our customer engagement solutions are being deployed by large Governments, Banks, and Telecoms. We continue to spearhead our business by supporting our existing marquee customers across telecom, banking, government, and insurance verticals.
Can you please brief us about your professional experience?
I began my career with Xerox before embarking on my entrepreneurial journey with Intense Technologies. Intense Technologies odyssey began with the proverbial handful of dollars, a fecund imagination, and limitless dreams.
Having served as a Council member at NASSCOM Conclave, my learnings about the industry have been continuous. As a speaker at many tech forums, I have had the pleasure to meet and interact with renowned people from across the world. These experiences have made an impact on me.
What are the key achievements of your entrepreneurial journey?
Till about 2013- 2014 we were primarily operating in the Indian market. Post-2014 we began our journey into the global market. Today with clients across 45 countries and many more to go, my entrepreneurial journey has been great learning. I have always been the eternal optimist. Even as I started, I had always dreamt of seeing Intense Technologies make its mark globally.
In yet another milestone development- a proud moment for us, our platform has been selected for one of the largest, mission-critical e-governance projects through a large System Integrator, impacting billions of dollars of revenue and being deployed at a national scale.
This is a huge validation of the capability of our platform, UniServe™ NXT, and will help us in establishing the superiority of our technology. The deal will add significantly to the top and bottom lines of Intense Technologies. We believe that leveraging technology to deliver mission-critical enterprise-class applications at scale is the cornerstone of the business impact we deliver.
How do you look after your employees? What makes your team unique?
I have always believed that it is all about empowering every employee rather than demonstrating power. Success in the workplace depends on people, well-coordinated teams, and a collaborative environment. I am extremely proud of every employee for their efforts, excellent work quality, commitment, and zeal to innovate and create.
As a technology company, we very well understand not just the demands of the customer and the market but understand what it takes to retain talent. We see low-code development as means of allowing our technical teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives and innovations. Our HR policies and practices are well-defined, ensuring a continuous learning environment for employees. We have fair rewards systems, recognition programs, and encouraging work culture. It would be apt to say that Intense Technologies is a transparent organization with clear communications and is always open to employee feedback.
We believe in autonomy, giving employees the freedom to innovate, create and learn. Today, as we have grown as an organization, Team Intense Technologies has initiated engagement activities that include training, CSR activities, employee engagement activities, and more. The enthusiasm I see in my teams for their work is motivating and is surely the way to go.
As we expand, we are also continuing our efforts to apply talent management practices to support employees across Intense Technologies, improve retention rates and increase employee engagement.
Is there any special experience with your clients you would like to highlight?
With clients across 45 countries in 4 countries, Intense Technologies takes immense responsibility in delivering value and improving the business process for every customer. Every client has played a significant part in our journey thus far. While we work as their technology enablers, enabling them in their digital transformation, the experience with every client is special. Every repeat business from existing customers is encouraging and we value our long-standing relationship with each of our customers.
