Rancard, a software company, connected to more than 70 mobile networks in Africa, has launched a new product referred to as Rendezvous, which will enhance the growth of online commerce sector.
Rendezvous is a social recommendation technology which helps businesses to find customers. It enables businesses to go online, look in for and find customers. It does this by helping them to manage their advertising budget and where and how to acquire customers.
Kofi Dazie, chief executive officer of the firm explained that one of the values that Rendezvous brings is knowledge of the consumer, their social connections and relationships, as well as associated interests and preferences, thereby bringing relevance to the ads being delivered on behalf of brands and eliminating spam.
He said at the official launch of the product in Lagos that mobile ad intrusion is an issue as a result of lack of deep knowledge about what is relevant to the consumers, leading to inability to personalise ads.
Responding to questions bothering on major barriers for businesses looking to acquire customers online, Ehizogie Binitie, co-founder and chief technology officer, noted that recent trends indicate that a significant number of users are gaining access to online channels through their mobile devices which are increasingly data-enabled.
This means that businesses need to allocate more of their advertising budget to online channels. The challenge for brands has been how to effectively allocate their budget to reach their users where they can be found online.
“Feedback from our agency partners has led us to invest heavily in Campaign Manager which hides the complexity of multi-channel online advertising and provides granular reporting and analytics to enable brands get the best yields from their spend”, he said.
Addressing the issue of trust in online commerce platforms, he said, “: One of the challenges with commerce platforms is just before you buy, you are not sure whether what you are about to buy is what you’ll actually get. You may see something nice in picture and you are not sure how good it will be when the item is delivered. This is a big trust issue which impacts how things are well sold. What our social recommendation technology does is to bring the concept that we are all very familiar with.
This is the concept of people you trust recommending items you intend to buy to you before you buy them. So you can see the items online and you can also see the trusted opinions of people whose opinions matter to you before you buy. This eliminates an important barrier just before you buy and this is what our Rendezvous social recommendations technology enables online commerce platforms to extend to their customers.
HOPE MOSES-ASHIKE
