12 reasons we are thankful for 2020
As 2020 winds down and we look with hope and anticipation to a new year, we want to take a moment to reflect back on 2020. Though this year was difficult for every industry and individual, we want to remember the moments of excitement and achievement for our customers, our team, and our company for which we are especially thankful this year.
Receiving recognition through awards
The year, ZineOne was recognized for its innovation and industry thought leadership through a number of awards, including:
- Red Herring 100 – In November, ZineOne was announced as a winner of the Red Herring Top 100 North America in 2020, which recognizes the continent’s most innovative private technology companies. Industry experts judged entries on a wide variety of criteria including financial performance, innovation, business strategy, and market penetration.
- Top 50 Women in SaaS – Debjani Deb, CEO and Co-Founder of ZineOne, was recognized as one of The Software Report’s 2020 Top 50 Women Leaders in SaaS. This annual award celebrates women for their exceptional performance in executive roles, expertise in SaaS solutions, and the ability to foster innovation and growth.
- Silver Stevie – ZineOne won a 2020 Silver Stevie award in the “Women-Run Workplace of the Year of More Than 10 Employees” category. The Stevie Award is given for achievements in business to organizations and individuals in more than 60 nations.
Debuting in Gartner’s 2020 Personalization Engine Magic Quadrant
This summer we were thrilled to announce that Gartner named ZineOne to its Personalization Engine Magic Quadrant. 2020 was ZineOne’s first appearance in this capacity on the Quadrant, but its second recognition by Gartner, as ZineOne was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2018. For this honor, Gartner identified 13 personalization engine providers and evaluated them on 15 different criteria for the report. In particular, ZineOne was recognized for Data Processing and Analytics, Targeting & Triggering, and Market Responsiveness and Innovation.Partnering with Microsoft
In July, ZineOne became available on Microsoft AppSource, an online cloud marketplace providing tailored line-of-business solutions and also on the App Marketplace. Through this collaboration, enterprises can now use AppSource and ZineOne to achieve robust computing capabilities and stream machine learning capabilities, allowing the platform to scale as demand intensifies.Participating in NRF 2020 & our inclusion in the Artificial Intelligence EXPO Tour
Every January, NRF—the world’s largest retail conference, which attracts over 38,000 attendees and 800 exhibitors—is held to discuss emergent trends and innovations in retail. This year, ZineOne had the pleasure of being selected as one of the 28 top technology providers featured in the NRF Artificial Intelligence EXPO tour. On the tour, attendees met with our team and learned how ZineOne’s AI-powered Intelligent Customer Engagement (ICE) platform enables retailers to leverage in-the-moment personalization to elevate the customer experience.Receiving notice of a patent award for Speed to Sense™
In September, ZineOne announced Speed to Sense™, a new predictive hyper-personalization technology developed in partnership with global financial service firms and retailers. By utilizing streaming, in-the-moment data and combining it with continuously learning models, Speed to Sense™ empowers companies across industries to boost digital conversion rates up to 50%, all while maintaining up to 90+% predictive accuracy. The technology blends machine learning to increase the rate at which the ZineOne ICE platform learns consumer behaviors, ultimately resulting in offers that are more relevant and appealing to visitors.Introducing RevPredict’s real-time predictive dashboard
ZineOne introduced RevPredict, a real-time predictive dashboard that quantifies incremental revenue opportunities. The RevPredict program is available, at no cost, for select companies and is powered by ZineOne’s Early Purchase Prediction model, which predicts purchase outcomes early on in a visitor’s session. Through this intent prediction, the model identifies site visitors by type with a high level of accuracy, enabling businesses to motivate visitors to engage through different real-time actions.Interviewing thought leaders like the former director of product management at Kohl’s
As part of our Thought Leadership interview series, ZineOne CEO Debjani Deb spoke with Nikhil Chandurkar, the former director of product management at Kohl’s, about the power of personalization. During the interview, Nikhil and Debjani shared insights on how to create a differentiated experience during each shopping journey to convert on-the-fence shoppers and improve retention. Listen to interviews of many other thought leaders in the area of AI and ML across industries.Helping companies navigate COVID-19
In an effort to support enterprise as they navigated the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, ZineOne hosted a helpful webinar, “7 Strategies to Win Customers in Times of Crisis.” In the webinar, we discussed the pandemic’s impact on the industry, best practices and guidelines to follow, digital strategies of successful companies, and ideas on how to prepare for a post-COVID restart. Some of the key takeaways included:
- Transparency and communication increases trust
- The shift to online is permanent and those who invest in their digital channel will succeed
- 1:1 personalization increases conversion rates and provides a relevant, timely, and engaging experience
- Together, this experience will make all companies stronger
Introducing new capabilities for the ISM platform
In 2020, ZineOne was proud to launch many new products. Here are a few highlights from our product releases:- Experience templates – The Experience Gallery is a new feature of ZineOne’s platform that puts the power of data scientists in the hands of business users to enable them to swiftly react and engage online buyers. The Experience Gallery allows users to select from a variety of pre-built templates and custom templates to launch and manage hyper-personalized customer experiences.
- Integrations – Flexible Connectors is a universal plug-and-play solution that enhances dataflows by allowing for instant connections to most data sources. They can use JavaScript, for example, to flexibly bring data in and out of the ICE platform to connect to any platform. Pre-built connectors across a variety of technologies add to the ower of the flexible connectors to provide brands with greater control and flexibility when creating and executing real-time engagements.
- ML pipelines – This year also included advancements to ZineOne’s Machine Learning pipelines. The new product update offers greater ease of use for enterprises and makes ML less of a black box.
Hiring and promoting many amazing people
The people at ZineOne are what allows us to continue to be innovative. In celebrating this year, it’s also important to recognize the people that allowed ZineOne to thrive even in a trying time. This year, we onboarded new talent to the ZineOne team, and promoted many great individuals that have worked hard to deliver the technology and innovations driving the future of personalization platforms. We are proud of the team we work with, each of whom represent our four core values in all that they do: we dream big and deliver, we are one team, we cultivate excellence, and we act with integrity.Working with innovative customers
Hand in hand with the people we work with are the customers we serve. We are thankful for all of our customers such as Men’s Wearhouse, Jos A. Bank, Wynn Resorts, PowerSchool, and HDFC Bank. We appreciate our excellent relationships and hope to continue achieving future success with our customers in 2021 and beyond.
Partnering with Northwest Venture Partners
As part of our commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions, we continue to invest in our AI-powered platform to ensure more accurate predictive insights, better personalization, and more seamless and engaging experiences. Year over year, we have exhibited strong growth, and in 2020 raised $10 million in series B funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the round and was joined by existing investor Flourish Ventures. The investment—which brings the total funds raised by ZineOne to $15 million since its inception in 2014—allows us to continue to push the bounds of innovation to deliver a cutting-edge personalization platform to our customers.
As 2020 comes to a close, we are thankful for all we accomplished this year, and look forward to an even brighter future in 2021!
