A Chat with Daniel Bailey, VP EMEA at Digital Optimisation System Company: Amplitude

Amplitude is the Digital Optimisation System that enables its customers to innovate faster and smarter by answering the strategic question: “how do our digital products drive our business?”

Due to the impact of the pandemic, businesses have been forced to digitalise at a rapid rate in order to reach their customers. In fact, businesses are spending about $6.8 trillion on digital transformation, according to IDC. As companies increasingly operate online, they want and need to know how best to engage and retain customers on their online platform. That is where Amplitude comes in. For example, using Amplitude’s technology meditation app Calm, increased its customer retention threefold after making one small change to its in-app Daily Reminders.

Amplitude’s software essentially tracks and analyses anonymised user behaviour in online products to deliver actionable behavioural insights that drive business profitability through three core elements:

● The Behavioural Graph is the brain of the system and enables customers to see what is happening on their platforms. It is the fastest, smartest and deepest database of customer behaviours, built for the complexity of modern digital products. Based on trillions of customers’ actions to date, its Machine Learning predicts which actions lead to business outcomes, such as retention or churn.

● Digital Product Analytics applications enable customers to predict what actions need to be taken to solve issues. This is delivered through an evolving set of applications built on top of the Behavioural Graph.

● Amplitude Recommend product is a key part of our infrastructure designed to be a central system for all teams to leverage and contribute to a single, common data set insight the Behavioural Graph and to design, build, measure and optimise the digital products and every customers’ unique experience in real time.

Amplitude is now the brain behind more than 45,000 digital products at over 1,000 enterprise customers and 23 of the Fortune 100. Our customers include Calm, Peloton and PayPal.
 
 
Amplitude Unveils the Industry's First Digital Optimization System
 

How was the company started?

 
Amplitude was launched in 2014 to recognise the lack of services that monitored what kept digital customers coming back to online platforms.

It was born out of an unsuccessful voice recognition start-up – founder Spenser Skates was more aware of the lack of support and services that aided retention for digital businesses and Amplitude was born. Now supporting over 45,000 digital products, Amplitude collects vast amounts of data on user behaviour, providing insights to its clients on which online features are engaging their users.

We’re in a time where every organisation is a digital first business, competition and customer scrutiny is tougher than ever. We know that understanding rapidly changing customer behaviour and anticipating people’s next motivations is becoming an essential part of the modern digital business which is why we developed our tools to help that.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Amplitude’s growth has boomed during the pandemic, as more businesses sought to understand and improve how their customers were interacting with their digital platforms. In May 2020, Amplitude closed its Series E funding round of $50 million, bringing us to a $1billion valuation.

Of course, the need to be a digital business has been dramatically accelerated by the pandemic, with an organisation’s digital strategy becoming one of the most imperative for revenue and growth. As digital businesses have evolved over this last year, Amplitude needed to as well – we know that giving full teams visibility and understanding of customer behaviour in real-time, as well as being able to quickly identify key sentiments and anticipate what is next, is the only way the unknown becomes an business advantage and not a threat.

From this we created additional support and tools that would help our customers to understand and ultimately deliver the very best for theirs. ‘Amplitude Recommend’ is the second of our latest launches, creating a new level of customer intimacy by enabling one-to-one personalisation at scale. The platform gives businesses the ability to make more informed decisions about what to recommend to their customers and eliminate any risk by anticipating people’s behaviour is at the heart of the customer experience. There has previously been an inability for businesses to understand customer behaviour because there’s a lack of data, siloed systems and incomplete overviews which in turn makes true personalisation for individual needs impossible.

Consuming any product that is ‘tailored’ to our desires as a customer is important, the difference between retaining and losing us can be as simple as not understanding our needs. With the pandemic forcing individuals to be more digitally focused, it made this an even more prominent issue that we needed to address.
 

What can we hope to see from Amplitude in the future?

 
Amplitude has big plans; we’re set on helping all businesses become the best they can digitally for themselves and their customers. Amplitude will continue to innovate and develop across all levels of our Digital Optimisation System so that we can strengthen the technology lead and provide the insight that our customers need.

The main goal for the company is to continue to widen our geographical reach and footprint by developing a larger network across EMEA. In April this year, we launched the Amplitude Partner Ecosystem in EMEA, an industry-first program which brings together more than 40 founding partners to help customers accelerate and optimise digital transformation and product innovation strategies. We will continue to expand this programme throughout EMEA in the coming months and years.

We want to keep providing our customers and other businesses with the knowledge that matters which is why this year we’re hosting our first Digital Disruptor Summit. The event is for those innovating, transforming and shaping the world through disruptive digital products and will feature and provide educational content from leaders who are already using the power of data and analytics to drive digital-first growth. We hope to share all the insights we’ve gathered from working with businesses across the globe and providing events like these allows companies to understand their customers and use this knowledge to advance their digital offering.