Ksubaka: Scripting a Winning Strategy for Offline Retail

Today, the ability of physical retail stores to offer tactile experiences and allow consumers to have a direct touchpoint with their brands has given them a competitive edge to fight back against the onslaught of e-commerce. To win against the pureplay online, physical retail stores have changed their strategies. They are now increasingly focused on enhancing customer experiences in-store and implementing store digitization.

In an era where online shopping has become extremely convenient and easy, mirroring the same experience for customers in brick and mortar stores is imperative. To truly orchestrate customer experiences, organizations must ensure that customer insights are collected from various sources and then intelligently analyzed to foster productive engagement with customers in their channel of choice. However, a majority of retailers lack robust and intuitive analytics tools that are necessary to collect the data, integrate the information effectively, and make better decisions.

It is here that Ksubaka unleashes a revolution in the physical retail industry with its wide range of smart analytics tools. Ksubaka is on a mission to help retailers get more visitors, convert visitors into customers, and deliver outstanding customer experiences through their robust analytics solutions. “Our ultimate objective is to help retailers digitally engage with customers at a mass scale, gain actionable insights, deliver top-notch customer experiences, and make shopping more fun,” adds Corbett.

Innovations Reviving the Stores

Ksubaka has developed a wide range of cutting-edge products that enable retailers to deliver a superior customer experience. The company’s solution portfolio includes Smiles, a customer research app; Cloudshelf, a powerful offline-to-online aisle for retail stores; and Gamified Experience, a range of custom games to connect with customers, encourage exploration, and promote brands.

Bringing a smile to every customer tells the story beyond their first impressions. That’s what Ksubaka’s Smiles app strives to achieve. It allows retailers to survey customers’ in-shopping experience. Drawing inspiration from the smiley face surveys at airports, the team at Ksubaka reimagined the entire model to design an engaging tool that makes the shopper–retailer interactions fun and interactive. This fun-filled activity captures rich insights into customers’ sentiments, needs, and interests. A key component of Smiles surveys is the web portal, which gives retailers real-time monitoring of the surveys. They can use the live data visualization dashboard to review customer feedback, identify patterns, and pinpoint stores that require optimization. Further, to monitor and optimize the customer experience, Smiles app also uses customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, or net promoter scores (NPS) as a barometer of the quality of customer experience. “We can completely ‘brand’ the surveys with the look and feel of the retailer and blend into the retailer’s customer journey to deliver smart and actionable real-time analytics that show at each level in the organization the ‘why’ behind the ‘what,’” explains Corbett.

Next in line is Ksubaka’s Cloudshelf, a powerful offline-to-online (O2O) commerce solution that further digitalizes the retail space and connects the offline world with online.

It also gives retail customers access to the complete product range and a convenient way to order products that are not in store. Retailers can either use digital kiosks offered by Ksubaka or their existing fleet of touchscreens to browse and order products that are currently out of stock. “The brilliance of this solution is that we leverage the work done by retailers for their online presence so that they do not have to recreate assets,” elucidates Corbett. Cloudshelf can intelligently extract existing online assets (images, descriptions, prices, tags, associated products) and remap those in a format that encourages discoverability. He adds, “Our smart tagging means that a shopper or even a sales assistant can drill down to the exact product in a few touches.” The shopper can scan the unique QR code and buy the desired products, and the sales associate gets the credit for the sale. This bridges the gap between O2O and encourages customers to visit the stores more often.

Another product that Ksubaka specializes in is Gamified Experience. The company offers a range of custom games that can be tailored to a particular brand. Instead of coercing customers into engaging with brands, Ksubaka uses 50 game engines integrated with hyper-casual gameplay mechanics to create delightful engagements that deliver effective promotions or sign-ups. Today, the game engines have delivered over 300 million engagements for brands such as Unilever, P&G, Mars, Pepsi, Coke, Nescafe, J&J, and more. Ksubaka allows retailers to engage with shoppers via the language of games, which helps them strengthen their brand image.

Delivering Meaningful Interactions for Shoppers

To elaborate on Gamified Experience, Corbett recalls an instance where Ksubaka assisted Mondelez, an American multinational confectionery, food, and beverage company, with the launch of Milka in China, where they delivered a campaign through 8,000+ interactive displays across 150 cities. The interactive experience got shoppers to “mix” chocolate and milk ‘from the Alps’ to create the goodness of Milka and then “feel the tenderness inside” by needing to interlock fingers with another person on the screen to recreate the Milka bar image.



Ksubaka has helped several retailers drive growth through their shopper-centric approach. Some of the renowned customers include American Eagle that is using Smiles to improve their NPS and learn the ways in real time to improve customer experience store by store.

In another instance, Fortnum & Mason, the ultra-luxury retailer, uses Cloudshelf to help shoppers select their products. This creates discoverability and has become a fantastic tool for their sales assistants to easily assist shoppers in finding the perfect hamper to gift.

The ‘X’ Factor

Ksubaka’s relentless focus on the customer journey provides shoppers with a sense of delight and reward at first touch. Along with that, their obsession with data and analytics is what makes them the partner of choice for retailers.

Building on a Robust Partnership

In the current business climate, as most retail stores are solely focused on cost-cutting, they choose to rebuild only their back-end operations, which not only takes time but also misses the bigger opportunity. On the other hand, a majority of retail tech vendors are able to address just one aspect of the challenges that retailers face, and the solution they offer does not integrate with all the systems. For a solution to be truly valuable there is a need for a 360-degree approach and complete integration of systems. To deliver an end-to-end solution, Ksubaka has partnered with UST Global, a leading system integrator that works with most of the top retailers in the world. This gives Ksubaka the ability to combine speed and immediate results but in a framework that allows retailers to grow their solution, integrate, and scale. “We can implement our products within weeks, to the amazement of our clients. Our solutions deliver trackable results via touchscreens, without any of the pain points they are accustomed to,” emphasizes Corbett. The real win is when the efficiency gain is combined with what shoppers really want. This is where Ksubaka excels and delivers a better in-store experience.

Partnership with UST Global

The global partnership between Ksubaka and UST Global, a leader in digital transformation, kicked off in 2019. The companies joined hands to develop ground-breaking solutions for merchants in Europe, Asia, and North America. The collaboration relies on Ksubaka’s platform to deliver fast-to-market solutions and UST’s broad reach for deep system integrations. With this partnership, Ksubaka has effectively gained 18,000 engineers and is able to take on any enterprise-level project.

Creating the Wow Experience

Ksubaka is excited to be at the heart of the digitization of physical space that is underway. The company is reshaping the retail landscape by following their core values: Dare (dare to think big), Care (for the quality of its deliverables), Simplify (go to the essential), and Wow (creating moments of joy for shoppers). Ksubaka intends to make a difference in a whole host of locations, such as events, gyms, banks, conferences, pop-ups, malls, office buildings, and resorts, referred to as the Experience Economy.

The future holds even brighter prospects for Ksubaka. From a geographic standpoint, Corbett says, “We are super excited by opportunities in Indonesia right now as we believe we can make a real impact.” Ksubaka has a proven track record of being able to support any country. “Recently the number one mall in Japan has rolled us out to great effect to promote all of their events,” adds Corbett with a touch of pride.

All in all, Ksubaka’s vast experience in enhancing customer experience and their unique business strategy have helped them carve a niche in the retail industry. On a concluding note, Corbett says, “We aim to constantly improve the retail space by helping retailers better engage, communicate with, and understand their shoppers.”