CustomerX.i’s founder and CEO Hakeem James calls the startup an “easy button” for companies to better know their clients.
After planting its headquarters in the region last year, the Dallas-based consumer insights platform is poised for “aggressive growth, James said, as the startup looks to help businesses in the hospitality industry recover and grow in smarter, more efficient ways after being hard-hit by the pandemic.
“We use the analogy of a sandbox, so it’s as much as you want to be able to do with the platform. We enable you to do that,” James told NTX Inno. “We really give you a full 360-view of your customers and true intelligence around exactly why the customers are buying from you.”
CustomerX.i was launched in 2019, emerging from stealth at the 2020 Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference. Around that same time, the company relocated from the Cleveland area to Dallas. Hakeem said the move was spurred on by North Texas’ concentration of CPG, retail and restaurant activity and accelerated by an investment from Capital Factory, which also hosted CustomerX.i’s offices until the organization closed its Dallas space in November.
James said he started CustomerX.i because he wanted to give small businesses and mom-and-pop shops access to the same types of consumer insights that large enterprise companies have access to. It does that by integrating its software directly with the point of sale of a transaction, tying it to other outside data to provide what James describes as the “motivation behind each purchase.” The software also helps businesses automate their marketing processes.
“We like to say that we're able to… help you understand exactly where customers are coming from, who they are, why they’re buying from you, so you can find more of those customers,” James said. “That’s ultimately helping businesses grow with more of the kinds of customers that want to know about them, if they don’t already, and get the folks that do like them to like them even more and come in more often.”
Even before the pandemic, smaller businesses were looking towards technology to help them compete with the high level of consumer insights and data large enterprises like Amazon have on their customers. However, James, with companies in the hospitality space seeing decreased foot traffic during the pandemic. Tech tools are increasingly important for finding more efficient and cost-effective ways for businesses to grow their customer base.
“Whether it was just that their margins were kind of too low for so long that it has been difficult for them to reinvest in the data revolution that we’ve been seeing taking place or whether it was them being hit harder than any other industry during COVID times that were forcing their closures, the folks we saw surviving that now are the ones that know their customers best and they’re using data to be able to do that,” James said.
The need has accelerated CustomerX.i’s growth. As it looks to bring on more clients in the region and reach more industries, James said the company is looking to more than triple its team size from its current headcount of nearly 10 by the end of the year.
“The vision that we have is to be able to bring the big data, but to make it at a level to where you don’t need a data scientist to understand who your customers are,” James said.
