The current data ecosystem for both consumers and enterprises is broken.
For the consumer, the value generated from their data’s use is typically completely out of their control. The consumer, by principle, should hold data a sovereign asset and retain data ownership.
For the B2C (business to consumer) enterprise, there is a significant amount of issues surrounding data transparency, quality, cost effectiveness, and security. This dilemma makes it very difficult to achieve the maximum potential of data-driven applications.
With that being said, the data problem is only one side of the double-edged sword. There is also the interaction and engagement layer that makes up the core of the B2C customer lifecycle.
When we talk about engagement, it consists of components such as channel of engagement, the customer experience, and level of engagement.
In the current marketplace, most businesses have several existing channels of engagement, but they are not very efficient nor effective. Brands have tried new B2C interaction methods, new channels, and even new loyalty reward programs, but they’re only having marginal effects.
APEX Network is focused on awareness, engagement, conversion, retention and loyalty, and maximum customer lifetime value (CLV). They believe data-driven insight combined with in-depth engagement is the future of a fully optimized B2C lifecycle. APEX is the leading platform in blockchain technology powering the next generation of consumer applications.
Before I jump into immense detail of the APEX Network, let’s take a closer look at it’s parent company, APEX Technologies, to see how this all started.
APEX Technologies (formerly knows as Chinapex) is a customer data technology and AI company headquartered in Shanghai. They also have offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.
Apex Technologies is developing innovative solutions combining big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain to tackle hard problems in customer data, marketing, and CRM. This provides an enterprise with a customer data technology solution that helps marketers connect, unify, analyze, and activate their customer data.
When they combine their cutting-edge NEXUS platform and their AI from iQ with APEX’s blockchain technology, they are able to tackle problems in different areas of marketing, personalization, and customer analytics.
Ranked as the Top AI Company in China by China Internet Weekly, chosen as a Microsoft Accelerator Selectee and Microsoft Partner, to making the Forbes China Top 50 Most Promising Companies, Apex Technologies explosive track record in it’s first year of progress is quite impressive.
NEXUS was born with intention to deliver a robust big data analytics platform in conjunction with a marketing activation platform that delivers the entire data to action value chain.
This means that enterprises can flexibly activate data in real-time to marketing channels, personalization APIs, call-centers, and CRMs. They believe this to be a new breed of customer data technology that involves everything from data collection and processing of large datasets, to running advanced analytics and turning insight into marketing activation.
Not many current solutions have allowed enterprises to leverage the power of machine learning and AI that could provide tangible value in an efficient manner. With IQ, they have built an entire machine learning library off of both open source and proprietary technology.
Apex Technologies is building the next generation of intelligent business applications, with AI and data science at the core. The three products they offer are tailor-made for the use case of customer intelligence. iQ is a real-time AI customer data platform that is designed specifically for marketing, personalization, and analytics.
Apex Technologies have served over 300+ medium to large global and China enterprises. This includes working in the sectors of finance, travel, automotive, ecommerce, and retail.
For more information visit; https://chinapex.com/
As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the consumer data ecosystem and B2C engagement method is currently largely inefficient and broken. APEX Network is creating a disruptive blockchain infrastructure that solves this.
APEX Network will give power and ownership of data back to the customer through a method of private information and value exchange. These exchanges are between consumers and brands, that have enrolled in the program, across the entire lifecycle, from awareness, to engagement, to loyalty.
Apex Network believes there are three fundamental aspects that must form a bond to ensure long-term success of the project’s growth and longevity;
- The technology and extent in which it can solve problems it was built for.
- It’s speed to market and the real-world adoption rate of the technology.
- The actual value delivered in a timely manner for long term sustainability.
APEX Network will do this in a decentralized manner in which the value is conserved and passed on both to the consumer & brand instead of being dissipated through middlemen networks. One core principle of the APEX platform is the 1-to-1 consent protocol between consumers and brands. This drives rich interactions and value — which implies trust, transparency, and mutual agreement.
Value is passed onto the consumer through rewards that can be exchanged for cash through the CPX token, and passed back to the brand in the form of new customer acquisition and increased loyalty.
For the enterprise, APEX is not a standalone data and interactions decentralized exchange, but it is also incorporated into a module connected to a full enterprise technology suite (NEXUS & iQ). This makes adding value efficient from the data acquired and the interactions that are facilitated.
For brands, APEX Network is integrated with their current flagship products and provides a full platform built off their proprietary blockchain, including the AI powered side of the enterprise technology suite.
APEX will be the leading blockchain infrastructure for the next generation of consumer applications. They will help solve and fully optimize incumbent problems in consumer internet and B2C interactions.
The solution for enterprises they are creating will enable agile creation of custom dApps on their APEX Nework’s blockchain platform. This will increase privacy and ownership of data, interactivity of consumer experiences, and connectivity of value.
The B2C market is one of the largest global mega-verticals, with B2C ecommerce alone expected to reach a size of $3,940 billion by 2022.
“Apex Technologies is on route to NASDAQ by 2020.” ~Founder of APEX, Jimmy Hu
The goal of APEX Network is to foster deeper 1-to-1 B2C relationships through their proprietary blockchain technology. This gives enterprises strategically improved ways to approach marketing, CRM, loyalty, and customer experience, while maximizing value obtained by the consumer in all B2C interactions.
By optimizing customer experience and supporting your customers in achieving the goals they set out for each stage in the product or service life cycle, you are providing value. In an economy in which brand loyalty doesn’t come easily, value is what holds the key to creating lasting customer relationships.
You might be wondering… what do all these terms mean? I know most may appear as dry jargon but I will break it down for you to comprehend.
In customer relationship management (CRM), customer life cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.
A customer relationship system is made up from four different phases;
- Marketing
- Customer Acquisition
- Relationship Management
- Loss/Churn
The marketing is when messages are sent to the target market to attract prospect customers. Prospects become acquired customers when they place an order. Resell processes increase the value of existing customers throughout relationship management. Inevitably in time the company may lose a customer during the last phase. They then need to establish which lost customers are of most value and begin the win-back process.
Customer lifecycle management (CLM) is the measurement of multiple customer related metrics. Analyzed over a period of time, this an accurate indication of the performance of a business.
B2C is a process for selling products directly to consumers. As such, the typical B2C sales cycle has a much shorter sales cycle than the typical business-to-business (B2B) sales cycle.
To this day, we have seen it come to bottlenecks on both ends with current technologies that do improve engagements but do not change the nature of the B2C & B2B engagement model. CLM is often a tricky task even for large established enterprises with a strong IT and data strategy.
The existing structure of this data value chain creates an issue surrounding privacy, compliance, security, cost-effectiveness, transparency and quality. A paradigm shift is needed in which value is balanced and driven by trust and balanced benefit-sharing.
APEX Network is also focused on connectivity (connected information as well as connected value). Information and data, when transacted using fair and transparent protocols, can facilitate B2B data-level collaborations and exchanges as well as enhance B2C interactions during the experience.
Likewise, it connects and enables the exchange of brand-assets, such as tokens (CPX) and loyalty points (for discounts between brands), on a seamless platform. This focus provides a turnkey gateway to alliances and commercial partnerships involved that previously required manual arrangements.
Brands and enterprises will be able to quickly build and deploy decentralized applications for many different use cases across the customer lifecycle. This will include and is not limited to marketing, CRM, customer experience optimization, loyalty, and customer insights.
“APEX Network was originally intended as a Dapp project, but quickly realized that running as a dapp on someone else’s blockchain simply would not suffice considering the scope of the project. Thus APEX released their development plan, outlining a whole ecosystem consisting of both a mainnet and sidechains, with cross chain functionality.” APEX Community Ambassador, Jay
The full in depth article on the magic behind the tech; https://medium.com/@jrgenlavik/what-apex-network-is-and-why-it-is-time-to-do-your-research-bd8443b670
APEX Network has a built-in capability for data privacy, consent protocols, and transactions protocols for both B2C and B2B use cases.
APEX has designed a hybrid on-chain and off-chain consumer data management model that facilitates data ownership, transparency, auditability, and access control.
Data security and protection of privacy is one of the largest issues in the consumer data space. This is because of the number of catastrophic incidents of consumer data breach or privacy violation of data stored with internet and consumer data companies.
Data security and privacy issues don’t only affect the consumer. They will also affect the enterprise that is looking to fully optimize their customer experience and customer lifecycle management.
Gamification in the workplace as well as in the B2C sector has been experiencing growth recent years, and has created higher levels of interaction but often limits the longevity because it typically offers little incentive for consumers. Using APEX Network to tokenize reward assets and use them in gamification applications allows for an extra level of engagement, especially with the potential to exchange the assets for other utility assets or cash (CPX).
APEX Network’s goal is to simplify the process for enterprises and partners to create privacy-focused, consent-driven, and fair compensation data sharing and transaction protocols between enterprises and consumers.
“GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the creation of very strict data protection rules for all companies in Europe and outside of Europe for any data collected relating to and of EU residents (rolled out May 25, 2018).”
Using APEX Network to build B2C data sharing protocols truly allows an enterprise to build trust and deeper connections with their customers, as well as stay compliant with regulations such as GDPR.
Connectivity of enterprise and brand assets is prone to become an important facet of the B2C ecosystem. This will happen through the exchange and liquidity of enterprise assets (that can be exchanged for tokenized products, rewards, items) across the APEX proprietary blockchain.
Many applications and smart contracts on the blockchain need to be connected to the real world and integrated with existing systems in order to maximize real value. The focus of importance in enterprise-related application should be on real-time data streams from external centralized or decentralized applications and data sources.
B2C interactions would have further augmented value and economies of scale. At the same time, this will make B2B commercial partnerships become more frictionless and effortless.
“The goal of APEX Network is through proprietary blockchain technology, foster deeper 1-to-1 B2C relationships, by giving enterprises newer optimized ways to approach marketing, CRM, loyalty, and customer experience, and at the same time maximizing value obtained by the consumer in all B2C interactions.”
I will finish off this article by concluding my thoughts on this company and the goals they set to accomplish.
If you take a close look at the track record of the existing parent company, I think we would both agree that from the partnerships, to the explosive growth in 2017, the existing 300+ customers from mid to large enterprises (100 new brands and enterprises in the past year alone) it has served in such a short amount of time, to the integration of APEX network and the team revealing it’s new development plan and node details…
This is THE most concrete project in my opinion that exists to date. You have use cases that span over 6 industries by vertical (retail, financial services, automotive, travel, luxury and lifestyle, and consumer internet) with a loyalty system that prolongs the customer lifecycle with incentives that keeps them engaged and loyal to the brands they love most.
“Apex Network is essentially creating a massive rewards alliance where consumers can earn loyalty points / rewards which can then be swapped across the enterprises on the network — think swapping Finnair miles for Hilton nights.” APEX Community Ambassador Jay
What are you waiting for…?
#DiscoverApex and join the Telegram Community today to learn more!
Bounty Program: #DiscoverApex
Telegram Community: https://t.me/APEXcommunity
To learn more about…;
Token Metrics — The Wallet — The Incentives — The Protocols — The DEX Development Roadmap —Node Details— Partnerships — and more visit;
Resources For New Members;
Telegram (English): https://t.me/APEXcommunity
Telegram (Chinese): https://t.me/APEXcommunityCN
Kakao (Korea): https://open.kakao.com/o/gOXjb3H
Twitter: https://twitter.com/APEXnetworkCPX
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/APEXtoken/
GitHub: https://github.com/APEX-Network
Medium: https://medium.com/apex-network
Wechat QR Code:
References:
- http://cdn.chinapex.com.cn/med/videos/to/APEX-Development-Plan-eng.pdf
- http://cdn.chinapex.com.cn/med/videos/to/APEX-Node-Ecosystem-0622.pdf
- https://www.apexnetwork.io/index.html
- https://www.apexnetwork.io/En/solutions/index.html
- https://www.apexnetwork.io/En/about/index.html
- https://chinapex.com/
- https://chinapex.com/products/nexus
- https://chinapex.com/products/iq
- https://www.chinapex.com/products/apex
- https://searchsalesforce.techtarget.com/definition/Customer-Life-Cycle
- https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=91273
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-phases-customer-life-cycle-muhammad-rafi-aamiri/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifecycle_management
- http://smallbusiness.chron.com/differences-between-b2c-b2b-business-systems-39922.html
- https://www.astutesolutions.com/blog/articles/what-are-the-stages-of-the-customer-lifecycle
- https://medium.com/@jrgenlavik/what-apex-network-is-and-why-it-is-time-to-do-your-research-bd8443b670
Written By Marten O’Grady — July 6th, 2018
