Soumya Chatterjee and the art of being remembered

A customer can be worth remembering and still spend a remarkable amount of time introducing themselves. The shop knows the purchase. The loyalty program knows the points. The service desk knows the complaint. Somehow, the customer must chair the meeting. Soumya Chatterjee has spent much of his working life dealing with the machinery behind that awkward conversation.

As co-founder and CEO of Easyrewardz, he works in the unglamorous territory between a transaction and the next visit. His products concern the things businesses promise to remember: preferences, rewards, questions, feedback. The ambition sounds modest until several departments, a few software systems and a WhatsApp conversation become involved. Then remembering begins to look like a full-time occupation.

His career has moved through banking loyalty, online retail and customer software. Across those settings, one question keeps acquiring new forms: what does a business do with what it already knows about a person?

An apprenticeship in repeat business

Before Easyrewardz, Chatterjee worked at BrickRed Technologies, heading its travel and hospitality practice between 2004 and 2009. He then became chief operating officer at Loylty Rewardz, a role he held from April 2009 to October 2011. There he worked on the LIDSys technology platform and loyalty programs involving banks including State Bank Group, Citibank, HDFC and Punjab National Bank.

Those were useful places to encounter the difference between a clever idea and an operating system. A bank’s rewards program must account for transactions, calculate benefits and give customers a way to use them. The person earning the points has little reason to admire the engineering. They would quite reasonably prefer the points to turn up.

His work at Yebhi.com brought another setting into view. The fashion retailer employed him in technology leadership and service delivery, including a chief technology officer role. Banking loyalty and online shopping posed different practical problems, but both required software to follow a customer through more than one isolated action. His responsibilities crossed the boundary between building a system and keeping the service running.

Coffee, window panes and four founders

Easyrewardz’s beginnings belong to a group. Chatterjee, Angad Singh, Sapan Kadakia and Tejas Kadakia brought together experience spanning technology, finance, marketing and loyalty. The company dates its beginnings to 2011 and describes the following year as the start of delivering its technology products.

The founding story has an appealing shortage of proper stationery. There were cups of coffee, weekends in service apartments and algorithms drawn, erased and redrawn on paper napkins, whiteboards, window panes and mobile screens. A window pane offers a generous workspace, provided nobody needs to open it. The shared recollection is less a solitary flash of inspiration than a picture of people repeatedly trying to make something work.

The problem they chose was the gap between available customer-management tools and the relationships merchants needed to maintain. Their cloud platform would connect with existing transaction systems. Its purpose included helping merchants respond to customer behaviour without relying entirely on discounts. Getting somebody back through the door should involve knowing something about them beyond their appetite for a cheaper price.

In November 2017, Easyrewardz announced a $2 million Series A led by TransContinental Venture Fund. Investors included Jitendra Gupta and Soch co-founder Vinay Chatlani, alongside participants through Venture Catalysts. Flipkart invested in 2019. For Chatterjee, the product ambition was expanding from rewards toward a more comprehensive CRM stack.

The shop assistant goes digital

One strand of that work became Shopster, a conversational commerce toolkit. It let retailers bring catalogues, product recommendations and purchasing assistance into channels such as WhatsApp. Rather than asking every interaction to begin with a customer finding a website, the store could continue a conversation through a channel already in use.

By the May 2021 announcement of Shopster 4.0, Easyrewardz named Bata, Lifestyle, Levi’s, United Colours of Benetton, Skechers and Pantaloons among the brands using its virtual-assistant offering. Chatterjee described the development in terms of changing shopping preferences and helping retailers maintain engagement. The task was to carry useful parts of the store relationship into a digital exchange.

There is a recognisable human experience underneath the terminology. An assistant who understands what somebody wants can save a great deal of browsing. Moving that exchange into chat adds questions about the catalogue, the recommendation and the next step toward purchase. Each is small enough to sound trivial. Together they determine whether a conversation goes anywhere.

The work brought recognition. In April 2021, Chatterjee received a BW Businessworld Techtors award in the Utility Tech category. It was a fitting category for software whose value depends on being useful during somebody else’s working day.

Five conversations, one customer

In June 2022, Easyrewardz unveiled Zence, bringing together functions including lead management, loyalty, campaigns, ticket management, feedback and a customer data platform. Chatterjee introduced the stack during a Customer Fest Show keynote. Years of individual customer-management tasks were being assembled into a connected product.

His explanation focused on a familiar irritation: a person moving between touchpoints should encounter a business that carries the conversation forward. He wanted each channel to contribute to a consistent experience. It is a straightforward expectation, with a rather long list of systems required to honour it.

“Everything should be connected.”

Soumya Chatterjee · 2022

The point becomes clear if you imagine a purchase followed by a complaint. The service team needs the purchase history. Marketing benefits from knowing that there is an unresolved problem. The loyalty program may have something useful to contribute. A customer data platform gives those functions a common record; the surrounding tools determine what happens next. This is the everyday coordination problem behind the product.

The same concern appears in Chatterjee’s earlier formulation that customer data “has a story to tell”. That is an unusually narrative way to describe a database. It also places a demand on the software: a collection of facts needs enough context to become useful.

A loyalty program crosses borders

BataClub supplied an international setting for that ambition. Easyrewardz’s January 2024 announcement described its Zence work with Bata across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Bangladesh. The program combined loyalty journeys, WhatsApp engagement and a microsite where members could use dashboards, refer friends and family, and access rewards.

For Chatterjee, the emphasis was a unified view of a customer across locations. The practical appeal is understandable. A brand operating across markets has to recognise local preferences while making its own services feel coherent. A points program, a message and a member dashboard are different entrances into that relationship. The customer should be able to use each without discovering a different administrative personality behind every door.

By November 2024, Easyrewardz had announced a further $4 million funding round, led by Prachetas New India Growth Fund, with participation from Ashish Kacholia’s Lucky Investments and IIFL Fintech Fund. The announced plans included expansion across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa. Those were intentions attached to the round, giving the next phase a geographical direction.

The colleague behind the product

Chatterjee’s professional reputation has a similarly practical cast. A public recommendation from Raj Singhal describes someone comfortable with sales, technology and operations. It also describes a demanding working pace, acknowledging that his expectations could test a team’s patience. The portrait has more texture than a list of approved leadership adjectives.

That combination helps explain the roles threaded through his career. A technology head, an operating chief and a founder each sees a different reason for a project to stall. His record includes all three perspectives. It suggests why the distance between a product promise and the work required to deliver it matters so much in this story.

His own public posts make room for colleagues. Sharing news of Bata’s Zence implementation, he praised the team and named Rashmi Chatterjee, Palak Kapoor and Manish Sharma. The detail matters because a connected customer experience depends on plenty of people whose names never appear on the customer’s screen. Recognising them makes the product story a little less anonymous.

First remember. Then ask permission.

By 2026, another part of the customer record had moved into the foreground: permission. Easyrewardz announced OneConsent in April, connecting consent management with its customer data infrastructure. Its described capabilities include purpose-level permissions, audit records and checks before outbound campaigns. The relationship now requires the business to keep track of what it may do with the information it holds.

In May, Chatterjee discussed that shift with Shivani Muthanna in a YourStory video conversation. The subjects included first-party data, centralised consent and customer trust. In October, Easyrewardz advertised him as a speaker at a DPDP readiness forum in New Delhi. Permission had become part of his public agenda alongside engagement and loyalty.

There is a clear connection to the earlier work. Loyalty programs remember activity. CRM connects the surrounding conversations. Consent adds the customer’s choices to the record. Each step makes the business responsible for another piece of context that might otherwise disappear between systems.

Chatterjee’s career can be read through those handovers: from technology to operations, from points to a broader relationship, from customer knowledge to customer permission. The ambition remains close to an ordinary courtesy. Remember the person. Pick up the conversation properly. And before sending the next message, check whether they wanted to hear from you.