Meet Francesca Gargaglia, COO and CBO of Amity

In this interview, we spoke with Francesca Gargaglia, COO and CBO, of Amity.

Describe your business in three words.  

Supercharging apps, everywhere.

What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal? 

When Amity was founded, our goal wasn’t what it is today. We were focused on the world of enterprise chat and while we saw success early on, industry giants like Microsoft and Slack were dominating an already saturated market, so we began to look for other markets that we could put an Amity stamp on.

One of our biggest clients, a large Thai telecom business, has a huge user base on its streaming and entertainment platform, with more than 27 million users. Back in 2018, as the only platform streaming the FIFA World Cup games, they expected all-time high traffic and wanted to provide the best possible viewing experience for their users — replicating the feeling of watching a game live in a stadium.

They quickly realized that Live Chat could help translate the excitement, interaction, and sense of community that fans share but didn’t have the capabilities to build a system in-house that can handle over 300,000 concurrent users. So we unpacked our enterprise chat and re-built it into a chat SDK. It can now support more than 500,000 concurrent users per chat room per second. They saw such high engagement that this is now a permanent feature. So, no matter what content people are consuming, whether that is a tv series, film, or sport, every user can now chat with each other in real-time through live chats.

We have since expanded our offering with the Thai telecom's provider, with the creation of a social SDK with features such as groups and feeds. We quickly realised that businesses in every industry will benefit from creating engaging social experiences and communities, and we wanted to make these features accessible to everyone. Amity Social Cloud was born from this, and after the success we saw from trialing with the telecoms company, we decided to pivot our entire business model.

What is your day-to-day role with the company?

I manage the business’ strategic partnerships and projects, while also driving global growth and operations for Amity Social Cloud. I am passionate about innovation and am always looking for new opportunities to expand Amity’s offering. I believe leveraging disruptive technologies can help change the ways in which people communicate, and that these technologies can aid in building digital relationships regardless of location or background.

There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?  

Soon after we shifted our business model, an airline came to us as it wanted to transform its app into a travel community and allow users to engage with each other.  They have always had an engaged community of flyers, but their app was limited to ticket purchases and transactions and there was no sufficient pull for users to regularly visit the app and use the app’s services when not flying.

They started using Amity Chat by connecting passengers on the same flights and moved to use chat rooms to create a travel app knowledge base. Users could access helpful information and quickly find others who share their interests. The number of users kept increasing significantly, with new community members joining every day!

We didn’t expect the chat to be as popular as it was, but the travel community loved it with more than 7 million messages sent after just one month. That was an eye-opening moment at Amity as we discovered that users were craving social experiences and our solution wasn’t restricted to a single industry. Any business with a loyal customer base and a digital presence can benefit from offering improved social engagements.

What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?

To be competitive in the digital era companies spend a lot of money on developing digital products, low engagement, negative ROI. Lack experience, feature set to transform these platforms into a catalyst of engagement. Episodic consumption into loyal.

A challenge many brands face is the struggle to establish long-term engagement and communities among their customers. As the world becomes quicker and immediacy is expected at each stage of the customer journey, it can be difficult to retain customers and build brand loyalty. We strive to help our customers do this through the Amity Social Cloud.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?  

Amity is the one-stop shop for social experiences and community building. We don’t focus on specific features to build social engagement but rather create the complete package based on individual customer needs. A business doesn’t need a tech team to take advantage of the technology. If a company doesn’t have the in-house capabilities to integrate the social SDK, then we can take on that role. We become an extension of a business and a true partner to help unlock the power of social experiences.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to take the leap.

How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why? 

We want to democratise social experiences and make the features to build communities accessible to everyone. Offering a suite of products with pre-built features that would normally take months or even years to build in-house. Most of our competitors target tech savvy companies and technical executives and as until now, these products have been reserved for technically sophisticated people. We have made these technologies understandable, useable and accessible for anyone within the business. A junior developer can easily integrate the feature set into any app in under two weeks so product and marketing teams can immediately identify the tangible ROI of a social SDK.

There is no risk for businesses looking to build digital social experiences. Customers don’t need to make a huge initial investment but once the social features have been integrated, the results and the benefits speak for themselves.  We provide our customers with our social expertise to ensure they can leverage our product to its fullest potential. We work closely with all customers to understand their individual business objectives and advise them on how to use the technology to achieve their intended outcomes.

Any new product launches we should know about?  

Amity isn’t a static company. We are always evolving and adapting Amity Social Cloud to respond to the customer and their needs. Customer feedback is incredibly important to us and enables us to improve existing features, develop new areas, and make these available based on this feedback. Global brands are beginning to realise why the journey of the user experience should be a priority and will continue to evolve as customers demand more from their digital experiences. As an organisation, this is something we are prepared and excited to react to.

What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves? 

"Am I adding positive value?" This is a question that I constantly ask myself, may it be through how I impact the people around me, the business, or society as a whole. I always seek to add value in the most effective way possible, which is often dictated by my intuition of what really matters. I encourage everyone to think deeply about where you want to put your focus and what you want to change because that's what will matter the most in both your leadership role and in your life.

Is it still possible to build a strong and successful business without social media. If yes or no, why? 

A strong business needs to build relationships with its customers, based on trust, that outlive any individual purchase. While this can be accomplished without social media, the recent pandemic has changed how businesses operate – by putting virtual communities front and centre in their marketing, product development, and sales strategies. The last 18 months have exemplified that a strong community is necessary for building and maintaining engagement, and social media is one platform out of many that businesses can use to develop trust and commitment from customers.

What plans do you have for Amity over the next two years? 

We have ambitious goals for Amity. With the world moving closer to a fully digitalised landscape, we want more companies to see the value of community-driven growth, and we intend for them to use this value to build their own social platforms for their customers. We are expanding and want to use our expertise and capabilities to make this process easier for businesses across the globe and be the partner of choice for these companies on their journey to create positive communities.