Blog

To understand how human experiences are driving key business decisions today, Airtel Business, India’s largest and most-trusted ICT services provider, launched its initiative TechBlaze. In association with YourStory, it aims to bring together leading entrepreneurs, startup leaders, and technology decision-makers on a common platform to share insights on latest trends, experiences, and innovations.

A series of insightful roundtable discussions, under the flagship TechBlaze, has brought together prominent entrepreneurs and technology leaders to exchange their perspectives on the evolving landscape of customer experiences and its impact on the new paradigms of business growth.

To know about these roundtables click here and here.

The third roundtable of the series was held in September 2023 in Delhi, where entrepreneurs and technology leaders discussed how in the age of digital transformation, the landscape has shifted from traditional touchpoints to a realm where technology seamlessly weaves into every interaction. Insights and excerpts from the conversation:

Building customer delight

Avinash Deepak, Senior VP and Business Head, Airtel Business, opened the discussion by speaking about the importance for businesses today to understand how the lifetime value of a customer brings opportunities for a business. “It is imperative to understand how a product is consumed, so that one can build a process and sensitivity around that journey,” he said. 

Expanding upon the power of technology to build customer delight, Rashi Singhal, Head of Merchant Experience, Pine Labs, spoke about the company’s remote terminal troubleshooting feature for point of sales (POS) devices. “Our ability to resolve software-related issues for our customers remotely has stupendously increased customer delight. That would take a day earlier, now gets fixed in no time,” she said. 

Anchal Mahajan, Associate Director, Process and Service Excellence, Insurance Dekho, agreed that the right kind of technology plays a critical role in seamless customer journeys. “Our aim is to reduce the number of interactions and build on real-time resolutions for our customers, whether it is making changes in their details or accelerating claim processing,” she added. 

Naveen Kadyan, VP Product, Zupee, explained how predictive analysis helped them build customer delight. “In the gaming sector, network connectivity for the game experience is crucial. We have developed our technology to understand the performance of customers’ devices. Also, if there is a lag in gameplay, we refund the user without questions. That has really helped to build customer trust and our NPS score,” he said.

Building inclusivity and localisation

Technology is also playing a crucial role in building inclusivity for underserved segments today. 

Vishal Gupta, Co-founder, OneStack,  “In India, around 38 crore people in rural areas and smaller towns, depend on physical transactions in a bank. We are bridging that gap for them by providing digital banking tools. Innovating for this segment has helped us build inclusivity,” he said. 

Reaching the customer in their language is another big factor in driving customer engagement. 

Rahul Tandon, Chief Customer Service Officer, Ecom Express Limited,  pointed out the importance of localisation for customers, considering the widespread adoption of internet and smartphones. “For us, mobile literacy across India has pushed deliveries across pin codes in India,” he said. 

Tarun Mathur, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, General Insurance, Policybazaar.com, explained that providing information in regional languages was an important part of building customer engagement for the brand. “We realised that people preferred reading material in their regional languages, which helped increase their engagement with our content and business,” he said. 

Besides enhanced customer experience, localisation also helps businesses to gain higher conversation for their products. 

Abhinav Upadhyay, Chief Marketing Officer, CollegeDekho, discussed that providing regional language interaction has helped them to build meaningful conversations with their customers. “We did a pilot with four regional languages and it resulted in a 20% surge in traffic from those regions, leading to higher gross enrolment ratios,” he shared.  

Building timely customer communication, standardised customer experiences

While localisation helps businesses communicate effectively with their customers, another important aspect in building customer engagement is reaching them with relevant information at the right time. 

Praful Poddar, Chief Product Officer, Shiprocket, shared that their company invests in proactively resolving issues or service recovery, by providing crucial information to its small and medium business (SMB) clients. 

“In our experience, timing of when information is shared is very important. We make sure to communicate any delays or disruptions that are predicted, so that our clients are appraised of situations.” Poddar also added that to offer value-added services, they first understand customer behaviour through data, post which they design timely communication to answer their specific requirements. 

On how customers like to receive information, almost all panellists agreed that SMS and WhatsApp were preferred choices of communication for businesses today. “In our experience, interactive sessions between customers and businesses are moving towards WhatsApp, while informational services and record keeping updates are on SMS,” Deepak said. He added that Airtel Business has built tools that help businesses regulate the volume of SMSes sent, making it sharply targeted and timely. 

“While SMSes and WhatsApp are primary communication methods for reaching out to customers, interaction with users has also seen an upswing through engagement with chatbots”, said Saumya Sadana, Senior General Manager, Customer Experience and Process Excellence, Cars24.

Abhishek Chandra, Chief Revenue Officer, GoKwik emphasised the importance of standardising solutions for customers that helps in building experiences. “For the brands we service, we take the responsibility of building end-to-end standardised customer journeys, including details like expected date of delivery, that go a long way in building trust and credibility for D2C brands and their clientele,” he said. 

Building secured customer interactions

With increasing digitisation across sectors, focusing on data privacy and security is of utmost importance for businesses today, to build trust for their customers. 

Mohit Varshney, Head of Customer Experience, Pristyn Care, explained that the company follows strict principles on data encryption and access. 

“At Pristyn Care, not everyone gets access to every data. It is completely role based. For example, the finance team has access to only financial details and nothing else. Our calling gateway to patients happens through our internal systems to mask phone numbers,” he added. 

Conclusion

Modern businesses today, give utmost priority to customer needs and  this roundtable outlined the role of inclusivity and localisation in reaching diverse customer segments. It also touched upon the significance of safeguarding customer information, and that timely and standardised experiences are pivotal in enhancing customer engagement today. 

As businesses continue to navigate the digital transformation era, the pursuit of customer-centric values remains at the heart of sustainable growth and transformative success.