Consumers are demanding that their favourite brands deliver better experiences beyond having great products and services. A panel of experts gathered at the e4m MarTech India Conference 2023, to explore how technology can transform a brand’s relationship marketing strategy -- and help the brand refine its acquisition, engagement, personalization, and retention efforts.

Panellists Ankit Goenka, Head of Customer Experience, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance; Dilpreet Singh, Head CRM Loyalty & Analytics, ITC Hotels; Manan Bajoria, VP-Growth Marketing, ixigo; Nishtha Arora, Digital Marketing Lead, South Asia, Corteva Agriscience

Vartika Verma, Marketing Head, GupShup along with moderator Mani Sikka, Associate Partner, KPMG in India delved deep into topics like deploying offerings that foster long-term loyalty from customers and understanding the key drivers that increase engagement across all marketing channels.

Sikka started the session highlighting how in the last couple of years, the usage of technology has completely transformed. “With all of automation, AI coming in, there’s a lot that is happening in terms of opening more and more doors for businesses to transform and enhance customer experience. Consumers are demanding more and more with every passing day, and personalising messages is not even a choice anymore, it is a necessity at this point,” he said.

In today’s times, the conversations are no longer restricted to the kind of industries – whether product oriented or service oriented. Singh pointed out that today, everything is about experience. “If I talk about hospitality, I believe the origin of the ‘customer experience’ term came from the hospitality industry, because it clearly operates on the idea of ‘home away from home’,” he explained further.

However, CX as a concept has evolved over the years. There are three important tenets to CX now, according to Singh, namely data, technology and content wherein all three need to go hand in hand. He also said that as for technology, there has been a very interesting revolution in this space. “Traditional industries like hospitality and BFSI have leveraged a lot on the technology part,” Singh mentioned, as he shared some of the avenues like guest profiling and segmentation that played a key role in ITC Hotels’ case.

Shifting gears to customer loyalty, Bajoria shared that loyalty, especially with flights, can be a big challenge. “While we do focus on discounts, we focus it from a new user perspective, so that we reduce the friction and the user gets to try out our platforms once. What we focus more on is solving the pain points across the customer journey,” he said.

Bajoria also shared examples for the same, wherein ixigo has recently enabled a feature of automatic web check-in, send push notifications about flight delays or even text the baggage belt number post landing. He said that all these smaller things and data are being pulled from a lot of APIs, followed by real-time updation. He explained that it is important to consolidate and provide an end-to-end user experience, for the user to be able to appreciate not just the discount aspect, but also the end-to-end customer journey.

Shedding light on what’s happening in the developing economies, with regards to CX, Varma said that these economies started leveraging the internet on their smartphones. “Whereas in the West, it was more about typing in a www. something. So what they expect is in return you give some links. The UI/UX of what we expect versus what the West does, was completely different,” she mentioned.

According to Varma, consumers today expect an experience which is completely conversational in nature. For instance, the ChatGPT boom has brought about this change, wherein consumers are expecting an immediate response. “While Gupshup offers conversational engagement, I’d say it has long before that been in the heart of customers in places like India, Singapore, Indonesia,” she said.

Arora, who comes from the Agritech space shared, “Anyone who is online, farmer or not, is my target sector. I know the pincodes, the hyper targeting, so anyone who is in that area and is online, is my target customer. The other bit is that we need to cater to the media dark also,” she shared.

As marketers, Arora continued, essentially what one could do for media dark is that they could send an SMS. “Sadly, the downtrodden part of the villages still don’t have 3G, 4G or 5G. Also, they prefer the feature phones over smartphones when outside at work. The smartphone is more of a shared phone by the family,” she added. These users tend to like gamification, loyalty, rewards or cashbacks.

“When I was on my field visits, they would ask me ‘why can’t you do it in two steps like we scan it on paytm and get it done?’ It is challenging for me everyday, that I have to keep CX at the heart but have to do the UI/UX as per their expectations. If they are very used to responding on WhatsApp, I can’t make the journey as per what I want, because they have been accustomed to it,” she concluded.

While the conversations around leveraging technology continued, Sikka also highlighted how the right collaboration with technology solution providers also plays a role in enhancing CX.

Goenka further said collaboration like these are more like getting complementary expertise. “The other way to look at it is, if an organisation is good at X thing, do not look at anybody else to come and partner. For everything else, you can get the best in the market,” he said.

At Bajaj Allianz, Goenka shared, there’s a 5-step process that is followed. “We do not look at technology first. We look at the use-case first, the first step there being to listen to your customers. Second is to analyse the feedback, Make a list of what your customers are wanting, then do a GAP analysis. Here is where the technology comes into play. Once you do that, you go ahead and implement and define your success metrics and monitor it. The last step then is again to go back to your consumer,” he explained.

To sum it up, Goenka said that it was a big ‘yes’ to get technology partners on board, but only when you need the expertise that you already do not have.