INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR. SANDIP TARKAS,
President (Customer Strategy), Future Group
CEO, Bengal Warriors
1. Customers are increasingly looking for an integrated channel experience as they engage with brands. What are some good practices being followed to provide a consistent brand experience across channels?
A lot of experts have been saying that pure play retail is on its last legs – be it online or offline. Customers are demanding an omni channel solution that is best able to address the issue of customer convenience. In an omni channel environment, a consistent customer experience across various touch-points becomes vastly important. As we develop our omni-commerce environment step by step, we are ensuring that the customer experience is consistent across all the channels, and the experience is as seamless as possible for the customers.
2. Does social media have an influence on a brand’s sales or profit? How are brands leveraging this as a serious sales channel? What do you believe are the pitfalls?
Social media has a huge influence – the effect on the negative side is even stronger than the positive side as of today, but I’d like to say that it is early yet to isolate impact of social media alone. As always, several factors are at play in determining sales and profit for a brand – both intrinsic and extrinsic factors are at play. Social media plays the role of accelerator and multiplier – so good news and bad news both travel far more rapidly through this channel and brands need to develop strong social listening capabilities as well as rapid response mechanism to contain damage when needed and to act as multiplier for good news.
3. Can you share some examples of how marketers are leveraging insights from data around customers and buying behaviours to make powerful decisions and actions? How can they have better control of the actions, especially given that several operational processes are owned by stakeholders outside of marketing?
Brands are today in a situation where using data to do business is not merely an option but a mandate. In such a scenario, powers equations between the CMO and CTO have been considerably re-written. Data will not give 100% answers on what needs to be done, but can help almost 100% on what not to do. Also having strong insights from data makes marketers that much more confident of the next step, even though the role for gut-feel based calls will never diminish.
4. What are some good practices being adopted by enterprises to leverage the contact center to manage customer experience and potentially use it to even cross-sell / up-sell?
Getting the senior managers to listen in on conversations at the contact centre can perhaps be the most important and educative step for a company. Also regular call centre data analytics will help know which direction the brand is moving in and help steer it in the right direction. Its use for cross-sell/ upsell is yet limited given the quality of manpower employed at a typical contact centre but more and more brands have been able to leverage this in the past few years.
5. What are some innovations being done by the Future Group to maximize customer experience? How are you leveraging technology to drive this?
omni-commerce is the biggest step forward in this direction. In addition we have given special emphasis to the concept of Seva at our stores – a lot of effort is going in studying negative labour issues in our customer’s life, like the chore of having to wash and cut vegetables or mixing atta etc, which the customers find boring, and delighting them with a solution to those is another great step forward.