leveraging data to create a seamless customer experience

Leveraging Data to create a seamless customer experience

At the recently concluded eTailing India Expo 2017 – “India’s Flagship Conference & Exhibition on Retail, eCommerce and Mobile” (http://etailingindiaexpo.com), leading thought leaders shared their perspective on “Technology Services for Retail & eCommerce”. This article summarizes the session for Customer Experience: Leveraging Data to create a seamless customer experience (The session is not verbatim here).

What is your understanding of data?

For us, the data comes from consumer and from the service provider. In the service provider, the data looks like as if it is not that large. But if you track the events that they are doing, that becomes a large data. This data is meaningful for analytics. When we see the patterns in various services and the events which

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we are capturing on the overall behavior in last two and a half years, it is a pretty large amount of data.

Is there any data which is beyond the platform?

When we collected the data from the service provider, there was no platform. There was no tool to collect the data. The challenge was how to generate those events which were happening.

Earlier consumers were forcefully fitted into different segments due to less accurate information we had with the data. But now, every consumer is an individual identity and we are still exploring the tip of the iceberg. There is a phenomenal amount of data we can put in to use.

You had offline and online experience. How does data change during these phases?

For instance, one of the responsibilities we had was delivering the need for consumers to contact us. This is defined by how you define the entire consumer journey.

How has data become big for you?

We are pure Omni-channel players where we collect lots of data across offline and online touch-points. Our focus is to give seamless experience to customer with the use of data. Customer walking in a store has to be identified based on its previous purchase. We are collecting the footprint of the customer inside stores where we are using beacons. Depending upon the purchase, we are sending personalized message to them as it improves the upselling for us. That’s impacting the conversion and revenue for us. We have started collected NPS in each and every outlet to improve the customer experience.


The first known case was Walmart using the point of sale system in the field to start making marketing and merchandising decisions. Data is still channel oriented where we are losing opportunities. We have to keep customer at the centre and then determine how we can revolve around data collection points and the marketing push. There is still a gap.

In the app development industry, data has grown bigger. App making has become further personalized.

How data is used to change consumer experience?

In online, we have used Google Analytics to reduce the bounce rates. In offline space, we have redesigned the layout of our stores based on the NPS feedback. We put fresh products at the front of the store to give the feeling of freshness.

We prepared videos trying to explain the score of services. These are expectations of the consumers that you need to provide. Due to this, there were drastic changes in conversion from 40% to 70-75%. It all happened due to changing the educational experience.

When we started digital marketing solutions to eCommerce players, we realized there was a very binary view of the scenario. From a business perspective, you need to know the accounts dates, what are the sessions date. So, the first part we realized was to successfully track for the information. Once we have that information, we are able to assess the qualitative aspects of the transactions. From the data perspective, we get to know the frequency of the purchase, how many people are coming to website and buying a particular product are my brand impression getting improving or not. So from a binary view, you are suddenly having accurate results of consumer behavior.

Here is an example of BMW. The new BMV prototype has about 15000 data points from engine and transmission down to the suspension and brakes. Using Big Data analytics, BMW Group can detect and fix vulnerabilities that show up in


during the manufacturing process. In absence of digital technologies, it would have taken months to analyze reach the actual root cause of the defect, in any. Based on the data collected during the test drives and other processes, BMW can find faults and fix them before new cars go into full production. It thus enhances the customer satisfaction.

Q&A

What about consumer security and data security?

Entire information is given by the customer with its consent. It shouldn’t be spooky.

In future, do you see data being shared between companies?

In fact, data collaboration is happening between non-competing companies where there is a strong alliance structure in between them. But you can see majority of the data is shared on public platforms like Facebook.

Can data analytics be used for deriving insights before even the customer looks for the product?

If I am going to search on Google analytics, there is a funnel where first you start from awareness, then there is consideration and then you jump to buying experience. But just on the keyword of searching, you can jump on the exact need to show the customer. You need to do your data analysis well.

Speakers: Samarjeet Singh (Co-Founder & CEO- Iksula), Shoeb Ahmed (Cofounder of head Digital Marketing- BizYantra Global Services Pvt. Ltd.), Rohit Kelkar (Director of Sales and Business Development- Sokrati), Sudhir Tiwari (Head E-Commerce Technology- Godrej Natures Basket Limited), Dharmarajan K (Head of CX- Tata CLiQ) and Amit Kumar (Co Founder & COO- Zimmber.com).


leveraging data to create a seamless customer experience

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