Customer Experience: Changing Shopping Experiences in India – End to End Brand 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: Changing Shopping Experiences in India – End to End Brand Experience. (The session is not verbatim here)

What differentiation are you making for the customer?

One is content that is put on the website and the ranges put into brick and mortar. Second, the kind of customer service given to the brick and mortar as well as online customer. The third is the way to maintain a relationship with a customer.

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Our Clubcard is also a case-study for universities in UK. We give loyalty cards where we offer 1% discount for a particular period of time. One great advantage of clubcard is in capturing the data. If you don’t have the clubcard, customer goes to website and same goes to brick and mortar, you won’t be able to track or validate the customer. Use of club card data helps to integrate these two parts and then give the right offering to the people.

If you look at online and offline scenario, there is a very interesting perspective in the jewellery category. At the gifting level and the high level which is the standardized solitaire, there are buyers. But in the mid-range, there is a shortage of buyers. At the dichotomy of online versus offline, we are not looking at both as separate businesses; we are not looking as eCommerce. Fulfillment can be online or offline, discovery is more from offline to online.

Earlier consumer would walk into the store and then discover what products you had. The other thing we looked at customer base both is that there is a regionalization both in terms of design and in terms of language. One of the challenge is how do you convert this at online platform for that one unique experience of the consumer.

The second significant insight is that we are moving from a verbal to a visual mode of communication. Both online and offline are appearing to be more seamless today.

Are the locations at which the online customers purchasing versus offline stores are same? Are you able to create deep access into other parts of India which is supplementing sales strategy in the main cities?

When we began, we looked at an all India approach. We had orders coming in from far-flung areas. It was exciting to get those orders but we realized if we would have focused monies in cities present in, with a distance of 100-150kms, the ROI was much better for us.

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The other thing that was realized was for instance if you want print ads in a metro city for say Kolkata, the cost was print media is too high. But with the help of digital, we can target particular audience in a manner to drive traffic.

What are the benchmarks of customer-experience?

In terms of play-station, it can be defined as how deep you can get in terms of immersive experience. In a shop-front experience, we look at not just the number of people who have played; we manage the experience in terms of how many people have managed to play it through at least one level (satisfaction metric to buy). We are measuring engagement in the shop-fronts. If it is zone-based event that is created, those are always connected to the online forum and we measure the amount of discussion happening at the forum. This is where we start to advocate particular game (social advocacy and positive sentiment).

The direct measurement is how well we are doing for both online and offline customers. Other than that, we came up with a pricing engine where it actually goes and looks it over the competitor. Again the competitor reach in categories varies. We look at these competitors and see how well we price in the online and ensure margins. The challenge is we can’t compete with pure play online players. We can lose out on the price. Technology is playing a vital role in reaching the market.

Through received club card points, we track the customer buying patterns. So what happen is we can have better predictions of customer buying behavior. A brilliant example is if there is a lot of traffic on to the website, you can get to know it easily. But then if there is lot of people coming on to your store, what we actually do is that at the tills and checkout counters, there are cameras fitted above it. So, we actually look at the heat map of the lane and if the heat map is red, it means more customers are piling up the queue. It helps us with store and customer management.

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Customer experience is critical at the luxury level. We have tried to put all the products online to get larger choice. When the consumer comes to an offline store, this is what happens. We have enabled everything with an Ipad which works for both online and offline perspective.

What are the trends do you see in packaging and logistics space?

Whenever someone buys from marketplaces, he or she expects it to get the product exactly as it is displayed on the screen and in good condition. So packaging is really helpful in this. Proper packaging is proper safety otherwise it will be tampered. Many times we hear that people order phones online but they receive stones, order diamond jewellery and the diamond in the jewellery is missing, all these things happen because of poor packaging. Nowadays people are really educated about packaging and now they use good quality packaging, even some of the big companies like Amazon use tamperproof bags or corrugated boxes. Taking care of packaging also is one way of brand promotion. You can judge the name of the brand with the color of packaging. We can also say this is one way of indirect branding with the help of packaging.

Packaging is really important because people who handle the goods logistically do not take proper care of the product they are given responsibility to send to the consumers / customers because the logistics firm deals with these products that has to be delivered on a really large scale. Packaging is really important in the online space. People return their products when their product is tampered and not in the same condition as they see online while buying. The people in eCommerce department know the pain in returning because they have to pay a cost for logistics again above all the brand name in terms of people ordering from the same site. Returns from the customer side will be less if the packaging is used the right way.

What are the axis points for you digitally and offline. What devices are people using? 

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The conversion rate is a little high on the desktop compared to a mobile phone but the current situation of the market is kind of 50-50 (Europe Stats).

Purchase online is 70%+ done from the desktop and not the mobile phone. When it comes to electronics, the conversion is mostly mobile and also gaming consoles - mobile consumers prefer mobiles over desktop because the crowd is young.

Is there something you would to like impart in terms of technology that are likely to arrive in near future?

The experience need to be lot more immersive (VR/AR). It needs to be lot more contextual and it will go even better when you have personalized it. The person identification most probably is going to come by the fact that consumers are going to be always on due to wearable, mobile device or loyalty cards.

One example undertaken by Tesco is monitoring the parking space for its customers. This way they can tell them if it was a right time to get in the store giving customers alternate options enriching customer experience.

Q&A

How much nudging is enough nudging to cajole the customer to buy the product?

There is no formula and too much nudging is not a good idea. The line between the consumer’s privacy, respecting privacy and reminding him of something is a very fine line that’s needs to be taken care of. You need to be sure of understanding the customer in terms of nudging.

Speakers: GAURAV KACHRU (Co- Founder:5ideas), RAHUL NARVEKAR (Founder & CEO: The India Network), ATINDRIYA BOSE (Mentor / Investor: Start-Ups: Technology Products / Internet Services), POONAM JAIN (Chief Business

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Development Officer: Maruthi Plastics & Packaging), RAVINDRA PRASAD (Head of Engineering and Technology: Tesco) and VIJAY JAIN (Co-Founder & Director: ORRA).

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