Day: April 16, 2018

Some very deep insights came to highlight from my Q&A session with Ranjit Satyanath, CIO of Infiniti Retail Ltd. popularly known as Croma. Croma is one of the leading and most loved retail company in the Consumer Electronics & Appliances segment. Here is the detailed version of the conversation: Q1: Croma being one of the largest players in Consumer Electronics & Appliances retail, what IT strategy do you think works best to make Croma the most loved? Any strategy that puts our customers at the centre of everything we do is bound to work. So from the very beginning, we have focussed on making the journeys smooth for them – whether by adopting Omni-channel practices ahead of the curve or setting benchmarks in CX. A couple of years ago the industry faced business challenges from unexpected quarters and we started off by reacting to them like others. But then we quickly realised that merely responding to market situations would not make the cut. Across the organisation we adopted Power of 3 – picking just 3 areas and focusing sharply on them. The Customer was on the top of that list for almost all functions of the organisation including IT. Our Customer Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are at benchmark levels and business has also been hitting new highs while several competing businesses have floundered and closed shop Q2: Patience is a virtue your customers don’t possess. Your digital customer experience is your great weapon and the application your great differentiator. Is Digital Transformation a key to improve the customer experience? Why is it necessary to place the customer and the countless buyer journeys at the centre of your digital commerce strategy? I would disagree that customers are not patient. They are. However, the device in their hands has opened up a realm of possibilities previously thought impossible. You can actually track where your taxi driver is on the mobile? Really? Then why do I have to call a number and speak to an IVR to track my delivery?  New customer journeys have started to happen and Digital is at the centre of that. Brick and Mortar retailers like us have to marry our physical processes with Digital making for “Phygital” journeys. The challenge for retail now is to figure out how customers would like to engage and craft journeys that delight them. Q3: One of the words that NRF 2018 panelists and attendees repeated over and over at the conference was Personalization. How can retailers make their digital solutions personalized and deliver customized user experiences to shoppers? The key driver for personalisation is customer data. The paradigm itself is not new to the industry. Retailers have always been endeavouring to deliver personalised offers to customers using Loyalty data. But knowledgeable customers are resisting explicitly providing more data in return for deals. Also, consumers are also not likely to be very impressed when targeted with re-marketing offers based on their product searches. So retailers are moving away from customer loyalty data and resorting to other means to gather them. Added to this is the fact that personalisation has taken on a completely different meaning. Customers look for different kinds of customisation based on where they are, their current state of mind, weather etc. For example, some customers may want to be assisted by their favourite salesperson whereas others may want to help themselves. Fortunately technology like beacons, store wi-fi, clickstream analysis, visual analytics, AI, ML etc. provide retailers with the tools to tackle such expectations. Genuine use cases are still rare but work is in progress and we should see some real wins in this area soon. Q4: Knowing the key techniques to improve your conversion rates is vital to any eCommerce strategy. What techniques and strategies will influence eCommerce trends in 2018? We look at our eCommerce channel differently from pure-play online players. Physical stores are at the centre of our story and we will continuously leverage the power of digital to increase our engagement with customers. We continue to see a large percentage of customers research products online but come to our stores to experience the product and the instant gratification that physical retail offers. Added to this, we also use our online channel to convert customers who may be in store for a product which may not have stock by delivering the said merchandise to them from our Distribution Centre. Having said that we use all the tools and techniques that the pure plays employ to increase conversion and we will continue to invest in the online channel to enable smoother customer journeys there. Q5: Retailers are starting to adopt a more data-driven approach to technology. What is your take on the use of #BigData in #RetailTech? Like any retail business, Big Data and its implications are critical to growth. We rely on Big Data for dynamically structuring our prices, understanding customer behaviour on our site, measuring sentiment on social media etc. Going forward I see visual analytics and image search as areas of high potential in retail. Q6: Data analytics is a must have for understanding the forces driving for Retail & eCommerce business. Do you think Supply Chain Optimization improves with Data? Definitely. The more data one has about the different elements of the supply chain, the better optimised it will be. For example data about what is selling in each store will sharpen Supply Chain’s ability to ship relevant merchandise to the store thus reducing costs pertaining to inventory holding, interest, reverse logistics, shrinkage etc. Logistics teams use data-driven algorithms to plan the most efficient routes for their deliveries. Technologies like RFID make it possible to generate and assimilate large amounts of data, if implemented correctly can significantly boost supply chain efficiencies. Q7: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing trend across most industries at the moment. It can process data far more efficiently than any human ever could, and when this is combined with machine learning and other emerging technologies, it can allow us to access much deeper insights than were previously possible.