Consumer Convenience: The Future of Customer Satisfaction
Can you tell us about your career graph thus far?
I have 30 years across FMCG/ Retail, Media, BFSI categories as I moved from being an advertising professional to TOI, Modi Revlon, Dishtv and Aviva, where I held business and revenue roles. I see myself as a quintessential learner and builder and hence kept evolving into new domains and even varied profiles.
Despite starting out as a product/ Marketing expert with core skills in Brand and Communication, I have managed Retail (both offline and online), delivered annual Revenue of 2500 cr (data analytics led renewal revenue) and then Digital Transformation as we built differentiated customer propositions
What drove you towards entrepreneurship?
I have been known as a customer evangelist in all businesses I have worked in. Be it domestic or MNC, most Indian enterprises exhibit a difference between the walk and talk when it comes to creating great customer experiences. Whilst 80% companies believe that they understand their customers and offer good experiences, only 8% of their customers believe so. This is a huge gap.
Largely most companies operate with a sales/ product centric rather than a customer centric philosophy. This might seem like a small shift but actually transforms the entire world view for decisions, investments and even structure, processes and technology.
That’s the inspiration for my founding C-Xcel, a CX advisory practice.
Can you tell us about your entrepreneurial product?
The idea behind C-Xcel is to help B2C companies achieve greater success through customer centricity. Data has proven direct links between great CX and customer retention (upto 5X more), Brand Reputation/Trust (upto 68% improvement), higher Revenue & Profits (upto 17% higher growth) and even Employee retention (1.5X employee engagement).
My endeavor is to engage with Marketing , Sales and Service professionals to redefine CX at the center of their model and help drive higher Customer Revenue, chart Digital transformation for convenient customer journeys, build capability and culture to support such an environment.
How will it make a dent in the existing customer experience?
Customer behavior and expectations from brands have changed totally, specially in the last 18 months, post Covid. Today 77% consumers are willing to spend far more with brands that offer great experience. More importantly 50% customers will switch a brand after just one poor experience.
Consumers have come to expect seamless convenient and personalized experience a la Amazon from each and every brand, so everyone is competing with Amazon and Uber when it comes to digital experiences.
How does customer experience differentiate itself from customer service?
Consumer journeys are no longer linear, but complex, hybrid (online/offline) and multi-device, multi-platform for customers who are connected 24*7.
Customer service is a small part of experience - typically a reactive process, more used for post purchase use cases. In contract, Customer experience is pro-active, much wider brand touch-points across the process of search, discovery, review, sales, onboarding, and life-cycle management.
My favorite quote is that customer service, which is tablestake, needs to kick in, when experience fails to deliver the requisite consumer outcome.
What is your vision regarding your company?
I would like to engage with B2C brands to help create consumer sensitivity, digital transformation and unlock value.
How do you intend to market your product?
Building awareness & acceptance of the gap is key for businesses to take the plunge into investing in CX. I am creating content to help build sensitivity on the subject and also induce dialogues around it.
What are the new products/ user experiences you are working on?
One of the fundamental tools we offer is a tool to measure current CX capability of an organization, which helps gauge where it stands and build a roadmap for the future. Most CX solutions are tailored to specific business use cases in the domain of strategy, design thinking, data analytics, digital transformation and culture creation.
