 Good afternoon viewers. You are watching us on Exchange for Media's Martik Fridays, where we are going to discuss today this lovely afternoon. The role technologies have played and are playing in boosting customer engagement. This is essentially marketing technologies that have been deployed as tool sets to harness the customer feedback and improve customer experience. This is the topic for discussion this Friday and with me we have a very esteemed panel, but before I ask the panel to introduce themselves, let me all welcome you from those who are logging in at Zoom, logging in from Facebook Live, from LinkedIn, from Twitter, you know, you're most welcome and I hope you will have a fruitful discussion. We have as I said a very esteemed panel from diverse background and I would ask all of them to introduce themselves and post that I will lay out the broad spectrum of what we are going to cover today and then we will have a free willing discussion. May I now ask Mukul to, you know, since I'm seeing you on the top left on my screen, may I ask you to begin by introducing yourself and we'll go clockwise with Mukul, then Ashish, Bharat, Shweta and Janak. Mukul, over to you. Hi everyone, my name is Mukul Kumar Sharma, I'm the CEO of Pinkvilla, one of the largest entertainment sites globally doing over 30 million unique visitors per month. I've been with Pinkvilla for the last five years before which I've been with companies like Coimoy.com, Games2win, prior to which I was with Radio for a while, I was working with a channel called Radio One. So great to have joined this discussion and I hope it will be a very fruitful session. Thanks Mukul, Ashish. Good afternoon everyone, I am Ashish, I head e-commerce for Godrej and Boys. From past three years I'm trying to actually build an omni-channel commerce business for Godrej and Boys. Prior to that I was head of online grocery for Reliance Retail. So what you see as a geomart today, I think something which we started in 2012 and for almost four years I was developing that and in the last assignment I was joined business head for that initiative. Of course almost 17 years I spent with Reliance, it was more actually in telecom, in retail and when I joined actually one of the biggest initiative was the Reliance Petroleum Refinery in Jamnagar which was Asia's biggest and I started career from there. Well that's a fascinating career Ashish. Now we come to one of our youngest members, Bharat, tell us about Rage Coffee and yourself. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here talking to each one of you and all the viewers watching. I'm a serial entrepreneur, I am young but I also started very young. I started my first company was still in school, it was something on the side but it taught me a lot about entrepreneurship. At 21 I started a company called Postergully back in 2011. It was a direct to consumer brand. I had of its time internet and e-commerce was just starting to kind of penetrate the Indian market and the company grew from zero to something substantially big in four years. I exited the company in 2016 and then started a company in a B2B e-commerce space. So happy to talk a lot about how kind of technology is changing customer engagement and how do you really take your customer experience to the next level because of the possibilities of internet being around and I currently run an FMCG company called Rage Coffee which I started in 2018. The goal was to build a 500 crore company online digitally native that would be direct to consumer and also the distribution channel would be very different but it would be largely direct to consumer. So again how can customer experience be a moat and actually defensibility for your business is what I can talk about. Fantastic. I think we are in for a very exciting and enriching you know session with you in there and over to Shweta now. Hey hi everyone. Thanks for the you know kind of starting the introduction there Sanjay. I am actually a digital evangelist and I kind of consider myself a torch bearer of digital because I've been associated with the industry since 2000 and since then I've been a part of almost all the stakeholders we who are there in the ecosystem be the media or the agencies at alongside.com. So I feel fortunate about being a part of this industry for quite some time now and currently leading a digital projects looking forward to a fantastic discussion that we'll have with an amazing panel that we have and with you Sanjay. Thanks. Thank you Shweta. Over to Janak. Hi I am Janak Sarda. I lead the digital group of newspapers and media house. I am a media and a tech enthusiast hence Mark Tech is a subject closer to my heart or dear to me I would say. After having run the media business for about over 12 to 15 years I started a startup in the machine learning and artificial intelligence space and we cater to the healthcare the hospitality by way of bots. Bots that's something you and I probably use on a daily basis these days. Elixirs are going to command the way we behave in our homes or offices and of course a lot of interaction going forward with the technology space completely for all spectrums of media and advertising. Thank you. Thank you Janak. I think we are in for really a fascinating conversation given your expertise in machine learning and your experience of having applied that in your businesses. So thank you very much. So dear audience you can see that we have a very diverse set of panelists each of them being an expert in their field of expertise and before we begin our conversation let me share with you what are the broad areas that we're going to cover. We're going to talk about the last quarter you know how the quarter one of the financial year 2021 has been for everybody in terms of the customer level. Have you seen any dip in your customer engagement or as we've seen in the media industry we had a paradox while the ad revenue dipped and the CPMs dipped but the customer engagement actually went up the roof. So what has been the level of customer engagement for you during this quarter? Did you put in any strategy to bolster customer engagement or you reacted to the situation or maybe you innovated on your feet? What is it that you did to counter this unprecedented situation that we were put in? Did you deploy any specific tools of technology or did you apply common sense? As simple as that and if we have to talk about the tools of technology I would like to talk about the role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, chatbots, big data you know and how all this has led us to boosting the customer engagement specifically on the diversity of platforms. Mobile being the highlight that would be one of our key conversation points. What about personalization? How did you achieve better, sharper, more intrinsic one-to-one kind of personalization? Did you use 360 degree to go for Omnichal interactions? How did you harness the social signals? What was your conversation with your social community? Because community is the key to engagement and of course if you have to think on your feet, you have to think out of the box, how did you enable real-time or quick decision-making in your organization to respond to the customer needs? Because all this makes for a superior customer experience. So these are the things that we're going to talk about. I am also going to talk about given the topic that we have today which is essentially the role of technologies, enhancing customer satisfaction. I'm going to leave a question with you. I recently read an article by the Hardware Business Review where they talked about the need of CMO to actually move to the role of CMT and they called it as a chief marketing technologist. You know, so is there a time now? Is it an opportune time for CMOs to be morphed into CMTs where most of the decisions that they're going to make are going to be driven by technology? And HBR in this science article talked about how the CMT's role is essentially to align the marketing technology requirement of the company with and align that to the business schools. So I would like to discuss that. We would also talk about some specific case studies that you may have in mind either of your own company or of the ecosystem at large and then we will cover the challenges that you face in terms of deployment of the marketing technologies. The challenges in terms of logistical execution versus a very tricky challenge of the fine line that you need to draw between data privacy and harnessing the social footprint. Because as corporates, you need to play a responsible role and I'd like to hear what we did. Finally, and hopefully we should be able to cover all this in the next one hour that we have, I would like you to do a little bit of crystal ball gazing. You know, how does the future look like? We've come out of a difficult quarter. This quarter presented tremendous challenges but as we've seen human resilience is triumphing and most of us have been able to convert these challenges into opportunities and the first quarter results of the IT industry that we've seen in this country are very heartwarming indeed. So with this as backdrop, let me begin and I think let me begin by asking the first question to let's say Shweta because Shweta is handling the digital portfolio for Philips as a brand and range covers from both consumer durables to health care. Shweta, tell us, give me your opening thoughts about the customer engagement levels. How did the graph initially look to you and how is it shaping up today? Sure. So I believe that customer engagement, I will consider two types of customer engagement. So one is the organic engagement which may happen because of this COVID-19 situation and the post scenarios. The other one is the triggered customer engagement where you realize there is an opportunity but you had to trigger it because it didn't come organically. So if you talk about the health care business, definitely there was an organic engagement because of the very nature of the business but there are some consumer businesses the company had to trigger it because you need it to engage with the customer the situation where there is an opportunity because they are spending both in 25 percent time post COVID. We have seen like 25 to 30 percent increase in the amount of time that people were spending online so that was an opportunity. So that was the trigger kind of customer engagement. So one was which happened automatically and second is where we have triggered it because we thought that there's a need and we have to be in touch with the customer in the situation despite of the pandemic scenario there. So I guess these are the two kinds of we have seen this engagement going pretty high in case of health care because of the various product portfolios that we have talking about ventilators maybe respiratory devices and all those things and also we got this opportunity to engage with the customers and doctors and physicians who had a lot of time at this moment unlike the pre-COVID scenario you have to engage with them and then kind of have a conversation through various webinars, virtual sessions and be in constant touch. So this is how it has impacted. All right I think interesting point you've made about triggering the engagement and I think that is a very very proactive approach to doing business. Mukul I know Pinkvilla's consumption of entertainment content you know actually hit through the roof you know because everybody was at home and everybody was watching entertainment and Bollywood and stuff like that but did you experience initially some jitters in the beginning? So I think when the lockdown started and everything we experienced a lot of jitters honestly because see we heavily rely on content in terms of video content and also textual content. So what happened initially is though consumers were spending more time online there was the earth of content so which is why what we witnessed is a lot of sites witnessed a heavy growth in their traffic but they were primarily hard news traditional news sites. We did not see any drop but we did not see any spike this I'm talking about the first couple of weeks when the lockdown was first announced then however we figured out a strategy to bend around it and we what we did is innovate on content so we don't just do Bollywood we also do a lot of lifestyle fashion beauty now fashion beauty Bollywood was pretty much restrictive in terms of what you can do or whether people are interested in that in this scenario so what we did more of was on health which worked really well so it was changing like the first few weeks there were videos around coronavirus awareness how you can take care of your health how you can boost your immunity and a bunch of other things which worked really well then there was a different set of content pieces which worked really well so I would say we really changed the way we were looking at content all these decisions were obviously based on data on social listening tools on our in-house analytics tools on user behavior and what users were reacting to what in terms of even Google trends and everything but we had to really innovate in terms of the way we were doing content and what we were covering and what we were not but I would say we could do it very successfully basis the data and how consumers were reacting to it fantastic fantastic you know that actually leads me to a question to Ashish assuming Ashish that you know you had initially experienced deep and then maybe hopefully you know hopefully you bounce back but you're in a business which is about God rid interiors essentially furnitures and initially for the first two months everything was locked up now proactively what steps did you think did you take some steps or you were just basically hit by a by by this whole incident so Sanjay I think the situation was definitely unprecedented and no one actually was knowing what to do in that scenario and since furniture is a business which is both a discretionary also and it requires a lot of supply chain in terms of deliveries in terms of installation so when we actually went into deep that what will happen maybe in April and May we realized that there is a sudden jump in terms of people actually looking for work from home related actually content and we have an ergonomic sale and like what is like talked about people are thinking about they're working from home but 90% of people actually don't know how to work from home they started feeling problem related to health they started feeling problem related to how to focus on their work so as a brand we have a lot of actually expertise in terms of our ergonomics and so what we did actually we started communicating with our audiences two times in a day so first in the morning we were talking about what they can do in terms of ensuring that the day goes properly and in the evening around four or five o'clock we were talking about very very simple health tips so maybe just an exercise which they can do in for 10 seconds 20 seconds we saw actually the engagement was huge there is a huge increase in terms of engagement so once we realized actually we went into in depth and understand what exactly is happening in the market rather than actually thinking about what actually can I can do to increase my sale so for first two months almost we invested our time in terms of understanding pain points and other thing and subsequently we built actually a strategy of how to get it to this new demand as well as help customer with this hour of need so I think like consumption of content increases consumption of you see grand engagement actually increases almost three x times but of course sales in the quarter one as well as in the quarter one it you too it will take some time actually to go back to the normal level but we are actually seeing a lot of good growth actually starting like from April to maybe now July scenario so I think pretty much good trajectory actually good and I think later on when people started working from home the sale of ergonomic furniture and chairs definitely you know would have shot up and you guys had some very sleek furniture in that domain let me now take this question to Bharat Bharat you essentially with your new business which is I think the third venture that you're launching your extremely young life and may you continue to scale greater heights with coffee as a business and that too in a in a brick and mortar space coffee you're not selling virtual coffee you know what has your experience been and how did you adapt to this unprecedented situation sure sure so first to clarify we are a cpg company we are a packaged coffee company we do not run any food service any qsr any horeca nothing we do have institutional businesses we do supply to a lot of horeca but we ourselves do not own any brick and mortar it's not a part of our near short term or midterm plan business company it's a no it's a it's a b2c company and b2c company in a way that we basically manufacture and distribute and market very innovative coffee products do the Indian audience online we do have offline presence as well but we are largely a digitally native brand we when I say digitally native I mean that we are digitally first we think about our customers we think about the products we think about marketing and advertising and customer acquisition in a very digital way so largely the the DNA of the company is direct to consumer and the possibilities that direct to consumer presents I think I can touch upon those but you know if you kind of broaden the scenario here and we look at you know what's been happening at least in the last you know one quarter since covid has hit us on I think April was tough April was I think almost almost blank for almost most businesses that we've spoken to but we have seen a continuous recovery we've seen in fact you know I can also disclose that June was the best month ever for us in our business because because you know there are two three things but largely our biggest competition coffee shops are shut or you know people are not willing to go there right now because of all the other reasons but the biggest factor I think have also been that at home consumption of food products and grocery products has kind of increased also we were very I would say well set up to fight this kind of a change because if you look you know you mentioned about omni channel we are I would say you know from birthday omni channel we are not you know legacy giant now trying to go omni channel so that we have to think and move all pieces of a puzzle in an omni channel thinking but we think from day zero we think about omni channel we think about how we need to go to our customer we need to approach our customers so we were very well set up for this kind of a change because for us when the consumers wanted us you know online we were available in all platforms you were available direct to consumer or through our own websites and beyond that I think we just have such a close communication with our customers throughout their journey of you know throughout the life cycle of purchase and repeats that we were we became a you know almost almost a go to choice for them all the kind of brands that are even close to our you know two or three brands that are even close to the quality that we give this you know the product range that we have they're all being imported into India and they were also hit so these two or three reasons I think were a mix of why we're seeing a surge in why I think we'll continue to see a surge also would now make in India the entire conscious that the Indian consumer has got you know gathered in the last one or two months has been phenomenal it is such a big boon for Indian entrepreneurs I feel and that could not have come if the consumers didn't start to think like that so I'm very happy about that as well because we'll make made in India product and we're very proud to be able to give something at an affordable cost to consumers which are all being which was all earlier being imported into India fantastic in fact your passion is clearly coming across Bharat and coffee in these troubled times is also a bit of a stress reliever so you know I'm sure besides initially you may have faced some logistical challenges in terms of delivery but I'm sure you're in for a good time now let me ask Janak we've discussed the broad spectrum of consumer engagement levels initially most of you found it dipping a little bit but you bounce back you thought on your feet you triggered consumer responses you innovated you know you made your product digitally digitally savvy and digitally native you embraced the 360 degrees concept but to do all this Janak what are the tools which are best suited from a technological perspective to be deployed and I'm not necessarily asking about one specific tool which is essentially data crunching machine learning but in your experience what are the best marketing technology tools that are available for marketers to actually deploy in this kind of a scenario and going forward well I think what is clearly you know written on the wall is that we need to start embracing technology and make it mainstream we need to bring it into our DNA as marketers and kind of think of our brand's vision on embracing it and going to market with those strategies essentially what we noticed was the hype cycle was terrific at the beginning of the COVID season it continues to remain like that however having said that distribution channels distribution challenges that every product or every market you're faced were quite unique but the customer engagement initiatives that they needed to launch during these times to came as a teaching of sorts you know you need to be now better equipped better prepared to face a situation like this than ever before in the future this is not a temporary crisis that can be resolved through PR it is a long lasting impact that your brands are going to face and you're going to need to use technology smartly to start communicating so much so that one of the biggest advertisers globally is now kind of deploying a bot permanent we are working on one of those you know bots and we are helping them kind of visualize on what is the kind of communication that they need to have with their consumers not just during crisis like this but even otherwise because it's an expectation something that is available off the shelf need not need so much of tech backing as such but you have to think like that I think the time has come in fact for us in the news media as well that was something that we needed to kind of shift to overnight while in seven days the print editions kind of came on for us in some parts of Maharashtra in a staggered manner our flagship editions were still curtailed to digital you know so all of a sudden I had to push my newsroom to kind of think only digital embrace work from home because we are used to come into offices in the evening maintaining deadlines for the print etc but now that's not the norm the new norm is you need to be better prepared better equipped to go to your reader consumer and the market as such so I believe it's time that the CMOs start also thinking of their goals to be the kind of you know that you used I would become CMT's from CMOs yes absolutely I think how it has been able to actually predict trends and but you know we this is a larger question and that is I think a subject matter of another session because marketing and advertising is both a mix of science and art and if you purely take the you know the approach which is scientific you will miss out on the creation of big ideas you know advertising thrives on human ingenuity and and you can't only be data crunching so I think hybrid models have to evolve and and we have to perhaps that's subject for discussion on another day you talked about chatbots and in my experience I often find chatbots very impersonal they cannot be customized and sometimes with my experience of chatbots has been that it has been very frustrated and I wanted to get in touch with the customer service representative especially when it comes to e-commerce so there are limitations but then technologies are constantly evolving Mukul my question to you is about one way we've seen that superior customer experience hence better customer engagement can be created if you are able to look at personalization you know and personalization on specifically mobile platform share with us your experience of Pinkvilla because Pinkvilla's content consumption I presume I mean share with us how much percentage of your content is consumed by mobile I would guess it's around 90% but but share with us 96 97% yeah I guess desktop is about a cup one or two percent the remaining is tablet and about 96 97% is mobile I think that's the trend with all the publishers not just us the world has moved mobile see in terms of personalization what we've been doing is because previously what would happen is you have a homepage how publishers work is you feature everything on the homepage and people can take a pic but when we are doing like close to 300 articles in a day it's not possible to feature 300 articles on the homepage so then what do you do you uh some people came up with the solution where you know you have different landing pages for different geos in terms of geotargeting but now what the publisher space is moving towards is personalization in terms of first tracking what the user is interested in like I said we do various categories like fashion beauty lifestyle then even in the film industry right we cover a lot of Korean now that's the new hot thing in the teenage world a lot of kpop is being consumed a lot yeah kpop and that's something we discovered recently in the last three four months uh it has crazy fan following you have no idea what level I mean Shahrukh Khan is nobody in front of them that is the level of global fan following they have uh no offense to Shahrukh of course but yeah I'm just explaining the scale so what typically happens is uh what we are doing now is we are making buckets in terms of which users are interested in which type of content more we are bucketing them um and then we are repurposing those buckets to retarget the users with such kind of content now what are we using to retarget uh dynamic pages in terms of every user sees a very unique and customized landing page that is one uh in terms of newsletters we are trying to automate that as well so whoever's interested in whatever type of content gets those specific type of content pieces in addition to that what we are doing is we're trying to engage those users so like to continue on the example of kpop every article that we do on kpop has at least like two thousand three thousand some even have ten thousand comments and these comments are on the website so we discovered new content for maths that we want to do and target specific to categories to drive engagements and these are all native comments so they are not like I'm not talking about social we have a huge following on social as well but this I'm just talking natively on the site so I think one of the most important things was uh to first figure out uh what the users want and which section of users what what and then bucket them and target them accordingly so that is something we are working very extensively on in terms of firebase and BigQuery and a bunch of other technologies and we expect to improve further targeting bases that and increase even more user engagement fascinating uh ashish in terms of deployment of technology you know you initially talked about striking up uh twice a day conversations with your consumers you know a structured conversation with your consumer um but behind the scenes to to data mine uh to to narrow down to your specifics of the audience sets uh what are the kind of technologies that you used or was it entirely an applied technology game look I think most of the technologies which are rightly available in in in the current scenario I mean you talk about the utilization of the search trends dynamic marketing and all those sort of things from a commerce perspective I think even if you really think from a conversion perspective I think these are the technologies which are giving result so if I talk about personalization and we have deployed couple of such solutions like we have actually put the complete emphasis on uh response from our chat boards earlier it used to be one of the thing but now it is actually something which is driving when people are asking for deliveries people are asking for services so this is at the customer experience front but if you talk about from a demand perspective right these are the dictionary demands so which I think got affected so much in the past one quarter and four months certain technologies like personalization customization at a scale which we were earlier also doing were like little bit not giving result because the context has changed completely so if I really think from a perspective now people are buying chairs and tables more as compared to maybe beds I think the whole shift in this past four months have actually taken like caught us unaware in terms of this whole efforts on personalization and customization I want to just talk about in terms of furniture industry and more so from a tech perspective there are only two queries if you really think from a customer perspective if they want to have buy a furniture one is actually how this furniture will go with their surroundings the colors and other things and second is fit or not so I think AR is one technology on which we are working extensively and we are trying to find a solution there ultimately the color and other combinations is still are like it's a very very personalized choice and we are not able to find answer till now with a lot of our data but here is something where we are actually bullish about and probably you will see a lot of things actually happening on our website in that area fantastic in fact so you talked about one specific tool sets of technologies that you're currently using and going to be deploying more aggressively which is augmented reality in virtual reality and how you're going to create customer walkthroughs and fitments and all that Bharat in your experience you know since you clarified that you are essentially a digital native product what is the kind of technological outreach that you think is most suitable for your kind of brand for the customer outreach and engagement both so outreach to begin with and then engagement so for us I think there is a broad playbook that businesses you know like ours typically follow when it comes to outreach I think social media is the top priority these days and within social media channels depending on your tg it could be Facebook Instagram Snapchat and other you know other micro kind of platforms that do exist but overall I think social is a very critical channel for outreach beyond social I think you know for acquisition you're looking at you know the general channels that a lot of marketers have used over the years but if the channels have evolved over time you know be it email marketing be it sms campaigns that you do be it google be it seo that you know that is important but so these are the things that are really important because see digital customers where are they coming from to find about you they're either searching for your product or they either see the product when they're on you know somewhere natively they are on let's say on a news website in the seo product a lot of that heavy lifting is done by these giants for you for example google would do a lot remarketing retargeting if you don't do it right another interesting thing that has worked for us work for us is programmatic so you really hyper locally kind of target and there are various other things that advertising can push that for you at the right stage so that's what I outreach and you know another thing is within social media there's a lot of kind of content you can do videos is hot for example every brand has to figure out what works for them and if they figure that out they should kind of push the pedal and actually did growth on one one two or three of those kind of channels but if you look at the customer journey when the customer gets acquired I think that that is when the challenge kind of really begins how do you retain that customer you know and then again social media pays a huge role but beyond that it's the brand's visibility you know are you sending them emails do you have a close connection with your customers are you sending them feedback forms you know do you have some for example chat and messaging right what kind of a customer experience are you giving them you know if they're able if they want to talk to you do they have to fill up inform or do they have to go the traditional view of emailing you or can they do it in the second very quickly and can they get a reply within the next six hours can they can then holistically can you plug all of this universe of social media email chat bots and google ads and you know instagram dms and all of this can you then put all of this together and build a cohesive kind of universe for your customers and and that I think is the really big challenge of retention is something that has takes takes the cake here I think it's it's the most difficult thing this year you know retention we see repeats as high as about 35 percent so we know what we're doing is working then content can be plugged into several other ways it could be video content which really works for us it could be static content you know I missed the missed the point on influencer marketing which is very important for us as well for brand awareness but yeah I could go on and on the the videos are the you know you actually covered it very well it's a very comprehensive overview of what works and doesn't work uh incidentally you know what as a student of the internet I've been observing is that in this current times are two paradoxical trends in terms of marketing have actually come out there they're at both ends of the spectrum as you know email marketing has actually come back with the bank and we are seeing uh you know emails coming back and more personalized emails with much open rates much higher open rates and customer engagement rates podcasts has come back uh you know right from New York Times to some other publishers uh podcasts has come back at the other end of the spectrum is a deployment of machine learning and artificial intelligence so these are two broad spectrums of technological interventions but you know Sanjay the thing is the thing is a lot of companies a lot of organizations even really really large organizations they have to realize and I'm sure they know this but you know the way we look at it is that we really don't need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to marketing technologies there is so much out there that is happening and let these guys really know AI who really know ML who really know how to build all of these bots let them do it if we have to you know kind of customer something for ourselves it's always there but we typically you know we see that when we work with these organizations especially SaaS companies that are global and are building global kind of products either from India or you know selling to India we see that there's a lot of value and the ROAs are very very high on those technologies so we would rather just plug them in and you know get on with it yes absolutely totally understandable Jana in terms of specific technologies marketing technologies uh you know we as you said we've looked at the complete spectrum um where do you see the challenges in terms of deployment you know uh I'm not just talking of the skill sets alone uh but do you see other challenges in terms of adaptability of the of the of the organization because you have to email you know you do not have time these days to seed this into the organization and somehow you have to actually um you know uh to pack it in the limited time that we have so that we are able to be more nimble-footed so what are the kind of challenges um that um uh you're facing and I would leave that thought with Shweta also to think about it Shweta in terms of you know your consumer durable products and specifically your healthcare devices what has been the challenge in terms of deployment uh reaching out and what is it that you've discovered that you need to do better uh you know so first let's let's uh have Janax views on the subject so essentially what we've noticed is a lot of time the expectations are really high I mean the CM was when they started talking to us uh they expect the moon to be uh you know literally got down to the earth and delivered tomorrow morning uh with all the whims and fancies uh that you see these days uh you know the jargons that we use rather yeah what happens is you need to realize there is a lot of back and forth that needs to go into building newer sets of uh technology deployment thankfully in our space what happens is uh I call it the learning block for every marketer or somebody who's wanting to deploy these technologies like taking up from what Ashish just said about the role of bot in the Godrej ecosystem uh we are talking to one of the biggest brands in the world where they want to do a bot is uh a lot more simpler you know which which needs to blend in what their website brings to the table so when you're talking about such kind of things you need to kind of figure out whether your back end is ready to do this uh to deliver on what my framework would want to deliver or rather the way you have looked at it uh as a delivery me a lot of times you realize that that is not ready you know that is not the case we have to work with the cto first try and fix up all these uh back end issues and then go back to the brand teams or the marketing teams and kind of show showcase to them the way the process is going to work essentially what I am trying to get to is you need to have a clear cut defined visual on how much is the AI component or how much is the data analytic component you want to bring to the table today because it's a gradual learning all organizations will need to go undertake this learning exercise at some point in time today tomorrow or whatever but you need to have a visual you need to have some uh kind of benchmarks which are achievable which kind of do not uh you know dilute the importance of embracing these technologies to your uh to your staff today you know the guys who are dealing with this today cannot get dissolutioned with it we should not be scared of it so there is an hr element to that as well but I believe overall the acceptance level has phenomenally increased people do read a lot before they kind of approach or come to us for solutioning uh data analytics uh artificial intelligence I wouldn't say ml is here as yet because a lot of ml uh the real key components of ml are not yet being deployed completely simply because again you know you are in the learning stage you are in a primitive stage uh so you have to have the right vision uh yeah yeah Janak I think you you've hit the nail on the head you specifically talked about the lack of organizational preparedness you know you talked about the multiple decision makers and too many stakeholders and then finally when they get it right they want to get it overnight so I think that is that is the real problem and one of the solutions which has been suggested by the pundits and I quoted initially the Harvard Business Review that CMOs have to be morphed into chief marketing technologies my question to Shweta is Shweta are you ready to be the CMT? I think I am already so so Sande I call this era as the digital Darwinism right so so Darwin's theory going on to that one uh if marketers do not change or become smarter you know it'll be very difficult to sustain so I think I think that's something which which uh every traditional market here and not just market even organizations right so organizations who may not adjust with the way that the customers are evolving at this stage where they are using almost all kind of technologies and India being a younger country you know you have the younger generation generation Z the most and uh you know their consumer and uh the customer behavior their content consumption pattern everything is so different if the organizations do not come up uh and they just wait and watch uh it'll be very difficult for them specifically in this scenario to kind of sustain so I guess uh you know it is as organization need to follow the digital Darwinism and kind of you know uh come up to the scale and the level uh now the second point which you mentioned so I do see technology as an enabler right so uh it it's all about what do you want so it's a customer decision journey it's the customer lifetime wherein probably a technology may also be used uh like the chatbot can be used by the customer support team because you know they need to respond to queries maybe an artificial intelligence could be a machine learning or national language processing would be required within the device itself which is more of a product innovation and not just going out and the third kind of technology enablements could be you know leveraging programmatic or uh you know leveraging creative optimization because when we are talking about digital uh you know it's too complex because so many platforms so what is working for us probably bringing in artificial intelligence at that stage where we can try out various creatives on the fly and these uh performs to give the best of ROI because ultimately you know as you know many of the people had mentioned that ultimately the marketer has to see the ROI and the CMO will always ask for ROI right so I think it's uh it's important but uh it needs to be looked at at a strategic picture and not just you know one juncture that's what I kept saying that if you look if take customer as a very transactional uh you know moment wherein we do a transaction and we just forget about the customer I don't think that it is going to work so probably you need to look at the complete uh lifetime value of that customer and uh and then many in that relationship go out uh leveraging technologies but call at the end of the day technology is an enabler uh so it's not that the that the strategy is formed as for the technology but then the technology needs to fit in the strategy and then to enable each of the departments and the vision of the company uh to achieve whatever the organizations want to achieve so so that's my view and the challenge that you know I was talking about I guess every marketer has the same challenge specifically digital the pie so what is the size of the pie in terms of investors uh I I guess if if we show them the ROI the pie increases so so that's why we have been observing uh even with the with the current company and since the time I've because I've been associated with digital for quite some time and uh this has been always the struggle so I guess as and when the marketers come up to the speed follow the digital Darwinism I guess the pie is also going to only increase uh and the ROI loss time yes uh Shweta I think this is that this is wonderfully put by you digital Darwinism survival of the fittest but tell me when it comes to medical devices and Philips is one of the largest producers of medical devices in the world um do you still hold truth is this fact that it has to be the survival of the fittest that there needs to be a more you know uh socially driven return of investment on medical devices get share us with us your thoughts on medical devices and consumer engagement so uh I mentioned it in the beginning also so COVID-19 to some extent for this particular business has been uh uh you know phenomenal in terms of uh the kind of customer engagement which has started on digital right so we never thought about people taking so much of interest in healthcare and now you see you know the content consumption on COVID-19 and on healthcare has increased a lot so uh it is something to do with that uh you know because the customers have become smarter uh obviously the trend is changing uh the devices business has always been when the B2B is always considered to be little lagging behind because B2C is more dynamic more happening and you know there are some quick turn around so uh probably B2B is always considered as a really laid back but I think this change has definitely uh you know uh transformed uh you know the whole way of looking at uh uh healthcare uh and even the devices at time you know the doctors limited professionals in healthcare uh the doctor needs to monitor his patients at the same time looking at the vitals and I guess that's where the connected monitors and all these devices which have inbuilt artificial intelligence and machine learning that comes into the scene because the devices are connected that this moment all smart devices uh you know you can actually read through all the vitals even sit in at home so even doctors and sons of certain patients you know or aging parents can actually see their uh you know their history as well as you know how they're performing their recovery or not so all those things have made it more smarter and healthcare you know is is one of the sector where in the data the amount of data which is there is huge you know almost thousands of exabytes so obviously all of them is usable because some privacy norms there but it's a huge segment and it's a very promising segment to uh move ahead to move forward all right in fact sounds very promising and and you've you've put it as objectively as you could um I think that brings me to the next point of our discussion which is about the challenges in terms of deployment of martech marketing technology and one of the things we initially uh I initially alluded to was a fine balance that you need to draw between you know uh data privacy the consumer data privacy and how do you uh harness the consumer to craft more you know personalized communication to him so um let me begin with mukul and I would like all five of you to you know uh give me short answers on this one because we need to cover the last leg of our conversation which is some amount of where do we go from here so mukul what are the challenges that you expect or you faced in the deployment of martech so uh like some of the problems uh which janak brought up right uh now we are necessarily a 14 year old uh company and when the website was built initially uh it was built on drupal and still is on drupal what technically happens is when you have so much data and so much content and when i'm saying data i'm talking about our data that is the text the images the links everything if you want to migrate it to a newer technology uh it will take you about two years without breaking anything obviously because and what happens is because all the traffic we have about 70 75 percent of it is organic search so that's google news google discover everything and anything breaking will impact your traffic directly and once you're impacted it'll take you six months to one year to come back there's no no getting away the google thing so one of the challenges in addition to and i think janak touched this but uh it's not very easy to immediately move it's it's a very continuous process it takes time but we are slowly and steadily trying to do that with in phases because uh while we want to adapt the latest technologies we also want to make sure nothing breaks that is most important uh then we are compliant with all the data norms like if you heard of gdpr ccpa and the latest brazilian one which came out so i think a lot of countries are becoming very sensitive about that so now in terms of data we inform the users in the form of a pop-up very loud pop-up not like a very small in ticker where we say you know we are collecting your data blah blah blah and the user has an option to opt out of it yeah so the user has an option to opt out of it and they have an option not to see personalized ads so that that is very good uh that is a very good law at least uh in eu and california ccpa and now the brazilian countries are implementing it so we we are following all that as well but the biggest challenge i would say is uh is adapting the latest technologies without breaking anything but we do try our best to keep doing it at the fastest pace possible but we would prefer it to be way faster than what it is right now absolutely i think you've you've said it well ashish um you know to some extent you've been a part of a bit of a legacy organization but which is now reinventing itself at a good pace and the god ready commerce is a point in time uh what are the challenges that you faced from deployment of marketing new marketing technologies in your organization yeah from an organization which is actually 129 years in business some of the systems are 30 years 40 years so one thing is yes the other thing is actually changing the uh perception of the people also there's many people in the organization are there from a long period of time so more than actually technology the biggest barrier is actually changing the mindset the moment actually mindset is change i think technology is an easy piece to solve my view is changing the mindset first before actually you actually think about technology change very true uh barat so we've talked about organizational preparedness lack of uh you know lack of organizational preparedness the speed of execution ensuring that nothing breaks uh in between because you're in a live business and then the change in mindsets which is you know ashish also brought about this point very well um would you like to add something to this yeah i think i think for us specifically and just the way of businesses are adapting to digital transformation uh you know the prophecies i think it's definitely going to happen that a lot of marketing dollars are now start going to uh you know these digital platforms um the challenge that i see personally from a 10 year 20 year perspective is the humongous dependence dependency on two or three different platforms um as you know internet businesses are monopolistic in nature large internet businesses so heavy dependency on google on facebook uh you know i think is not good for the overall business because these these companies are very fickle when it comes to their advertising uh norms and they just really know how to govern of any kind of money you give or give to them so i think some level of uh governance to these platforms will be needed um and even amazon for that matter globally uh you know some level of governance to them introducing their private labels for that matter you know you know when they say that a big bizarre alliance does it it's not the same you know because the markets are very very different fragmented in their case but in your online commerce case let's say globally uh a market leader would take up on the market mostly uh or the majority of the market so i think i think some level of governance will be needed and so that these guys these guys don't have their way throughout yeah corporate governance um is is a another good aspect you brought out shweta uh you know you talked about uh initially we were we touched about privacy and data privacy uh and i know you're very passionate about corporate social responsibility share with us how the organizations can can balance their uh you know pecuniary or you are the corporate interest with the social responsibility and what kind of the deployment of these technologies which can be very pervasive what kind of responsibilities that they impose on a corporate right so it's actually a difficult question sanjay and you know very subjective because every market year will have will find a different limit you know to what uh responsibility is and you know where all we can uh you know draw the line uh but from my perspective i think when you think from a customer perspective not from a technology perspective but from a customer perspective uh it's easy to decide that what is good and what is bad uh rather than looking at what are the returns we look uh specifically on the returns that we are getting from customer it makes the uh you know thing difficult because then you are you're not at all bothered that how that your customer feeds uh second is you know to understand the customer so using these technologies to understand your customer more uh typically what we do is we have an email id we have a phone number we don't know which uh you know uh mood the customer is in what he wants to consume and then we start bombarding so i guess uh using technology more and more technology to understanding what your customer behavior is what he wants to whether he wants to listen to you or not and and making sure that you have these uh you know ab testing or you know various uh uh cash points there wherein you can set which touch point works better so they need to be very uh you know in an aggressive manner understanding the customer and then using technology to reach out and then uh you know kind of uh you know get your objective uh though it's not always possible now with data with brands like you know ours or various of the bigger brands who have a legacy who have a database and there are a lot of stringent rules as well with them which are good you know some recent announcements of the talk various of chinese players there uh so fortunately or unfortunately our uh data service is out of europe so obviously we have to follow the gdpr guidelines in india you know they're not still not so much of stringent guidelines that we have all day which may be coming very soon but but at this uh you know so so then it becomes very important for us to understand that where do we draw the line uh you know is it uh and and we do have technologies to understand that whether the person has interacted this creatively didn't click so that means i will not show him the creative next time when it comes so i'll show so there are various ways of dramatic and you know uh uh use it we targeting and all those things uh all the re-targeting also with a frequency cap so that we don't end up you know show him the ad again and again so there are available uh options there in the technology and the software just that marketers need to use them so most of them uh you know most of us we don't even use these features which are available in almost all the kind of analytics that we get so uh so and and as brands we need to be responsible of the data that we have uh and you know creating governance that's what you know uh mukul and barat had mentioned so is very important uh now whether it's a corporate governance or it's it's a central uh you know uh governance that you know probably the the government has uh uh you know communicated i think that depends on nation to nation but yeah you've said it you've encapsulated it very well uh while technology and data is of extreme importance but before everything else comes customer and customer satisfaction is the key i'm afraid we've run out of time but before we actually go i would exercise my uh you know right as a moderator to ask janak to do a little bit of crystal ball gazing before we go because we've already crossed our uh a lot of time we've had a very engaging conversation janak where do we go from here just do a little bit of crystal ball gazing for us and how do you see the martec uh you know space panning out in the next six months uh so in fact i just uh wanted to kind of address a few issues that barat and sweta just shared we are not even talking about vision computing as yet and we are discussing privacy uh you know all our products that we have in the market are gdpr compliant and ccpa compliant as is the norm globally because we deal with global clients but what's going to happen is the vision capability of the artificial intelligence is going to change the way we re engage with our customers from here on uh what i mean to say is that camera that security camera probably will give you a lot more insights into the age bracket the ethnicity the kind of a mug or a cup that uh uh that a person was carrying while entering a mall or exiting a mall you know coming into the store look at amazon i think they've really kind of got it out there uh you know where your interaction is happening through a chat bot on customer service but your product recognition is also being enabled through cameras this is already happening we need to live with this new reality the fintech has gone ahead and kind of uh really taken a big leap on the vision capabilities of artificial intelligence or the computer learning that is something that i think we need to be conscious of yeah coming up today the mainstream or the mainline consumers of tomorrow all those kids who are born in 16 17 18 are going to behave very differently than the way sanjay the way we address our generation or you know or the kind of marketing mix that we're going to see so there are going to be lots and lots of changes happening we will need to be equipped and prepared to kind of embrace them uh sanjay i believe i would bet my money on the vision capabilities of the computer now because absolutely i think yeah you know i think you talked about the vision computing and i think this has been fascinating as a moderator i would be actually amiss in my duty if i do not ask an audience question so we i will only take one question because we've run out of time friends uh this question is by debanshu benerji and this is for ashish ashish debanshu is asking you that uh do you have any roadmap at godridge on integration of online and offline channels to start implementation so that you can have better consumer buying or better service experience uh you know um so what do you have to say to that we are an omni channel commerce company we already have integration in terms of pricing promotion and we are integrating our channel partners also because look as a brand we have outreach more actually from our partners as compared to our direct presence so as a part of the strategy you the person can see actually maybe in three to four months time period we will have our all channel partners also as part of the overall complete solution so i think from that perspective we are on that path great uh with this i'd like to thank our future our viewers who are watching us from all parts of the country hopefully from different parts of the world too thank you viewers for standing by and and listening to us watching us thank you my panelists for a very engaging conversation we've crossed 65 minutes and we didn't have a moment to pause so i'm really grateful for your enriching insights thanks everybody and we look forward to seeing you on any on another day thanks for watching thank you thank you thank you thanks a lot thank you everyone