 good morning everyone and thank you Mr. Sinha for joining us today. Before we start the conversation I would like to ask everyone in the hall how many of you buy jewelry online if you can just raise your hands okay. So if you buy jewelry online I'm sure like everyone is aware about character is a very popular and known brand I'm a customer myself I'm wearing one of the pieces so we'll quickly get into the conversation. Today's theme is leveraging technology to drive customer centricity. So Mr. Sinha I want to start off with Carrot Lane postcard. I think it's like the perfect example where Carrot Lane as a brand leverage technology to record personalized video messages on the rings for your loved ones. So if you can share what was the insight behind this. Jewelry as a category plays a very very powerful and emotional role in the lives of people right. We buy jewelry either for a very important occasion or if we want to gift it to a relationship that truly matters to us and you know jewelry is it stays for a lifetime right so you buy the jewelry but what we realized is that customers would buy the jewelry the jewelry stays for a lifetime but the emotion associated with that period you know at that moment of gifting that emotion wouldn't last that long right so if you wrote if you wrote a small note with it or if you said something I mean unless somebody was recording it and notes also they often get misplaced or they get lost I'm talking about five years 10 years 20 years into the future and we were thinking about how do we capture the emotion along with the moment of gifting the jewelry and allow customers to have it for posterity you know so that they can look back about on it and relive those moments so that's when we launched the postcards feature for the audience if you're not aware of it you know when you buy a carrot lane jewelry you can actually read your record your personal message for the person that you are gifting it to and whenever the person who's received the jewelry as a gift the ring we've started it with the rings category she just has to scan her ring and the video will play back so no matter where you are you just need to have your phone and you need to be wearing or have the ring with you and just scan it and it'll play back that memory and that emotion at any point in time and I'm sure it's not an easy thing to do so if you can share what were the you know execution challenges and how has been the audience response okay yeah it was not easy you know when we were working on it see scanning the ring is actually not so difficult but the problem is that you know if we were doing it in our office and where we were testing it we could control the lighting we could control the angle from which we're going to scan it but when we have to make it in a way where a customer can use their phone and every phone comes with a different camera resolution there will be different kinds of lighting they will scan it from different angles so to make it work where that personal message of that individual pops up for that particular ring despite all these challenges was not an easy task and we have an in-house technology team we actually worked on this for over one and a half years before we could bring it live for our customers launch this last month only yes we did we launched it just before valentine's day and we thought that was a great moment to be able to bring it to customers and in the first very first month of february itself we have had more than a thousand messages being uploaded along with the jewelry that the customer the ring that the customer has bought so definitely it's had a great response so it was only for the rings right now we started with rings and we obviously want to take it over more categories but rings is easy to scan you know if you do it for earrings it's not that easy to scan or you need to take it off so which is why we started with rings okay that's very interesting uh also you know you started off as an online brand and now when then ventured offline so from a digital approach now the approach is omni channel so what is the challenges you know in ensuring a seamless experience across online and offline channels right um so i'll start i mean like you said we started online and the reason we began opening stores is because what we found in our early years is that many customers were coming to our website going all the way to an ad to cart but they were not finally converting so there were many who were converting but many were not an ad to cart is the most powerful signal of an intent to purchase for a customer so when they drop off at that stage you want to understand why um and when we would speak to these customers and they would say you know at the end of the day this is jewelry right and i i mean i love the design i love your pricing but i'm not yet ready to buy it uh online uh so there were a bunch of customers who were ready and a bunch of customers who are not uh and we said the only way to try and you know solve for this is to start opening stores and allow these customers who are not ready to buy online to be able to experience us uh in stores um that um you know it was a very big learning journey for us because when we started opening stores we had a lot of friction right and many brands went through it customers would come to a store and they would bargain for an extra discount and if they did not get that discount they would um call up online and the online person would say okay i'll give you an extra discount because the online person wanted the credit for it uh and they would just give the extra discount and the customer we would basically make a fool of ourselves right um so we started you know we learned from that and we said we will not do any discretionary discount yeah so whatever offers we have it is published on our website the exact same offer will be available in our stores or online or anywhere else right um so you remove any kind of reason for a customer to think one channel may be better than the other our policies are a hundred percent the same across channels um but the other problem to solve for us was on the part of incentives the omni channel is not just about opening stores and having online right when the let's say a customer calls an online customer service person saying i need advice and i want to know if i can buy this ring now if the online person knows that feels that i will get credit only if the customer buys online you know for my incentive they are not going to tell the customer look if you're not sure go to a store nearby right they're going to try and convince the customer to buy online and that may not be optimal because the customer may not be ready for it right and the same thing could happen at a store um if a store tells the customer that no no buy here two days later if you buy an online i don't know if you'll get the same experience we are not um you know it's not helping us in any way um so we said we will give 100% credit to the customer service person irrespective of whether the customer is buying from them now or whether the customer is buying from somewhere it's later so if i have interacted with the customer the customer may have bought 10 days later at a store but if i'm an online customer service agent i will get full credit for that sale as much as the store also will get right so now there's incentive for us to collaborate because if i can work together with them i will be able to make sure that i convert the customer and be able to therefore and be rewarded for it as well right so i think in our initial years we were trying to fix all of these uh problems uh on you know removing the friction for an omni channel brand and now we've moved to a stage where uh we are actually building an experience for customers by leveraging customer understanding right so now um you know like we are in santa cruise over here right and we have a store in andheri west we have a store in bandra um what we start doing now is we start trying to map what is it that our customer is browsing over here so if i know that people in santa cruise and in the bandra andheri west region they are browsing certain designs much more than they are browsing some of the other ones we will make sure that the inventory that is available in these stores are aligned with that right so in a way you are just when the customer comes to your store you already have designs and pieces in the store that most of them in this area are liking and that's when you truly start leveraging omni channel you know you're using that information of the customer behavior online to actually enhance business at the store that's very interesting and since we are talking about inventory sales i'm curious to know if you can share how much online and offline contributing to the overall growth of caroline uh you know that's a very uh that's a question i get asked quite often and the answer is not an easy one okay because uh if i tell you about where does the final transaction happen and where does the customer finally buy um more than 90 percent of the final transaction happens in stores we now have 260 stores across 100 cities um so more than 90 percent is now happening in stores but if i if i flip the question and say where does the customer journey start right um and where does the customer desire get built where do they decide what they want to buy and whether they want to buy from caroline or not yeah 80 to 90 percent happens online right so by the time they come to our store they have already experienced and they know our designs they know the relative pricing and all of those things so without this online space that 80 to 90 percent business that's happening in stores would never be happening right and in a way it's fully integrated that the customer is not thinking online or retail yeah they are just thinking that i want to buy jewelry and where can i get the best jewelry for whatever i'm looking for right so if we talk about the customer profile is it the same that comes online and offline or is the profile is different yeah uh it's a little it's a little different some small like for example more customers online come for gifting right and you know actually um one very interesting um inside over here is that we all know men don't like shopping and men going to a jewelry store is just like they're completely out of place right they don't know so they really love the fact that they can buy online right and they really love the fact that again we have a 15 day money back policy so if you don't like it we will take it back and give you a full refund right so that's a big question because for men to understand what jewelry will my spouse like or my daughter whoever they are buying for is it's a black hole out there yeah they are very rarely going to be able to get it right so for them the convenience of being able to buy online and knowing that if they don't get it right it can still be fixed by exchanging it for some other piece of jewelry or something i mean that's great so a lot of gifting happens and men buy more online especially if they're buying for gifting and women by women prefer prefer to come for them it's an it's not a you know it's not something which they enjoy spending that time they want to try out those designs right they're thinking not just what i'm going to buy now but what i'm going to buy next time as well that's very interesting that men buy jewelry more also you know carrot lane is now a part of titan group and you know i just want to step back in time when the partnership was done carrot lane started as a like a online brand while titan strength was offline so what were the learnings you took from titan and vice versa what did they learn about online from you okay i'll start with what we got from them titan as you know runs tanishk which is india's most trusted jewelry brand and you know the we had started our business in 2008 the one thing money can buy pretty much everything the one thing it can't buy is trust right so for us this association with titan allowed us to build trust with customers and in a way leap into the trust building space because of course step by step we were beginning to build a customer base and trust with them but this allowed us to really take a leap into that space and one of the first things that we did in 2016 after this association was we rebranded ourselves to say carrot lane a tanishk partnership right because that truly expressed who we were as a brand an independent brand but in association with tanishk we also learned a lot from titan about how to run physical stores because we didn't know how to do that we knew how to sell online and we had opened a few stores but they were just very very few but running the store how to manage the operations how to deliver great customer experience and in fact now many of our business partners or franchisees are franchisees who've been with titan for many years right so we were able to leverage this franchisee community with them as well what titan got from us was so titan had been watching this space for a long time and of course they had tanishk and they launched mia after some time but they did not have the understanding or the deep understanding of how online customer behavior is and how do you engage and build that online traffic and convert that into stores or footfall traffic and that was a space where we were able to add value to them you know this learning that we had okay okay and also I want to understand how does carrot lane elevate customer experience yeah so it's very very important you know when customers actually for any brand in any category but particularly so when they're coming to buy jewelry it's a very special moment for them and we have a belief in carrot lane where we say that you know it's the small things that make a difference so actually when the customer is walking in it's not as if we do something which is you know which requires a lot of money or something that will create a special experience in a way that requires that's intensive yeah it's little so I'll give you examples like we have a rule in our stores that the customer should never have to open the door right we should open the door for the customer we must greet the customer within the first three seconds of them entering many of our stores don't even have doors right they're open entrance like the mall stores in particular we must greet the customer in the first three seconds and obviously body language plays a very big role not just that we have so there's a whole host of lessons that we've learned over time and small things that could make that difference another thing that we do and that really has helped us build loyalty and repeat is that most brands you know after you have finished the transaction with the customer you forget the customer right sorry the customer will get an sms or an email saying please rate us you know now nps question is is there right but that's more like an automated email what we do is we take the time to call the customer on the fifth day after their purchase right and we ask them that look is everything okay and he's still happy and you know we know that up to 15 days we can do a full money back for them so we know that if they are not fully happy right now we can solve it for them and indeed one of a customer will have some question saying oh you know the ring size now that I'm wearing it it's actually one size small so when you proactively reach out to the customer and you solve any small concern that they may have they appreciate your brand so much more right they really feel that this is a brand that thinks of me even after the sale is over they've not forgotten me so it's this whole journey from pre sales to post sales but little little things over there that we do to try and elevate that experience so that you spoke about the customer experience if we talk about the marketing and communication strategy what is there for you know strategy for the carrot lane and you know what is the media mix what is the preferred medium for carrot lane actually I want to start by saying that I truly believe that for a category like ours our brand is built not by the marketing money that we are spending but with every engagement that we have with the customer in our stores so I feel that our true brand builders are our jewelry consultants or sales staff in stores or online because with every interaction with the customer they are building an experience that the customer has about carrot lane and that's really what the brand is having said that marketing plays a very important role in building awareness because I need to get them into the store in the first place right before I can do all of this and given that we cater to a younger audience we cater to an audience which buys more for everyday wear and this audience lives their life mostly in the digital space we actually do most of our advertising in the digital space whether it's you know through meta or google or youtube and all of these platforms instagram is a big platform for us and so a lot of our and today we live in a world where the communication is actually one is to one right we're not running advertisement where you know hundred million people across country are going to see the same ad so the communication is different to each individual depending on their profile and depending on you know what they are likely to engage with with us we have a little bit of time so I'll quickly ask my last question if you talk about you know the e-commerce space digital space a lot of scam is happening so I want to understand what carrot lane is doing to mitigate that and also you know reduce consumer concern when it comes to buying jewelry online okay to buy so scams actually are you're right they are happening you know you keep reading every day you read in the newspaper some new kind of scam that's come up see to build first of all to build trust with customers it you have to work on it over years right it doesn't happen and it's about every situation how you deal with it that adds up one after the other to build trust and I feel today we are at a space where a brand I mean at least carrot lane has been able to build that trust for customers to feel comfortable about shopping online but if you are if you are a new brand I think your single biggest focus has to be on how can I make sure I make every experience and we were always focused on that every single customer how can we make sure we give them a great experience you know we live in a world today where people you know they write about their experience online within minutes whether they love it or whether they hate it specifically talking about scams you know we we put you know the best that we can do as a brand is to tell our customers that um you know come only to carrot lane website do not listen to people who just call you randomly always validate if you have any questions for example when a customer shops from us we'll send them on an email a small snippet that says that you know we don't do any raffles or we never ask for otp's and stuff like that because commonly this is what happens having said that we don't have any control about any random person trying to use our brand name or any other brand's name right so I think people have to just be that much more careful and that much more aware about it okay thank you Adul I started the conversation by asking everyone in the audience I want to end by asking you do you buy jewelry online I do yes for my wife mostly but even when we have to gift to others I do buy online and sometimes you go to store would you prefer online or offline it depends yeah it really depends I remember when I joined carrot lane eight years ago from my first salary at carrot lane I had to buy something for my wife right so I bought this necklace that I thought was nice so the first day when I gifted it to her so I ordered it online I got it home and when I gifted it to her the first evening she said this is wonderful I love it thank you and then two days later she asked me uh Adul you had told me something about the 15 day exchange you know at carrot lane what is that policy so I said yeah well you know if you don't like it you can exchange it but that was one of the the points that made me confident about buying the jewelry because I knew that but I was also one of those husbands who could not guess what she really wanted and over time you know I think now we've reached a stage where I tell her look why don't you just pick what you want rather than me trying to guess what you would want thank you so much Adul for joining us today it was a lovely conversation thank you thank you