 Is this called pin drop silence? I think so, it's the pin drop silence of everyone being on mute I think. Or lull before the storm. It means to be seen who is going to storm who. Aalok is in a mood. Sorry everyone, I will just start checking. Sagar, we are getting live? Yes. Kyaati, you may start. Firstly, a very good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. A very warm welcome to all of you to this exchange for media's ongoing series called moments made by marketing sponsored by Salesforce. Now, marketing for financial services in a digital first world where we explore how technology brands help create marketing moments and personalized experience. And that is what today's discussion, the webinar is going to be about where brands today in to connect with consumers through hyper personalized, you know, messaging in an only channel environment creating a moment made by marketing that elevates the consumer experience in digital first world. Even our financial services needs to be there, right? How do we choose them? How does marketeers bring out those financial services to the forefront? The financial services sector is built on transparency and hinges on data and technology. However, the diage of data available to a market here can impede marketing efforts. Hence brands seek technology that offers real time engagement, consumer insights and hyper personalization, which of course can help create agile solutions, offer seamless customer engagement across the service life cycle. We have the stalwarts of the industry right here with me on this webinar. So I'm not going to say much right here, but introduce them to all of you as we will talk about today, marketing of financial services in a digital first world. Joining us on this webinar on the panel will have with us Mr. Aalob Khan, Chief Marketing Officer of Max Life Insurance. Very warm welcome to you, Mr. Khan. Thank you very much. Very nice to be here. We also have with us Mr. Subhashish Ghosh, joint president and head institutional business, marketing and alliances, Kojak Mahindra Life Insurance. Very warm welcome to you, Mr. Ghosh. Thank you. On the panel, we also have Mr. Lakshman Bilyotham, Chief Marketing Officer, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. A very warm welcome to you, sir. Good afternoon, Cathy and everyone. And thank you so much. On the panel, we also have Vishwajit Parashar, Chief Marketing Officer from Bajaj Capital. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Parashar. Thank you, Cathy. Pleasure to be on this panel. Thank you. Thank you. Last but not the least, on the panel, we have Aniruddha Joshi, director of Marketing Cloud from Bial's force. Very warm welcome to you, Mr. Joshi. Hello, everyone. Thanks for the warm welcome. Happy to be here. And chairing this session, we have with us Ronita Mitra, founder and chief strategist, brand eagle consulting. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Mitra. Thank you. Thank you, Cathy. And look forward to the discussion. Absolutely. Now, before I hand over the session to you, Mr. Mitra, I want to urge all our viewers right here that the discussions will get enriched and you will benefit most from it if you keep asking questions. So while the discussions are on, we encourage you to use the Q&A tab on the screens and send us your questions. Ms. Mitra will try and kind of include all the questions possible during the discussion. So please go ahead and do so. And over to you, Ms. Mitra. Thank you, Cathy. So we've all seen the world being a completely and altogether different place from what it was since the pandemic has set in. And we've all witnessed massive shifts in the way we've been living our lives. We have seen that technology has leapfrogged by several years in the last few months and has actually been at the forefront of driving many of these shifts. This escalation in the adoption of technology has redefined marketing. It has redefined what brands need to do to strengthen themselves. And sometimes, in fact, it has had deep and significant implications on how brands need to interact with its customers and deepen customer engagement. BFSI has always been one industry that has been ahead of the technology curve. In today's panel discussion, let's listen to and learn from the experiences and wisdom of some of the very senior leaders from the BFSI industry as to how they have taken technology to the next level to deliver personalized experiences and superior customer experiences. To begin with, can I ask each one of you, all five of you on the panel to very quickly talk about one key moment in the last 15 months that you have witnessed with your customer, which was a standout moment, completely unexpected, completely took you by surprise and was a big learning as to the big changes that are about to come about, that are about to face them and us. So can I ask each one of you to quickly talk about one such key moment? And then I'll ask the individual questions. Yes, Alok, would you like to go first? I guess I'm sitting on the panel as on my screen is the first box, so I'm just taking that opportunity. Thanks a lot. Well, if I look at your question and say that one singular, one standout moment, it is difficult for me to pick it up at the single moment because moments are many and one needs to identify a moment that really is the most relevant for the category that your brand is talking about and in our category, which is life insurance, our category is about the family. It's about the family's protection for future financial protection and everything else. So what we associate at least at max life with ourselves is how do we bring our category in relevance to family moments and make it relevant for the consumer as such. Now, ours is an emotional category, so it's all about trying to bring about a change in the perception of the consumers with respect to life insurance. Now, historically, life insurance has been a funny daddy, old talk about death, talk about morose-ness, talk about what will happen to the family in the past, but now with consumers changing and more importantly, even now in the situation, the data and technology becoming coming to fore with so much of information that we all get that we at max life, and I think even at the industry and hopefully Subashish would agree with me that we are changing the narrative from fear than moving it towards happiness and making the category more relevant for the current environment. This is not the India of the 16th and the 70s where we were going through various issues with respect to our own country and its economic development. We are no longer a developing country, we are pretty much reasonably in the developed kind of a state and getting there. So even we do realize that consumers narratives are not coming from limitations, but today's consumer is reasonably well aware of his opportunities and he is not in the game of saying, oh God, what's going to happen to me? This generation is pretty much in a positive frame. So our thinking is that family still anchors at least India pretty much. So we need to be in the space where the family is going to associate their happiness with our category and hence make our category more relevant. So I believe that we want to use more depend on the life in life insurance versus the topicalities of death, et cetera. And the moment you start talking about family, its relevance is towards happiness and it's towards positivity. So it's a half glass cold and half glass empty. We have seen our loyalty scores and our engagement scores whenever we participate with using the family events like, let's say even events like Diwali and Holy and all these festivals where families get together and the events of our category, it comes in quite, quite well. We actually create a sufficient number of conversation starters which helps our sales teams to initiate a conversation at the top of the funnel. So it's a way for addressing instead of using the regular old examples of what if you don't come home tomorrow? I think that era is over. Making the breadwinner feel while feel responsible, not feel burdened. That is where we have changed and we've seen sufficient good conversation starters giving us giving our agents and our sellers reasonable amount of entry into the houses of our prospective consumers and customers. Very clearly progressive outlook not towards the old age stuff not discussing death but discussing how your life can become better. Once you make plans, as they say, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So we are using those lingos to get our consumers to be ready for the future and frankly once you're ready, then go and enjoy life. So plan B is what makes a plan A that much more beneficial. So plan A but have a plan B and we use all those occasions to celebrate the breadwinner in the occasions on family events. That's all we've seen a very good response from our consumers. Thank you. Thank you, Alok. Very interesting family moments move from fear to positivity and actually enable the sales team with these insights to actually convert into business opportunities. Anirudh, can I request you to come next and just a small request to all of you for this particular question if we can just be a little quick about this particular question because we have lots to cover so that our audience can really gain from this discussion. I would really like it to be as enriching as possible. Yes, Anirudh. So again, I will not talk about a particular moment but generally a trends that I have seen so far I have whatever discussions I have with my customers during my conversations. So if you ask me, the few trends that we see are more related to the general theme about these trends is that how can I be more contextual or personalized in my in my interactions with the customers. So how can I be more relevant during the conversations that I am having. In that sense if you ask me the trends that I am seeing is how can I be more real time proactive in my conversations being personalized so that's very important to me. Then other things that I have seen is that the moments that matter they are not necessarily digital only. They are assisted as well so these are coming out very clearly in our customer conversations. Third thing that I want to see as a trend may not be a moment as such but in general trend that marketers are asking us is that how can AI assist in some of these moments that matter the most can AI help us in delivering that right personalized content or personalized messaging at the right moment in time. Thank you Anirudh. Very very interesting contextual personalized real time and I will definitely come back to you on the bit about AI so that you can tell our audience more about how you have been leveraging helping your customers leverage AI. So Vishwajit can I ask you to go next. So Bajaj Capital is a financial distribution house for 1964 and we have an open architecture like you know we help people achieve their financial goals through mutual funds, life insurance, bonds all kind of products under one group and I would say there are decades when nothing happens and there are days when decades happen. So last two year if I would really put it and if I really come out with moments there were two very important things which we have discovered. I want to take you back to the month of April when there was a lot of human cry, panic and people were down with COVID. So what we did we proactively tried to sense the voice of customers you know what is it actually they are feeling and we realize that they have a lot of customers have taken mediclaim from us. So what we proactively did we tried to connect with them we tried to help them with finding the right hospitals with oxygen beds because there were a lot of fake messages that were floating if you recall and we set up a proactively health desk to guide in our clients as to how can they have a cash less mediclaim facility how can we on their behalf speak to TPAs connect with health insurance providers and you will not imagine the kind of emotions were so high and when we helped them during those times to get their mediclaim reimbursements or to get them cash less reimbursements they are NPS scores jumped from 17 to 30 in just one month we did the survey and the second thing again the voice of customers people who were not down with COVID they were in a very panic mode they were you know concerned about market volatility because of their portfolios they were not clear whether the and the feeling was that the country will is locked down so markets will close so what should we do they will be doing with their money so we in a way you know and our industries go to do with education and awareness because people normally trust financial planners like us with their hard and money so we created a lot of you know awareness campaigns through webinars we made them available the top fund managers to discuss their portfolios portfolios were discussed and thanks to you know our regulators you know there is something called digital onboarding which is called KYC and in previous days it used to be kill your customers with lot of papers but now thanks to regulators it is digital onboarding is very very seamless process now so that is one thing which we started for new customer acquisition and you know understand their understand their emotions we tied up in a company called Omni life where we tried to help them understand their health issues you know the trying to convert their pessimistic into optimistic mode through yoga teachers instructors best of the people available in the market so that there is a regular engagement with our existing clients so broadly I would say those were the real testing times and lot of moments not just one moment very interesting thank you so much very very interesting proactive inciting and solutions for your customers we are going to come back to you for a little more discussion around the insights and the moments actually Subhashish can we hear from you on life insurance we have already got one perspective of life insurance looking forward to getting another perspective from the same industry I will tell you since you have asked about one moment I will tell you that one moment when the lockdown happened over a year ago obviously we were not one of us for that digitally to serve everything for the customer so for the reason for which they had to come to the branch we had to very quickly replicate and make sure that nobody ever needs to come to the branch so very quickly we went around it our NPS course took a nose dive what we found out is that and which probably instinctively now with hindsight we should have known India is a very high context economy here very high cultural context people want to meet people people want to talk and so one side is transaction the other side is advice transaction yes you can probably do online advice probably still people want to meet face to face so once we got that feedback and we would see it coming we actually had to scramble and open within the COVID guidelines the government guidelines and our own situation the way it was we'd open the branches for two hours a day three hours a day four hours a day to take care of the walk-ins because people wanted to come and talk to you in spite of whatever tools you gave them to service them online there was a certain set of people who did want to come and talk to you and surprisingly it was not dependent upon age to think that it was the 50 plus who walked in was wrong people of all types walked in people wanted clarification is COVID covered various types of clarifications we wanted in critical illness is COVID otherwise also is COVID covered so many other questions that otherwise they hadn't thought about some people quickly got in their nominees to be adjusted probably when they took a policy the nominee was somebody else now maybe they are different so I think the interesting part was that yes a lot of people did go digital 100% hello I think I lost you or I went out no Subhashesh you are you froze for a moment I think my internet is unstable so so while we tried to give all digital tools and we did give digital tools we were interestingly enough found out that a lot of people did want that physical comfort of an I2I comfort so I think I cannot look too far in the future probably like 3 years maybe 5 years it still has to be physical and digital but I don't think it is either one very interesting so while technology has pretty much really taken over our lives dominated our lives the importance of face-to-face interaction in India is equally important and at your point about the advisory the nominees was very interesting and I'll probably come back to you once again on that when we talk a little more about customer journey maybe you can talk a little more in detail about that Lakshman what about you on quickly on any key moment that was a highlight so at Ujjivan small finance bank we primarily serve the unserved and underserved segment which predominantly has seen the traditional forms of banking and with COVID now they were thrown into the world of the digital space so what we realized is that we had to carry them with us so over the last 4 years we realized this challenge long back so we always combined financial literacy with banking in every aspect of the initiative that we did across the globe moreover we moved to assisted forms of banking much early around 3 years back and we guided our customers and slowly segmented our customers understanding which customer is willing to adopt the digital channel which requires more of assisted purposes and which requires branched comment and this really helped us during the COVID period because when the market rules were introduced we could catch up on the early adopters very well and also in the process we streamlined many of our processes to make banking part more simpler so we saw an update happening in the digital space in a very big way but as we go along we also realized that trust is an important factor for this segment so the physical as well as assisted as well as the digital form will continue to evolve in its various formats across customer segments and this is something that I will elaborate as we go on sure thank you very interesting but I think the most interesting take out for me from what you just said is that you had even before COVID you had proactively been working on some of the solutions assisted digital solutions for your customers going by the segmentation and I think that's a very important learning for many of us you know which is to constantly proactively keep working on things so from there can be let's look at some of the specific aspects of how technology has helped us take forward businesses in the last one year as much as can I ask you to talk about you know with technology yes you did talk about the importance of face to face also but if you just focus on the technology site you know technology does help in one aspect which is hyper personalization and have you used on the channel communication to create personalized communication and personalized experiences for your customers in any way yes that's precisely what we are doing and we are in a journey for that we are very cautious that India is a large country not everybody is fluent in English so we are very clear that most of our communications now going forward and some of it has already started happening is in vernacular and we are trying to figure out from which landing page is he is he or she coming to our web and can our web can our website be responsive we haven't done it but we are on the way to see that then can the website look and feel and even the images everything change to take care of the person from where he has come because going forward we are very clear about it vernacular voice video these are the three things going forward we have to be that person whom the person is most comfortable we cannot put our values and our thought process and say look you have to be that the same thing you know we had to open the branches for two hours a day because people wanted to meet us they are my clients I can't tell him that sorry I can nudge but beyond that I have to be responsive to what she wants and the other thing is that the kind of social media platforms they have created normal 5 which everybody is which is Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Instagram and so on so forth customer can come to me she can come to me from any form she can she can write to me on Instagram she can write to me in Twitter she can put it on LinkedIn and I should be ready to respond to her in every which way I cannot say now you fill up this 5 page form necessarily I am a guide there but I should be able to respond to anybody in any channel all these modes of communication have to be put in together though your personality may be slightly different in each of these channels which obviously LinkedIn and Facebook may not go in Passage types but ultimately the customer is asking I have to respond to that person in that way whatever channel he or she is most comfortable with very Passage because I think you know the very important thing that you have talked about is actually making technology when you talk about vernacular voice video it's not just about what works for the brand or the organization but it's really what will work for the consumer and therefore using technology to make yourself make your brand more familiar more accessible to the consumer by making it less intimidating, more approachable more human. Mam it's always the consumer it has to be that we exist I mean all of us exist for the consumer we, consumer doesn't exist for us we exist for the consumer and we make a big mistake if you think it otherwise. Absolutely and I think thanks for re-iterating that because I think in any marketing forum that is something that we need to keep re-iterating that is a possible opportunity and hopefully keep reminding that to the young audiences that would be listening to all of you Alok now there has been quite a data deluge since over the last few years I would say but definitely in the last few months how have you used this data deluge to your advantage to possibly develop meaningful proposition solution services for your customers you don't mute Alok if you could unmute yourself please Sorry can you hear me now Yeah, so very quickly I think data is not something that's been of recent 20 it's been there with us for almost 10-12 years I would actually say that this time around the data is identified as a new normal and data is the new oil the way I understand it to be and therefore for marketers like us if we are still sitting on the creative landscape without understanding the data and becoming some sort of data scientists ourselves then we are losing out on the moments that we had that consumers are looking for data is is very important not only is data but analytics is that much more important now at maxlife we've been on this journey for about 10 years way back in 2011 we set up a small function called the AI works team so AI has an artificial intelligence and we embedded artificial intelligence professionals in our core functions so they could understand the business not just come from data scientists and say this is the way it's done but contextualize the need for data and increasingly we've been using the marketing analytics the Google 360 stacks to create personas for our own customers because that's what you need to do to be able to efficient to make your funnel that much more efficient so I'll give you a few things that we did typically from maxlife's perspective on our marketing and I'm coming from a marketing perspective I'm not talking the operations and the underwriting that's all data and everything else so on marketing campaigns we check the campaign performance analytics using the tools there to decide where to spend our money's more we would then also in the various funnels do a drop off analysis to know when the customers have dropped off in their cycles and re-address them you know personifying the new the area where they left to try and address their requirements from there itself on the consumer side we do analytics to understand what kind of products work for which segments using again data analytics tax and everything else on our online sales mostly online not so much on the offline side but more on the online sales we know exactly which funnel or which stage of the funnel did the customer drop we know which media mix will work for a particular persona and that's the way we define how do we address him again but leave him alone if he's dropped off we will re-market to him so the re-marketing tools are all coming from data analytics that happen there we do an A B testing to understand where all can we re-address a consumer segment at the end of the day the objective really Ronata is to make our business more efficient and we have been able to reduce our cost of acquisition on the online side at least by at least 30 to 40% by using data and by using marketing analytical tools so yeah if you don't know data then you are out I know India is a large country but I'm actually surprised the pandemic made me realize that even the mid to old age I mean my parents kind of adults are adopting to technology so it's like almost like hand in glove I mean my father-in-law is fighting with me please use PayTM help me use PayTM help me use UPI I don't want to go to the branch so for me data is or digital is equal to we call it DIY I call it contactless and that is what I think is a key part why in the pandemic times contactless journeys have become the need of the R while I agree with Subashish mostly that life insurance is quite fidgetful instead of digital only but increasingly if life insurance companies are not able to provide a complete digital journey then we will lose out depends on the consumer he wants to peel off and go back to physical we should have that ability ability available fascinating so this is actually another lens to how you make technology human and accessible to consumers across consumer segments regardless of their profile regardless of their age and the biases completely drop about who can use technology and who cannot use technology and fascinating how you are using technology for deep end performance marketing you are using analytics for deep end performance marketing to drive business Vishwajit coming to you and coming back to your point around insights that you mentioned during the first round how have you used marketing analytics for example have you used marketing analytics to actually generate consumer insights and you know develop solutions I would say let me throw some data because we are discussing data 90% of the data was created in last 2 years and 80% of the data is still unstructured I have seen the way the organizations have evolved analytics was used to be R and D initially then it moved on to you know with big data etc and then finally I think today we are in an insight economy kind of a thing where everything whatever data you have you need to have some insights otherwise there is no use of data because in an organization like us which is a 5 decade old there are a lot of data which is lying in silos so how do we use that how do we get insights out of that so I think what Mr. Bhan also mentioned a lot of things I think these are all every marketer tries to do that how can we bring costs down whether it is you know new client acquisition so you don't do initially used to do bombard with e-mailers to your existing clients all kind of products of us used to share with them but now you don't want to you only want to send relevant information and you know the personas of the client the segmentation is clearly defined so that these kind of clients will not get in my case you know there are high network clients so why to send them a small product offering you are spoiling the experience so within the organization I think market forecasting statistical as to you know or whether it is called mix modeling whether which model as Mr. Bhan was also mentioning which media will work which media will not work with this persona so all these kind of analytics are happening in I think organization so that we can evolve from a brick and mortar model to totally digital first organization where even if somebody enters digitally we should know the behavior the intentions the emotions as to what is the client is that is seeking from brand like Bajaj capital and basis that the solution has to be done and I completely agree you know data is the core in the business today because ultimately there is no financial distribution house so if you don't understand the sensitivity of the client's investment behaviors and you know the sensitivities of the markets you will not be able to advise so there are platforms where you are coming to robo advisory models rather than just you know physical models so everything is based on data and then only you can survive in these kind of markets so I would say whether you have to understand the client lifetime value whether it is age for everything else you need data and otherwise kind of experience you are going to give is not going to be what customers are expecting from you because it is the same customer who is dealing on Amazon it is the same customer who is dealing in all other kind of you know consumer related you know apps so you have to have similar or wow experience wow experience is now a given so you have to deliver something to differentiate that this is not what you know what you stand and how you are more relevant in his life rather than just throwing mailers or bombarding you know information which is not relevant for you very very interesting because you know it's really overwhelming and I'm sure for the audience I'm sure a lot of the audiences in the same situation where you know when you say 80% of the data is still unstructured which is kind of highlights the extent of the enormity of work that's lying ahead and fascinating when you talk about the wow moment because now technology is powerful the course how does each brand therefore what does it need to do to do that delta you know that very insightful delta to create the wow moment for consumers you know can't just do what everybody is doing huge challenges to really deep dive and get insightful okay that's enough from me Anirudh I think what's coming out is that at the core of all this technology you know deep end user technology and something that we cannot do without AI is at the core of a lot of the insighting so how have you been can you give us some examples of how AI and ML could be used for sharper decision making and customer engagement sure so I'm going to build upon the answers given Mr. Ban and Mr. Parash right so it was it is really important that you have that data and AI sort of builds on top of it without data AI is nothing it's not possible and generally when we speak about AI we have this notion of a self-driving car and we put some automation on it and then automatically things will start happening well that's that may not be the reality of the AI so what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about very practical practical things that are happening in AI for marketing reasons at least so when you look at AI you can't just say that you know how I am going to or rather what is the automation that I'm going to achieve with AI it will be always in these discrete components for marketers right it is supposed to assist the marketers so what we at Salesforce are doing we are using AI with these discrete components in our tools so that it assists marketers to take better decisions or to give better personalization or to give right contextual communication at the right time so these are the things that we are doing so now if I have to divide that into like two three areas I would say that one of the areas in marketing where AI is let's say if you are an operations manager and your job your daily job is actually to execute campaigns every day day in day out and you are running 10 or 15 campaigns a day then it is your job also to monitor how the campaigns are performing can I assist the operations manager can I say that you know out of the 10 campaigns that you are running these two campaigns did better and these three did not so you might want to reallocate your budgets exchange those budgets etc so can I assist the marketer so that is one type of AI where it gives you these insights that Mr. Parashar was talking about the second one is related to let's say design or design better campaign so give a better let's say personalized communication to the audience and for example for this would be like which are my segments that are performing better can I get some insights automatically through an AI engine which can tell me these segments are performing better or can it give me a dataset where it says that a segment of population is actually converting better so all these kind of insights are there to get the third type of AI so this type of AI was more like an advisor it is trying to help the marketer in designing better campaigns the third type of AI is more like a decision system so where I have a list of attributes about all my customers let's say I have Mr. Ban was talking about data and attributes Mr. Parashar also talked about it so I have this I am going to use those attributes to decide which offer to give to that customer at the right point I don't have to sit and decide okay this is my segment I am going to use this offer for this segment can the AI automatically take those decisions so these are the types of AIs that are available within the Salesforce ecosystem and these will improve in the future and for that data is important so the marketer just has to use the right AI tools to deliver the right contextual messaging is what we are trying to do I am sure that is a huge learning and a huge help for the audience that is listening in on how AI can actually make a big difference on how they are doing their day to day business thanks for that Anirudh Lakshman, given your business and the customer profile that you have you talked about really the underserved segment of the market through last year given the high dependence on technology what kind of challenges and barriers did you face in trying to shift them towards technology and therefore a better and therefore a more seamless experience with you so with the onset of pandemic 1 we did reach out to all our customers explaining them I mean we were very clear from day 1 that when we are offering banking services it goes along with financial literacy plus anything that the customer needs to know so with the onset of COVID we reached out to all our customers we spoke to them about COVID we had EMI monitoring we spoke to them, we educated them at the same time we offered them alternate channels for example we tied up with local retailers to enable them go into the shop and pay online we introduced them to internet and banking services as Subash has mentioned we also all our communication is in one sector so anything that we do is in 12 languages across the board we developed videos on products and services and basics of banking the fact that you can use a ATM and our internet and mobile banking is equal in 12 languages so please the customers know to start looking at these alternate channels across the board and also we have tied up now you can do your payments through other alternate digital platforms that are available so for example recently we did a campaign we saw an uptake of closer on UX in terms of the number of customers adopting to digital transactions and during the COVID we saw a 3.3 and a half times increase in UPI across the board so what we realized is that it is important to listen to the customer and see what is it that the customer is willing to adopt it takes me back to the time when Jio got introduced and there was a search in terms of adoption of digital channels in the SEBI urban and the urban segment and that's the segment we primarily catered is there any challenge you can't hear me we can hear you we can hear you go ahead so there the customer learned ways to adopt to the digital platform so what we realized is that you need to give a good reason for the customers to reach out to them and when you introduce alternate options customers do tend to pick up these channels and do their payments especially when it comes to EMI payments we have seen customers willing to go that extra mile and adopt those digital platforms and Bharat Pill pay service were required to pay on the EMI so of course in some segments we have had to assist them through our sales force but what we have realized is that a little of guidance and a willingness to listen and understand their issues and provide relevant solutions has really helped us and these numbers which I quoted are primarily because of a collaborative effort of combining physical and assisted forms to leverage the digital space in a big group and also we realized that the fact that when we introduced 7% savings account we reached out to those customers through our martik tools where it was an automated campaign where we reached out to customers asset customers, we reached out to our empty customers asking them to use the digital medium and to invest their savings with OJ1 and we saw a tremendous upsurge happening out there in a very big way so you need to give the customer a reason and the customer is more than willing to listen to you and also adopt to this digital channels in a very big learning from what you're saying Lakshman is how empathy is at the core of building your grant empathy and connecting to the consumer via what works for the consumer and using technology therefore to bridge that gap very very important and so thanks I think that's a very important learning I want to add some perspective Bajaj capital being a brick and mortar model from almost 4 decades so during this covid times we realized that this physical will not work and you get ready for technical digital experiences so now what we call as high tech or high tech and high touch the same centers 250 centers are now more of an engagement centers with clients and transactions normally to get the scale and cost efficiencies is tech enabled so ideas technology will enable cost efficiency and scale whereas the engagement centers or the relationship managers are to empathize with clients and to build that relationship continue with that relationship so that the digital plus digital experience continues otherwise one channel may not be good for everyone so you have to have a mix of hybrid approach to work lines like in India where you don't understand 100% digital or 100% physical so we need to have both the channels and all the channels majorly 2-3 channels we need to focus what customers need you you need not have all the channels open for them because sometimes we realize those channels are not even being approached by clients so focus on 2-3 channels and give that ultimate experience I think that is what the key is I think some of the things that have come through so far is technology how it can be a powerful of powerful persistence or enable however we are still in a world in India where we cannot ignore the physical aspect and therefore we have to balance out it's not about either going from an extreme the culturally aligned physical that we are as Indians it's not about being completely physical or completely going the high end of technology but I think what all of you have brought alive is technology being a very powerful enabler playing a very powerful role of assisting marketeers assisting consumers but also it's got to be a blend and balance of technology and personal and physical so Bhashish in that context you were also mentioning advisory you were also mentioning this balance is there any aspect of the customer journey where you know you have managing the customer journey is very critical to deliver a superior customer experience so what aspect of that customer journey have you seen which has been of great challenge you were mentioning advisory for earlier is anything else or would you like to build on advisory more there was a mute as a life insurance company what do we do we come and approach you and you tell us we ask you let's take care of your financial planning for the next 20 years now you understand in the case of pandemic when there are job losses or at least the incomes of people have gone down at that time if I come and tell you can you commit to me a new policy for 20 years you will have you will require a lot more understanding and I'll also require a lot more understanding of you and your needs and your disposable income for me to give you a genuine advice which is right for you as a customer so therefore that requires trust ultimately advice has to be based on trust you have to be trusting me with the details and you trust that I will give you advice that is good for you and not necessarily good for me and trust is a bit difficult to build up in a long term remotely at least so see if it's a journey then it is fine you know over a period of time you build up and people move from physical to virtual it's fine but suddenly there's a break you can't develop trust suddenly overnight transaction as I make a distinction between transaction and advice transaction certainly will do overnight people move from upa everybody started paying to that the scan and did all that but trust doesn't come it's difficult I can give you information so we did a lot of webinars in fact if you really want to know one of the things that we did we got our advices that since you are not able to speak to people you call them over so we had webinars of 12,000 people and then geographies were broken we had people from people who were stuck abroad that time they were free during the day or evening as the case may be and we did webinars and we talked about certain products of ours because now geography was history so you could talk to people across and you could have your three best trainers or speakers or conceptually right person speaking to 12,000 people across the country instead of so advisors brought in people in a webinar format and we addressed them countrywide the trick part was how did you close the deal there so Samasthalia he has understood how do you then explain to the person after that and how do you then ensure that the advice that you get is the right advice and there honestly I think people struggled I think it was not so easy it took time it is still taking time I think everybody's story story now getting used to it like this this discussion would have never happened two years ago it would have happened in real life in reality now we are very used to it so people will get used to it over a period of time and it's the journey that we are talking about so yes 100% the advice I will shift to little bit it will be a gradual journey I don't see it will be overnight and it's certainly at least I am on the seat beyond 3-4 years what will happen in the future because future is ever changing and if you see the speed so we don't know what will happen whether the products will get simpler that is easy complex products whether people will understand so well or do you have videos which almost talk to like a human the person uses the tone the English the skin color which is the person you normally will associate yourself with and then you almost feel as if you are looking at a genuine human being who is answering your questions genuinely as the case may be then that journey would be interesting it was really baptism by fire through last year but anyways the consumers have only been the gainers with all of you working if you don't mind if I may just add to what Subashish was saying very interesting aspect that is picked up and I heard people talk about more journeys and digital and physical or the digital or the digital and everything else all those are pretty much terminologies everybody is using but in our industry which is an industry that is based on trust see we are talking about life of people 20 years 25 years hence when like Subashish said I can't even say anything about 3 years forward we are making promises for 20 years and therefore how do we get a consumer who in any case is in a bit of a doubtful mind with respect to life insurance we talk about trust and the life insurance industry has faced issues of trust for the last so many years so in this journey how do you get to that trust quotient is the challenge that has been there in our experience as well we all move from face to face to what we call edge to edge from F to F to edge to edge which is home to home now you can keep skilling your agents you know the profile of our agents in the industry are mostly house wives retired professionals the successful ones to bring them and make them more digitally aware and amicable to digital stuff and also then for customers to agree to move from face to face I mean zoom has become the most important often used word with the entire family now has been a challenge I am not saying that we haven't been successful or anybody hasn't been successful 60-70% of conversions have happened digitally but I would say that as the first drop of our hat the moment unlockdowns happen we come back and go back to our older ways of doing things because we are just more comfortable meeting people we are frankly social animals you can keep on saying social distancing but it doesn't happen that impact is not so much there it will improve I don't think some muscle that has been built up will not go away but I hope not that we need a few more lockdowns to make this more permanent but I think life will change I think so much is being very futuristic by saying I can't think about 3 months ahead right now like just the way we all got caught in the wave 2 we may get caught again in wave 3 hoping not keeping fingers crossed so the net net answer for me is that data again coming back to that core point data and technology is actually the data is actually the beacon of trust because the proof of the pudding of what you are how does trust happen if there is a proof of what you are saying your promising is going to get delivered that's how trust happens and the only way I can prove in us typically in a non personal environment is through data that look I told you I will be able to provide you this service here is the data providing you that service for example at maxlife we have a very important not for the industry a very important metric is the claim paid ratio how many what percentage of your claims that have come on you have you paid right and I am bringing this topic obviously because maxlife is leading in that the regulator doesn't allow us to say number 1 but yeah we are leaders in that so we have the marketing team that has coined a term called bharosega number again the bharosa is that you make a claim we are giving you the fact that we will honour your claim and then the data comes back and tells us yeah 99.35% of the claims value wise made we have paid that's what builds trust so the data I will leave the last line by saying data for a marketer must tell a story pure data has no relevance data has to tell a story which can connect with the consumer and thereby build the brand and solve for the consumer pure pretty much adding to superstitious point only so I think both of you collectively have actually answered a very important point about how we can use technology to just go beyond transaction go beyond mere transactional efficiency to actually building a very relationship and actually touching what matters to the consumer which is connecting with stories connecting with insights and building trust because finally that's at the heart of the relationship between a brand and the customer thanks for that very important I think what's come about is undoubtedly the whole search in data generation and technology how have you been advising customers and the industry in the adoption of cloud to manage this whole search and data and maybe in decision making so one thing that I must have cloud for Salesforce actually is not a problem because Salesforce as a company when we started the company it started in cloud we've been doing this for a long time we have I think been doing this for 20 odd years now so cloud as an adoption when we are talking about data and the volumes of data that is what is driving the cloud options today so if you look at some of the trends that I'm seeing in the cloud adoption in terms of what is driving really it's not necessarily only the pandemic that is driving this cloud technology or cloud behavior or people adopting cloud it is more to do with also to do with in fact innovations being done on the cloud technology the agility that the cloud technology brings right so the agility to transform things so had the cloud technology not been available last year would have been really very difficult for people to people to adopt now if you look at the last year itself right so from the cloud technology adoption perspective we looked at people who were working remotely as well right so people wanted to have access to the right data at the right point in time our employees were working away from working from home the accessibility of the system itself was some of the driving behavior to the cloud right so the adoption of the cloud started increasing because of that as well now with cloud technology also what happens is there are some concerns about data security and things that are related to data security but during pandemic what has happened is that many people are now now much more open to accept that as a technology that is what is the change that I have seen in the adoption of the cloud behavior so all these points large data sets different innovations that you are bringing in faster things that you are doing are driving this cloud adoption for us and for many of the financial services organizations that I see wonderful thanks for that Anirudh coming to you Lakshman at the end of the day for everything that we do measuring ROI and effectiveness of all our activities and programs is very critical so have you been able to use technology or has technology helped you in really measuring ROI or effectiveness has it been possible at all to measure ROI and effectiveness given the pace of change through last year what have you experienced one is when it comes to the acquiring customers our entire process is digital fully digital one is you make paperwork second is you look at the different life stages what is the customer journey in this entire process for example we just introduce a program called Ajeeva which is life averse event based banking services so let's say right from birth and when you are a minor to a major then you get married maybe an unforeseen circumstance such as a divorce or maybe death the point is if you don't have a nominee on your account later on when you need to operate these banking services or even the basic savings account it is going to be a challenge for any of your family members so when you look at metrics how do you introduce metrics and how do you measure in terms of making banking similar and convenient for your customers so before introducing this program to the customers we judge it this through internally how many of our employees are aware built awareness programs we re-injured the entire processes completely so that it's far more easier for the customer and right now from what we were to pre-COVID levels today close to 90% of the customers that we acquire automatically sign up on the nominee so making the entire banking process far more efficient and better and even in terms of all the services the average that has improved up to 90% so the idea is that look at those metrics which directly impact the customer's life well there are many metrics to measure and those are equally important but when it comes to a customer centric point of view does the customer leave the bank happier at the end of every interaction or a transaction does he feel better that I feel better banking with uchi the definition is very clear that we are into the business of building better life which means that when a customer builds a relationship with uchi it is all about realizing their dreams and aspirations of course every set of there are challenges from time to time the point is are we conscious enough to work towards identifying what are the bottlenecks and seamlessly working towards removing them so this is an ongoing process we have to be in a continuous engagement with our customers which either comes with inputs from the sales team through our research and through many months so one metric is you ask your customer how satisfied are you while we have still not got into net promoter score and otherwise but we have regular checks on a quarterly basis with our field team to assess how is the customer feeling about the entire process and we look at as I mentioned earlier we have started now looking at different customer segments and trying to understand what are their needs based on their lifestyle and then pick up certain metrics and measure them because you can't be measuring all of the metrics so that's the direction that we are taking very interesting so not necessarily do what the entire industry is doing just because everybody is talking about NPS not necessarily that has to be relevant for everyone but you pick up the selective metrics which are actually important for building your relationship with your customer very very relevant Vishwajit finally coming back to you since you were so keen to talk about moments when we started off you know all this finally boils down to what has really worked I mean there are challenges we have to come to a blend and balance a lot of things have worked well a lot of things have been learnings not so well can you talk about anything that has really worked very well for you and therefore helped you in creating memorable moments for your customer so yeah so I think since we are talking about data analytics and you know NPS course and you know the kind of experience during the pandemic time people have experienced through our brand so we did some data analytics and we realized that a lot of people are retiring and there is no tool which is available to help them which is called distribution phase if you go to Google how do you how should you plan for your retirement and you know there are tools which will tell you you must save this much money every month or that much amount and you will create this much of corpus but if somebody is retiring at 60 and during pandemic time he is no way connecting to any relationship manager so we we realized that there is a need for that kind of a product so we came out with a tool which helped retirees to plan their retirement corpus the superannuation funds and you will be surprised 90% of the people do not have a retirement plan in our country so they are just living a dark life and they are not realizing if they are retiring after 60 they might live till 100 40 years that is what we are made for we spoil our lives through bad lifestyles but ultimately we are expected to live 100 and so we came out with this research and during this pandemic time we came out with a tool which is helping people to get a return retirement plan during this pandemic time so now they have now they have now they can visualize next 40 years as to how much regular money they are going to get which instrument they have to invest and what are so know how all the products where they can invest so I think that is now going to focus purely on this segment because we realized that this is untouched segment and people are not aware about they are not financially literate what to do with their super annuation funds so I think during these times we have learned a new business opportunity because of data analytics I think this is what is making us very very special and we are acquiring new customers so entire model now there is a tool, there are webinars there are collaterals to support and last thing what Subashish is also mentioning it has to be transparent to get that trust trust cannot be bought it has to be earned so more transparent you are and how do you give that relationship experience which you are giving through physical online I think if you can develop that online boarding or online relationship with the clients I think that is where the key is so both the channels can work hybrid approach will also work but they both can be independently also working and can get businesses for the business thank you now what I am going to do is there are two questions that have come from the audience so I am going to pose the question to the entire panel and you all can choose who wants to answer the first question is which tools can you recommend for analyzing data of leads and existing customers Alok, Subashish would you all like to handle this or Vishwajit since you would be handling a lot of leads as a distribution house I leave it open to you all so each company will have its own tool and I wouldn't really want to talk about the brand because that's like promoting some brand but yeah I mean all of us would have we have to definitely I am very sure Alok and Vishwajit's company also will have a robust tool where first of all it starts with capturing the lead you capture the lead then to which channel it could lead could come from an existing client control brand new prospect so there would be a CVM there will be a separate team that will then allocate the lead because in life insurance industry if somebody is getting a lead because the original the customer could have come into a particular channel to an agent if that agent is like the lead should go to that person that's very important you can't give one person lead to another person that will create channel conflict and agency conflict so that is the first step that you will do and then of course you will rigorously follow up to see whether you know the lead is correctly followed up or not at which stage so each company will have it defined in their own stage stage one, stage two which is defined what is stage one, what is stage two, what is stage three that we clearly defined as a part of the training process and finally either the lead will be dropped as possible if not go through or it will be in cold storage for a while and then you again have to revive it maybe the customer just fishing for information and then of course they could be closure of course you have to be very fast on leads if somebody is calling you online or talking you should reach that person immediately that's what some companies where fabricators they do it extremely when you're searching online you almost get a phone call to say that how can I help you in your journey and how can I help you close the sale as it were so that's what we do I'm sure every company must be between Alok and I'm sure talk about this what you're saying is that the turn around time is extremely important the contact to the time you get back and I think Alok in any case I'd mentioned earlier about the various stages of the funnel not just acquisition and lead but managing the various stages of the funnel with deep dive for performance marketing Alok would you like to build on this on this question you're on mute sorry if you talk about tool I would think like what she said I won't be able to give you a specific name but all of us have our own CRM mostly that CRM is the main thing that picks up the lead from various parts of the system and then keeps it captured I will leave the answer to the tool because then you can certainly talk about some tool from Salesforce and certainly after the call we can discuss whether it makes sense and whether we should adopt or adapt that but yeah see my experience in business has been that for sellers if you give them leads and you will call them qualified leads or a core lead or a hot lead etc I don't know whether sellers they love they love to want to lead but they do one call on the lead and if the lead doesn't pick up it becomes a core lead so your CRM systems have to be able to give the supervisors sufficient feedback that this particular lead has not yet been approached or has been approached in a very flimsy manner so our systems come up and say this lead has been met first time after 5 days let's say now if you meet a lead after 5 days the lead from hot has already become cold or from cold has already become frozen so we measure through our lead management systems that how long are you taking to superstitious point for channel conflict we do also put in systems that if it's a lead that's been given to channel A and if the channel A has not done its due diligence on the lead till let's say day X then day X plus one that lead moves out of this channel and is given to another channel because for the enterprise that consumer is relevant is important we will keep on trying with him till we do a good correct the same time data will come back and tell us this lead has been met through 4 times over there have been 4 responses by the consumer and he keeps on delaying his decision that data will tell us drop the lead because then it is more money being wasted on that consumer that goes back again to define what's the right persona that we should focus on for our leads and makes our acquisition cost pretty low so we have identified personas through all data analytics on leads that happen and how many approaches what kind of customer what persona responds faster to our proposition or what proposition is meant for a particular persona so like you talked about retirement and I was thinking of telling you man leave something for insurance companies also the retirement is a very insurance company product but yeah we are very clear that our products at what age do we enter retirement retirement conversations like Swobhashi said Swobhashi said 60 years we don't enter at 60 we enter at 45 because our products are 15 or 20 years so we call them the pre-retirement segment acquisition happened at 45 so those kind of things happen I guess I mean everybody who's done business can talk and talk and talk about leads sellers hate the idea of leads because they think it's pressure on them and hence it's more important to give them qualified leads if it suits them fine if it doesn't then in any case goes into a wasteful funnel I was going to say we just have 3 minutes so you have exactly 1 minute so that I can do a wrap up in the final 2 minutes I was just going to say that I am biased but you can use sales force I am about to add that I just want to leave you out of the answer because I think everyone can get in touch with you offline and I think there has also been opportunity collaborative opportunities that have emerged on this call between Alok and Vishwajit and Subhashesh in future and you know Lakshman you can figure out who you want to collaborate with I am about to add that in our organization it is said that it should be called before the call otherwise it goes waste and there is concept called uberization in every organization nowadays so if somebody is not taking the call seriously it has to be transferred somebody else and we have used sales force and we sell Kotak also and we sell Max also okay wonderful so basically one can't do without Bajaj Capital and I am glad you are here because yeah yeah this is max life please Vishwajit has basically ensured that he is completely indispensable and this panel would not have been complete without him okay point taken and Anirudha I am deliberately leaving you out of any leader tool kind of question because it would just completely hijack this panel discussion for the entire audience segment Anirudha is here from sales force if anyone wants to get in touch with him offline so very very you are giving him leads now you are giving him leads that's true he was so keen to speak that this was the only way I could avoid him from speaking okay I think we just have the final one minute to go and I you know the audience I am echoing this I am sure on behalf of the audience it's been one of the most enriching panel discussions the diverse perspectives which have come from all of you and you know the whole strategic perspective to what technology can do and the role that technology can really play in taking your business forward and strengthening your brand and deepening customer engagement in times that we are living in which is changing so fast and so rapidly I think we have got a lot of insights a lot of knowledge and a lot of wisdom from this discussion but one of the most some of the most important things that stand out for me is that it's not an either or world it's not a black or white world yes the dependence on technology has increased manifold it has leapfrog but it's really got to be a blend of technology and the face to face it's got to be about technology being human it's got to be about technology being a very powerful enabler when it comes to driving productivity efficiency and every other aspect of business however it's got it's also got to be about technology data delivering the end game for any brand which is to develop trust with its customers because finally no matter how efficient your transactions are and no matter how much you contact the customer before Chai Khande Hojai but you know finally it's really got to add up to building trust because finally that will develop the long-term sustainable relationship with customers very interesting because we've got we also got a lot of insights from different aspects of different facets of financial services industry and businesses that are covering different customer segments from Lakshman's underserved customer to the life insurance which has again a huge wide spectrum to Bajaj Capital again you know dealing with intermediaries to B2C having Anirudh with a B2B perspective I think we have just covered as much perspective as could be possible in any discussion. Thank you all very very much Thank you Rana Thank you everybody Thank you Thank you to all our panelists for your time and insights and thank you Rana Ta for stirring this very interesting conversation and a valuable conversation that all our viewers have enjoyed I want to invite all our viewers to go ahead and send in your highlights of the discussions so that we know what were the highlights for you and once again from exchange for media group we'd like to thank all our panelists and our session chair for coming out here and talking about the moments made by marketing in the finance sector Thank you so much and for all of you viewers stay tuned for more insights on moments made marketing in different sectors different industries. It's an ongoing series sponsored by sales force presented by exchange for media group so stay tuned to know more Thank you so much. This is Khyatika signing off. Have a very good evening everyone Thank you Rana Ta for hosting us Thank you very much Wonderful session Thank you Bye bye