 Hello everyone. Very good to be doing this session and especially after an absolutely brilliant presentation by Manik. Very very good stories on consumer insights for all of us. So this panel is going to be talking about how we use consumer insights for making business decisions, right? Before I kick off the panel and I talk a little bit about the space, I want to ask you as an audience, what questions do you have here? And is there a mic somewhere that can just be given to the person who wants to ask a question? Any questions here from anyone in the audience, what are you looking forward to from this session? What would you like to know? I will make sure I include some of those questions in the panel. Yes? Can someone please give him the mic? Do you have a question? Yes I do. My name is Mukesh, again I'm with MartaGadvisor, the result of this company. The question that I have is the way you capture insights in a B2B and a B2C environment right, they're different and the way we use them now the question is how do you use tech to make sure that you get the most reliable information right and use it to your advantage which eventually helps you convert your leads better. So B2B, B2C, how do you ensure it's reliable, your insight? And how do you use it to make sure that it actually affects your conversion rates? It impacts your conversion rates, okay? Any other question? Anyone? Okay let me just get kicked off right? So before I kick it off I'll start by saying what's the objective of all business right, because we're talking about business decisions here. In my view it's always about being a force of good, a force for good in this world. It's not just the profit imperative for the shareholder or the investor, it is about making sure that the interests of the investor, the customer as well as the employee are well balanced and aligned right. Several times businesses end up over-indexing on just the shareholder. So the profit becomes most important right, but the way to grow sustainably is to make sure that you're adding value to the lives of customers right. Now how do you do that unless you figure out what's that burning need that you're going to help fill? What is the value that is going to be added to the customer's life right? And we're all customers so in several ways we will be able to relate to some of the insights that the panel here will be sharing in terms of how they've added value to customers lives. Most startups today with like several you know multi-billion dollar valuations are based on this premise that what is that core consumer need that we will fulfill? Is there a question? Can you hear me clearly at the back? Sorry I thought someone was asking a question. So given that I'm just going to kick off by introducing the panel here. I'll start by introducing Ankit. So Ankit as the lady mentioned is the founder of Bobble AI. What Bobble does in a minute is basically what they have is a multiple products which interface between the technology and the user. Examples they have a vernacular keyboard multiple different languages and they offer various facilities like swipe in the vernacular on the keyboard. They offer voice services also in the vernacular right? So speech assistance and such stuff right? There is a third thing Ankit that you had mentioned. Content. So they also create content which is actually very interesting and you know he will tell us more as he talks about it but you could take a selfie and that selfie can be converted into a sticker right? So the stickers or the emoticons that you send out are actually off your own face but with different expressions and so it's more interactive, more expressive, more engaging. But there's just a brief introduction of Ankit and we'll talk more as you know it proceeds. Sumit is here from InfoEdge. Now InfoEdge is a company is one that owns companies like Naukri.com, 99 acres, Jeevan Saathi. So a place where as you can imagine there's a bunch of consumer insights data they privy to a lot of consumer behavior that they then use to help consumers right? And finally coming to Zubin. So Zubin is from Shemaru, a name which is probably very very familiar to all of us. Over the years we've seen a whole bunch of Bollywood content produced by Shemaru. Shemaru also does a whole they have a bunch of channels three and a half billion views on YouTube. Again Zubin will tell us more about how they use that data to create better content and how they're reinventing themselves in the consumer range. But let me kick off by asking you a question. What is the biggest change that you have noticed in the last 10 years in terms of consumer behavior? Five years, 10 years. The biggest change which you feel has really changed the way you're doing business and I'll leave it open for the panel. Anyone who wants to answer that? Go ahead Ankit. I think it's a good question. I mean if you look at last 10 years history I mean we have a history of eight years so I can't talk about 9th and 10th year but when we started the company it was all web. It was 2012 when when we started the company it was all web and now in just three four years down the line we saw that how mobile grew exponentially and how web became started becoming stagnant. The birth of new platforms like Instagram like YouTube in India. The need for new set of technologies like vernacular or voice. I mean in this world of technology I think 10 years is a huge amount of time. We see dramatic changes happening in just one every year. New platforms coming up, new challenges to take care of. When when when new next half billion Indian users are coming on internet we see next set of challenges to cater to such new set of audience. So I believe it's a big change that is that we are witnessing today and hopefully with the advent of new startups I believe we are perfectly ready to take on such changes. Thank you. So it talks about a bunch around video voice and vernacular. Much has been talked about this but most consumers today want to engage on either of these three right or all of these three. 70 to 80 percent of internet consumption in India happens in the vernacular right. Almost every one would much rather watch a one minute or a two minute video than read content. Some of the largest e-tailers that we're working with has been we can see that right. Consumers don't want to read even a product description which is one page long on the mobile nobody wants to read that. They just want to be told very simple. Everything should be fifth grade friendly like you don't want to spend brain power concentrating and reading stuff like that right. And the third is voice. Voice in India becomes even more important and you know thanks to Ankit and his company a lot of voice analytics is currently available in English but for us to be able to use that in the vernacular we need to be able to address a whole bunch of Indian languages which his company is helping do. But question now for Sumit who is basically a part of a lot of companies which are very very consumer oriented how do you use these three to make business decisions or personalize, customize. What has changed using these three insights? So I think one of the important things most of our businesses actually have been in existence for over a decade and apart from these three I think one very core thing that has changed in a consumer's behavior is his or her expectation that you should understand my aspirations you know as as machines you first understood binary you understood what people had stated right. Today's expectation is you should know what I want you know and just to kind of illustrate it say there are two job seekers who are registered on Nocree. Both have done engineering or MBA from a similar institute. Both have similar experiences and similar companies there you know an algorithm 10 years ago or maybe even seven years ago would throw up a similar list of jobs to both of them right because the algorithm would recognize them as absolutely two similar people. The expectation today is that you should know what or where I want to apply right and I think that is a big challenge. There are various technologies that help you do it. So if you're applying so what has happened is today instead of a one-way match a lot of companies for example we've kind of evolved in the last 10 years to do a two-way match right so we now need to see okay candidate a where all is candidate applying where all is his or her resume being downloaded right and then actually make a recommendation. So if both of us actually had the same CV had the same experience his set of companies and my set of companies is going to be different and that is an expectation that a job seeker today has or somebody who's looking for marriage has right. Voice for example in our businesses the I think GEO has helped us not get too many more users because we're still more for the tier one and tier two but really usage has gone up. So people are spending far more time because data has become cheaper so we're getting far more insights right so voice is not something that we are so voice and vernacular is actually not something that we are using too much in our products today because we're not facing we're not addressing that audience at the moment with the current suite of products that we have but we are building a few no products which I can't reveal at the moment but in a few months to come we'll see which are based on those but what's happened is a lot of semantics and machine learning is going in to really understand the softer side and the aspirations of the consumer because irrespective of what we are using personalization the vow experience that monarch talked about has just become like hygiene it's no big deal that you're doing this for me it's hygiene I think that's a big change. No I think what you're saying is absolutely relevant Sumit and one of the biggest questions that businesses have grappled with is do I ask the consumer what he or she wants or do I give them what I think they want right it's the core between what a Steve Jobs did and he said I think people want an iPhone nobody said I wanted an iPhone right that need was not articulated but when you sell then you know people buy right so what's the whole point of this whole consumer inciting if consumers don't know what they want till they see what they want right that's the question that has flummoxed businesses forever but I think what you've hit upon is a really good one as well which is that there was a time when you had to ask customers what they wanted and you know the issue was they said one thing wanted another and you couldn't and I think the gentleman at the back asked a very very relevant question or how do you figure out which insight is reliable or not right because people will say one thing and you know we were talking backstage and Sumit was telling me that on Jeevan Sathi for example let's say there's a woman who's looking for a groom and she puts in that she's looking for someone who's five feet six and is seek right but they actually figure out from her behavior and the amount of accepts right or people that she has invited that she's actually quite okay the last three invites went out to five feet four and they were Mona Punjabi so she's not like hung up on that individual being sick right so it's not now listening to what consumers want or asking them it's actually observing and noticing and using behavior to inform what you're going to do because that's what data and technology have enabled for us today you know practically everything right like back in the day retailers they didn't know what do people want you enter a Louis Philippe showroom or you enter a you know shop or stop or any place you can't track what people are looking at what they want go to an online app every single click is giving you information in terms of where people start where they end up what they want it's up to us in terms of how we use that data to create better experiences for customers right so great great point Sumit but Zubin coming to you and you're sitting on like gold mine of data and everything that you're doing with YouTube can you share with us the story you were talking about backstage yeah so just for the benefit of all I think everyone in this room would have heard of Shimaru just a quick show of hands and I'm assuming that we've all grown up watching some amount of Shimaru content right now the first question that Yakuta asked was what has changed in the last 10 years and I'll go with the old adage change is the only constant if I had to say what is constant it is this need and this dire need of us all consuming content video content what content yes that's changed where content that has also changed so from Shimaru's point of view we've been around for five decades and every five years we go through a process of internal restructuring transforming ourselves and adapting to the new age ecosystem which is why right through the last five decades we have kept to one part of the equation fixed which is saying we are a content company and being a content company we will cascade our our content across every new technology that comes in so right from the VHS's and the and the video cassettes that we all have consumed here as as we've grown up to today stuff on Alexa or even our OTT platform Shimaru Mi and the fact that we are on YouTube with 3.5 billion views every month organically this is the power of content and power of following customers on their consumption devices and this is what we believe as the fulcrum of our success so far where every time a consumer gives us a hint of saying that's my new device of consumption or that's my preferred device of consumption we jump on to it and say hey here we are Shimaru content available for you whether it's through the B2B route or whether it's through the B2C route I'll give you another insight on YouTube for example like I said we do 3.5 billion views a month all organically and there's always this thing about how we grow our revenues so we actually studied data and data told us in two forms one is looking at the voice of the customer what is the customer actually telling us and the other is studied normal numeric data which just tells you where your content is actually giving you the best throughput we saw that two percent of our views are coming from the US which generates close to about 25 percent of our revenue so what we did with that data we created an internal strategy called GoVeas growth of views in US so the only mandate to the team in that case was go out there and grow your views in the US so that two percent becomes ten percent and we organically grow our numbers exponentially lo and behold one year later we actually experienced that okay so this gives you a sense of the power of data and power of listening to customers in both their comments on the entire platform as well as through data maybe just one more insight I can tell you listening to all our customers the customers kept saying we want a common platform for usage of our content and our customer base is very niche and very sticky on that content we've got the largest retro music channel in the world on bollywood content called filmy gane on on youtube and the customers there are so rigid and so authentically classic lovers that if you go and create anything deviating from there they'll start disliking your content and they're the ones who told us that can we have a common platform for content we created a platform called shimaru me and today it is there it's the app that most Indians love it's downloaded many number of times it really launched in just last quarter haven't yet promoted it heavily but we've seen a lot of organic traffic coming on it we present on all screens including apple tv fire stick and all the three mobile platforms android ios web so the fact is that customers have really appreciated this and that's what gives us proof of the pudding that data led insights do lead to meaningful strategies and customers do adopt them when you do that right thanks thank you zubin so we talked a little bit about the kind of impact consumer insights can have and how it is helping change value propositions or set up value propositions for companies but i think the question that still remains is how do we get consumer insight some of it is sure from looking at behavior because data affords us that now technology affords us that is that the only way how do you get insights how does one generate insights from customers regularly now there's a theory which says it's a both brain way of generating insights one is of course looking at the data and looking at patterns and you know the analytics behind it but the second which is back to basics is actually just doing deep consumer interviews ethnographic research just talking to people and also observing how they behave real time right so it's not only on the digital device but what are they doing in their houses with their products or the offering all of that right and i cannot underscore the importance of the second as well so let's not get too carried away because it's the age of data that we will solely rely on analytics because a lot of the exploratory research is the foundation of great consumer insights i think the gentleman before manik talked about agile and design thinking and design thinking which is looking at analogous industries to your own to figure out what's the key insight there is one of the great ways of generating consumer insights right so it's not limiting yourself to your industry but to look outside it's talking to consumers regularly another great way and i will talk about that before i ask you for examples of how you do that in your companies is actually when you ask consumers questions regularly right if you're serving them you may be using nps or c sad or whatever you use right to ask questions of your consumers and they respond back and you have the verbatim responses right how do you mind that verbatim and anyone from the audience as well i totally second your opinion and i think that unless you really go and start talking to consumers a lot of the data actually throws the what's what is happening now the trends but i think the wise only come when you go out and speak to them and unless you don't have the wise you can't really solution anything yes and i'll tell you what we do i personally feel that having someone with a little bit of domain knowledge really helps right so um rather than just giving for research companies a mandate and like used to happen traditionally and say okay these moderators will get all this data today online can do that very very effectively but the deep interviews i think they're two important things one if there's somebody from that team rather than just an outsourced person conducting it it helps because you know your domain the second thing is it must always be conversational right and i think the greatest insights come when you're in when you make the other person feel that the person is in a safe place and it's conversational in my experience i think those are two things that really really work and the third thing of course is the noise right with experience i think you get to know that don't just go by what the outliers are saying because sometimes you do it you get it very very wrong because a lot of us forget the bread and butter you know or forget the torso of our businesses and only want to listen to the aspiring lot i think listening is okay but don't forget this lot because this is what is giving you your bed and absolutely absolutely for every business there is a prime yes right but you know i think very good sumit just building on that one of the approaches that i have also seen work and i wonder if you're using it is supplementing the deep interviews and ethnographic research with just daily or regular ways of understanding consumer comments and i think zubin you referred to that in terms of how you read content how you read feedback but one approach that people typically use is they essentially look for the most the longest verbatim response that comes back from their survey not the you know one line answers would say everything is great or you know your app sucks right but more detailed responses pick the top 50 or the top 100 of the most verbose customer feedback and read that that typically is a store of great customer insight obviously that needs to be now you know in parallel you need to make sure that that is reliable by checking with people real time but it's a great source of initial insights which can then be further tested sorry i'll give you two instances that we actually did using listening to customer feedback one was this thing about looking at youtube comments on all our channels like i told you about filmy gane the channel very very authentically retro and classic content and hardcore lovers of classic we in our own wisdom said let's go and create content where we have new age dancers dancing on old songs we went and created a few of those videos we went back on filmy gane put them up thinking that we're going to get blistering views and lo and behold we got a whole lot of dislikes unsubscribers and we were shocked and you know what they all said keep it pure we don't want all of this so we listen to what they say okay and that was a huge insight and a huge understanding of the purity of the content itself on the channel the other thing that one of these guys actually came up in fact a lot of those and to your point on reading long verbatim content and comments we picked up some of those of course we didn't do focus groups or any kind of direct conversations but we started listening to what they are saying some of them actually turn around and told us that device or they use the word these little keywords that kept popping up something like a car or something of that sort and that's what gave us the the kind of it planted that little seed in our in our minds on saying we've got a whole lot of devotional content and can we now again back to the first point which is content being the fixed where is the variable let's create a device like a bluetooth device for the customer to consume content in the form factor of let's say a Bhagavad Gita but actually it's plastic or it's a fiber-based box that actually reads out all tells you stories of the entire Bhagavad Gita and likewise many such boxes that we've just about launched this all came through listening to customer feedback another B2B example I can tell you is again on the same lines suddenly brands started coming on to our channels and saying hey guys you guys got such great content can we come and advertise on your platform and we said lo and behold of course you can there you go and that gave rise to another entire division within the group called Shamaru brand solutions we today work with over 400 brands and agencies who where we give them customized solutions on how they can use our content to integrate into our content and also advertise and partner with us on all our channels and all our properties as part of the Shamaru network so yeah fundamentally a lot of listening is what we do as a company and that's what gives rise to a lot of the innovations that we do at Shamaru anything you would add uncle sure no doubt every one of us are setting all our products are sitting on oceans of data right and in fact consumer insights are nothing but the observation of ourselves when we look at that those data and come up with insights from it we basically we do Manthan of that you know ocean and we come up with insights but many a time what happens is that our own biasness comes to those insights while while doing that month and we bring our own biasness while sitting in a five-star hotel it's very difficult to to imagine how a tier three white or blue collar worker would be using your product or watching your content so therefore we we try to live the life of our users as much as possible to whatever extent possible at least for the product managers for the product team we ensure that they are closer to the users as much as possible the first thing we did in our company was that we asked all our team members at least the ones who were who were more closer to the product or the user facing interfaces to leave iPhones and switch to a Redmi phone because this is where you can actually have a real experience of how your product is going to behave in real India and not in your office 10 GB Wi-Fi so so that is one one major step we took the other steps we took was bringing users consumers to our offices to our place whenever possible wherever possible as you said reading verbose you know comments and and and compliments both so we we look at either one-star reviews or five-star reviews we look at two three four-star reviews because those are typically neutral in nature and even during one-star and five-star we pick up the ones which are more verbose in which which which can we pick up the call and call we pick up the phone and call the user try to understand what they're talking because you know many a times people do express their emotions but they really don't know what the solution to their problems are so expecting a solution from users is something I think it's too much of an expectation rather we should just try to understand the problem and apply our own mind and technology to come up with solutions do a testing do experiments and learn from mistakes our own mistakes users behavior and that's how we grow no I think Ankit great point and especially the point around tier three I was speaking the other day to the swiggy guys and they said something quite similar right which is that you know there is a different expectation that the urban tier one millennials have visibly the same in a tier three tier four right and their insight really if you look at the swiggy app is people want control they want to know where the food is at a given time they don't know how long they have to wait and he gave me this example of a mother with two kids hungry at home and she's ordered food and swiggy and she just needs to know is it five minutes away is it 20 minutes away right and that is the value they are adding right by being able to provide that kind of you know uber like where is the guy right now that kind of information or if you think about uber for that matter right one is the control about knowing where the guy is but really their insight or their behavior the consumer behavior that they've understood really well was that consumers move incrementally even if it's a high value product if you suddenly introduce it at a certain price point people will not see the value but if you ladder them through it behavior you know repeated behavior creates that habit and then it's very difficult to give up on that habit right so you get hooked and you know it's like slowly slowly the water is getting hotter but the frog is already in the water right so i think it's a great point in fact all of us know geophones it's like it's like an incremental ladder for the people who are coming first time on the internet when they pick up a live phone which was your live phone which was a pure smartphone they couldn't understand anything on it because it was firstly on english and it was such a different experience compared to a nokia 800 which they were used to the geophone which is somewhere in between a smartphone and a feature phone which is voice control and not you know touch controlled i think it's a it's a it's a great way to to take the users to graduate the users from level one to level three not directly by introducing an intermediate level wherein they can they can adapt to the new new technologies and new absolutely absolutely nice so great thank you very excellent points just summarizing we talked about video voice vernacular need for radical simplification so that the consumer can interact and engage with your products and our offerings very easily seamlessly and of course looking at it through a both brain lens right so look at the analytics all the behavior all of that but deep consumer research and talking to consumers observing them in their own environment no substitute for that but thank you very much really enjoy being a moderator today thank you