 Our next keynote session, ladies and gentlemen, is by Mr. Shashank Srivastava, the Executive Director of Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki. He comes with a rich experience of over 30 years in sales and marketing. He's a dynamic professional and is known for his analytical skills and a focused and goal-oriented style of working. His customer-centric attitude, keen observation, research-based data-backed approach and openness to adopt new technologies are some of the key factors that contribute towards his professional success. An alumni of IIM Ahmedabad, he currently heads the marketing and sales business vertical at Maruti Suzuki. I'd like all of you to join me in welcoming Mr. Shashank Srivastava. He will be talking on building a future-ready business through digital transformation. A very warm welcome to you. Good afternoon. And thank you, Kherti, for this introduction. I'm, in fact, very pleased to be here today for this event with some of the best marketing audience, I believe. So thanks to Densu and also to E4M. I hope to learn a lot. And in the previous presentation that I saw, it was a terrific one from Nerolek and there was a lot of insights there. And I hope that I will also offer from our experience at Maruti Suzuki some of the insights which might be useful to the audience here. I'll just start sharing a presentation so that, so give me a couple of secs. So I'll just start the presentation. Absolutely. Till then, I'm gonna remind all of you that there is an online conversation going on using the hashtag Densu E4M Report. You can join using that hashtag. And right now we have with us Mr. Shashank Srivastava. So if you have any questions that you'd like to pose to him, then do comment in the chat box or the comment box. Or if you're on Zoom with us, then do send it in the Q&A box. Yeah. So Cathy, you can see the presentation. I just a confirmation I wanted. Yes, yes, we can. So thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to begin a presentation to take the journey of future, for being future ready at Maruti Suzuki. And largely through digital transformation and I'll present to you a small 20 minute presentation. So first, this was the year of the Black Swan. You know, Black Swan was first referred in by a Roman poet in the second century. His name was Juvenal. And he said that he used it in a context that Blacksons, since it was an impossible thing, it will never happen. There is no such thing as a Black Swan. In fact, in 16th century England, you still have the dictionary mentioned Blacksons as an impossibility. It was only towards the end of the 17th century that Dutch explorers invested in Australia. They saw a Black Swan. And that is how it is said that in the time that you do not know of an event, you think it's an impossible. And friends, this pandemic thing was sort of a Black Swan. Of course, we had a big pandemic about 100 years back. But the qualities of a Black Swan event is, it's unexpected. It has a major impact. And also that it is rationalized by hindsight. And we had a new vocabularies during this lockdown which came out of this Black Swan event, which as you know, we had such vocabulary, using such words as lockdown or Webex calls, quarantine, protocol, work from home and so on and so forth. So it sort of changed the way we approached our lives, the way we worked and indeed the way we thought. And this is not just about us as people. It is also related to all our consumers. And in fact, all the organizations that we work for or in some cases, the businesses we work for. So most of the consumers were confused. They were anxious, insecure. As I said, it was a Black Swan event. Nobody really knew when this is going to end. And there was some sort of a negativity all around. That there were many changes in consumer outlook and behavior. In fact, if you see, and we have just summarized it, what sort of basic behavioral change was there in the consumers? They were seeking greater control over their journey, whether it is in terms of their lives or in the type of products they buy or the process by which they buy. They were also seeking greater empowerment and knowledge, seeking greater convenience. In fact, for car industry, one big thing which happened was people moving away from public transport to more of a, and also shared mobility to more of a personal transport. That sort of actually helped the industry because there was a greater demand for personal cars. Although having said that, there was also a loss of jobs in some instances, loss of incomes, loss of bonuses, et cetera. So there was this contradictory requirement of a increased requirement for personal transport, but less money at hand. There was obviously the media consumption landscape which evolved dramatically changing. We saw print coming down completely, OTT digital platforms going up. The prime time shifted. In fact, I was surprised when somebody told me that the prime time actually shifted to 11 o'clock in the morning from what usually happens around nine or 10 in the night. And also that trust and value became the new drivers of choice. And I would request everybody to take note of this because I think ultimately we found that it is the brand trust at that time which was probably the major driver of choice of product. In fact, we used to talk in our meetings that trust is the new currency for brand differentiation. And that is how we started our journey. And at the time when there was a lockdown, we didn't really know which direction the pandemic will move. So we started with a war cry which was ready, resolute and resilient. This is the sort of a war cry that we gave not only to our employees, to all our vendors, our partners and dealers and so on. So the aim was actually not at that time to was to survive and develop and not to panic. Of course it was something which we never knew which way it will turn. And at that time we focused simply on building the brand, not just and not business. And if you see the pictures here, you can see that we actually got involved not in making cars because that was stopped during the lockdown. We were making ventilators or helping in making ventilators or supply chain people or production guys, they were out to help and collaborate with some organizations for making a ventilator. That was the need for the nation at that time. You can see our machines being used for making PPEs and so on. And we started coming to office of course around the first week of May with all the social distancing norms. And you can see that girl inspects at the center of this screen. She's wearing one, it's a sensor it's a sensor which gives you how much distance if you come nearer than six feet which was the prescribed distance, then there was a beep both to both the people that you are closer than the prescribed distance. Also that data was going to the server and at the end of the day, we could analyze how many instances were there and who those individuals were who did not adhere to the guidelines. This helped us of course immensely because that was the prime concern at that time. And it also built a lot of trust with the consumers because consumers could identify that we were not actually after the business so much as to be very careful and very mindful of the safety and the physical well-being of employees and also the consumers. Then when the things started getting better, we had to shift to something which we call rethink, re-imagine and recalibration. Automobile actually is quite a complex business. We have products in which we have components coming from different vendors who are all across the country. We have many core functions including design. We had to digitalize it. We had to adopt new technologies both for not only just interaction and communication but also for vehicle production itself. And that also made us realize that there is an increasing role of data and analytics. Remember automobile business has had so far the same business model for the last 100 years. So you have component manufacturers giving components to a OEM who then decides to assemble the vehicle. These assembled vehicles are transported to different dealers. Dealers through their sales executives sell those vehicles to the consumer. This has been the structure for 100 years. It hasn't changed. But now with this change environment, we thought that the structure of the business itself will change and we need to rethink given the current situation. I'll give you an example. We had the launch of the S-Cross 1.5-liter BS6 engine vehicle sometime in August. Normally we have launches where we call all of the stakeholders and we have a very nice party and we have a press conference and so on. This was not possible. Our entire launch this time was done digitally. In fact, we got gathered more audience than we would do otherwise and at a much cheaper cost. For CRM, for example, or for logistics, we had adopted an absolutely different, had to adopt a totally different practice than what we had done so far. And I'll come to what all things which we did to make possible the embrace, to embrace new technology to make possible more efficient operation at Maruti Suzuki. So digital capabilities, that's the big business differentiator, also in disruptor. I think it was mentioned in the previous presentation as well. And I would like to now tell you the transformation story, to the digital transformation story from Maruti Suzuki. So our guiding principle of, and we had to change our DNA for that. By the way, it's true I think for most marketers, most manufacturers, you need to change your DNA and it's not just about any, it's not a buzzword that everybody's talking about. It has to enhance efficiencies. It has to lead to productivity, savings. It should increase collaboration. It has to be holistic. And by collaboration, I also mean there is a lot of cross functional efficiencies that you need to build in. And finally that it had to be people centering. And this last point is something which actually misses out when we are talking too much of technology. So we talk too much of data, but I think we need to be mindful of the fact that as far as consumers are concerned, they are real people. And as far as employees are concerned, they are real people too. As far as your collaborators, whether vendors or dealers, they are real people too. So whatever technologies we adopt, we had to be mindful that they have to be people centering. And I take you back to that slogan of rethinking and reimagining, which I just showed. And that was the basis of our digital transformation. Rethinking the way we work, reimagining the way we will connect with consumers and reimagining what the business would be. So let's look at the first part, which is the rethink part. And just for the information of many of you who may not be in the auto industry, but I'm sure you would know that auto industry, while the core product is automobile, there is a lot of other things involved like design, manufacturing, marketing, you have logistics, supply chain, finance and so on and so forth. So the important thing is to have an error-free production to maintain quality. And also remember that the go-to market time, which for any new model is about, used to be about seven, eight years, has to be cut down because of the fast-changing consumer preferences. And also remember that we are actually producing a car every 13 seconds every day. And we are dispatching, in fact, 5,000 to 6,000 cars every day. So in order to make this massive coordination, this massive operation, we have actually 50,000-plus employees. We have 3,000-plus outlets in about 2,000 cities. We have 15 million inquiries, which we handle for our consumers. So I think it's a massive operation and cannot be done now without the active transformation through digital means and database actions. So initially, of course, let me tell you that we started in the new normal, empowering people. We had digital solutions for hiring. Marty Suzuki, unlike other companies, never stopped hiring even in this period. We had actually hired more than 300 people who joined us during the lockdown. And that was possible only because we did the induction as well as orientation virtually. So while it may not be a real replica of the physical interaction, but the induction and engagement was largely done in this way and we never stopped recruitment. We also did a complete digitization of learning and development function, which is also a first time in the industry. And we had a lot of those health and wellness apps for very stringent health monitoring. Remember, we have been coming to office since 4th of May. And also in our factories where we have production, you need to be present physically. So while the work from home is available for certain category of people, but for most people in production or even in design, that is not available. So we did have those apps with a very stringent health monitoring asset, which is also serving a sort of a message to the employees of how concerned we are. And it also made us very conscious that in order to be at the most productive, we need to be healthy and we need to monitor our wellness as well. The reimagining part, of course, we come back to the consumer I am talking about. And I think in the couple of presentations made earlier, consumers, everybody said consumer has to be focused. And there's no different in our industry as well. But there has been of course a change in the nature of consumer. The modern auto consumer has drastically changed over the years. In fact, if you see, thanks to our economic growth, the consumer is now younger. He's more sort of a lifestyle seeker. So it's not just that he wants a car to move from point A to point B, but it's also that it is an extension of his personality. He's more aspirational, he's more experimental, even in terms of design, for example. And he's very tech savvy, which means that we have to follow not only in the media consumption choices that he makes, but also the nature of devices he uses in order to communicate the type of social media interactions he has, even our interactions and our transactions, they are all digitized now. And it's a great platform. We started off almost 10, 15 years back when we started our DMS, which is the dealer management system on the transactional basis, which is transaction part means that the consumer is known. The consumer makes a purchase or he comes and buys an accessory or takes an insurance or takes finance. So his data is known to us. That's a transactional based database. Then there is an interaction based database where you may not know exactly the consumer, but once we have an idea of who is, we have, even before he has bought the vehicle, we know about the consumer, what we call it a single view of consumer, where once he buys a car or once he inquires about a car, we try to find out as much as possible about him or her and try to make the best experience available to him or her. Drastically changed approach to car purchase now, 95% of the consumers research online before they even come to the showroom. Online video is now playing a bigger role in car buying process with 80% of the car buyers using it as a research destination. And more and more consumers are also now using digital, as you can see, 60% research online to find the dealer. Now remember the dealer part is actually at the bottom end of the purchase funnel. So earlier the digital was thought to be affecting the top end of the funnel and we used to, we had a lot of use, we were using it, but also at the lower end, and that is the basis for the hyper-local program for managing enquiries that we started very recently. Very recently means a couple of years back. I just a quick look at the number of touch points which a consumer has when he buys a car, there are 26 touch points before the pandemic 23 or 21 of them were digitized. The ones which were not digitized were finance, test drive and actual delivery. So here we have now done the finance bit also as part of our digital platform development. So the consumer can take finance even without going out of our system of enquiry processing, which means that he has less chance to go out of our system and he gets a much better experience, he gets a much better response time. And we have digitized 25 out of the 26 touch point. Even test drive, you can have a immersive through using immersive 3D technology of our showrooms. We can actually give you an experience of how it feels to drive a car digitally. So one last point which cannot be digitalized is of course the physical delivery of the vehicle. It's a physical product after all. That's why in automobile we talk of digital and not really digital. One fourth of our, and this is of course for our digital consumer, we understand that today the consumer is digital very savvy, which is why at Marty Suzuki, there is an increasing shift to digital both in the overall business as well as marketing efforts. And look at that, that's reflected in these pens on digital as well. It's been increasing to now 25% almost. A five-fold increase in digital inquiries to sales. Digital inquiries were just 3% of our total inquiries. They have now increased to almost 40%. So the distance from 3% to 15% was done in three years till the pandemic started. And post-pandemic in three months, it came from 15% to 40%. So that is the sort of acceleration which the pandemic has brought out in the consumer process converting to digital. And therefore we have also kept pace. And now in fact, 17% of the digital attributed inquiries to the details, 17% of our retail is actually attributed to digital inquiries, which is massive. And as I just mentioned, we have started the car financing process as well, which is the first in the industry. In fact, it is first in the world because for even more developed markets, this is not entirely digitalized. We have been doing about 2000 cases a month now and it's growing exponentially as we expand going forward in this area. We also have the largest dealer digitalization program now. We used to talk about earlier, we used to talk about how many dealer outlets we have, how much cities we are covering. But as you know, once we have this digital thing going, we are now starting to talk about our share of the network in the digital space. And that I think is a massive, massive change in the very thought process that we have had from a purely physical sort of approach to something is entirely digital. In fact, we have now 1100 plus dealerships on the digital map. And that is leading to more leads, in fact, better conversions and even lesser costs. And even in the CRM, where we have a lot of personalization requirements, we have with increased CLTVs for upselling, cross-selling retention. We are now using AI and using an entire database, both on the transactional front and the interactional front to have a single view of consumers. In fact, we have now the lead qualification and the lead prioritization where we can actually predict which consumer is most likely to buy a car or what is the probability that you will buy accessories. So it's not something magic, but it's just pure basis of data and AI technology. We even have doing an experiment in which consumers who walk into our showroom through their eye movement and their face expressions, we can actually sense the mood. And in fact, trying to predict what type of color or type of vehicle they are looking for. And that I think is going forward. It's an experiment we are doing and going forward, I suppose it will give us a much better sense of what the consumer is and we'll have a much better understanding of the consumer. So how does it help if you have a consumer understanding the way it is? I was looking at the presentation made by the Nerolek person. And I liked one word, one line which he said, consumer sensing is the new customer understanding. And we try to do that also at Mauti Suzuki to give a much more personalized and the richer brand experience. So as you can see, we have now created a data lake where we put in all data, interactional as well as from their websites or from their social posts, et cetera into a data lake and then we manage the data in a data warehouse. That means that we sort of organize the data about the consumer and gives us a very good idea of what the consumer is. So what we will do, what we are doing is holding us in good stead, not just in good times, but also when the going gets tough. And I'd just like to show you quickly these are the last few slides, quickly about the results which we have got post pandemic after strengthening our digital platform in every which way. We have Q2 to Q1, of course growth is very high. It may be a misleading figure because Q1 as you know was affected badly by the pandemic but then Q3 versus Q2 growth has also been pretty good. So month and month, there has been a good bounce back in the industry and certainly at Mauti Suzuki. In fact, Mauti Suzuki's highest ever sales in any month ever was in October 2021. And it was also the highest ever quarterly sale in Q3. It was also highest ever December sale. So we are truly back and I would without hesitation say that digital transformation as I just described played a big role in this success. In fact, you can see the quarter numbers how they've grown and they are now past the past year, last year's figure, something which most businesses are struggling with. So it's not just of course, this automobile industry has bounced back I think a little better for various reasons, especially Mauti Suzuki also we have been, I would credit it through our team who have done a great work in digital area that has sort of not hampered our operations which has been hampering some of the other people in the industry because they are focused plainly on the traditional way of doing business. And in fact, in December 2020, top seven model sales were all from Mauti Suzuki. So it gives not just a one time or one type or one segment or a one brand type of success. The top seven brands in the country are actually all from Mauti Suzuki as you can see from this slide. So, and also our market share actually increases. You can see in hatchbacks, we increase 3%, passenger cars 2%, MPVs almost 11%, vans about eight, nine percent, UVs percent. So overall market share of, we keep maintaining our market share slightly above 50%. Some of the segment market share you can see are really good. We are proud of it, but of course it was not possible without rethinking and reimagining and recalibrating the business that I have spoken about in the presentation so far. So just to look quick, look at the future from what was slow and calculated way and those companies who will survive and will do well will be those were agile and nimble in leveraging growth opportunities. We realized that. We hope that we will be up to the task for being agile and nimble for better productivity and efficiencies. And also from pure play product focus to digitally enabled products and services is becoming so important for automobile because now we are looking at connected cars. We are looking at even autonomous vehicles. We are looking at electric. We are looking at absolutely different way of consumer behavior, both in purchase of the car and the way they use it. So from solving functional needs for which Maurya Suzuki actually was sort of branded, but now we want to be an enabler of life aspiration as well. Just a summary from so and calculated to agile and nimble pure play products to digitally enabled services and solving functional needs to enabling of life aspiration and in fact mobility solutions. And I'm reminded of this famous quote as the world becomes a digital place we cannot forget about human connection. And that is what I would leave the presentation at the end in all this talk about technology and AI and ML and machine learning and big data and digital platforms and so on and so forth. You must not forget that finally it is about human beings. It's about the human connection. So that I believe will continue to be the most important of all the things that we do or either digitally or otherwise. So thank you for your time and thank you for your patient listening. Thank you. Thank you so much Shashank. I think it was such a wonderful presentation and we can't agree more that no matter how much the technology transforms our world it's still about human connections. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights with us. Thank you.