 My name is Ravi Santana. I joined HTFC Bank as the chief marketing officer in year and three months back prior to that I was in telecom in order phone and reliance and prior to that in power and in banking. I was a banker and accidental marketer who moved into marketing long time back. So before I start the topic is digital disruption and our work day as marketers I just want to have a simple case and conversation supposed to be the way right. So how many of you believe that your work day is different today compared to say five years back if you're working in marketing. Ten years back I don't see so many people having work for ten years at least one or two hands. What's the difference? What's primarily the difference in your days? Mobility yes then. Choice of media. Information availability okay. Let me give you my understanding of what was different. Ten years back if you have to ask me who's the data guy in your team used to call him the MIS guy. So people who are old enough will know that we used to have a data guy in our team called the MIS guy. Now what do we have? We have data scientists. People who talk something which we don't understand if you have not been in that space. Ten years back we used to have in our teams called media planners. How many people work in media planning here? Now in addition to media planning what we have in our team is platform specialist. Somebody is a double click bid manager specialist. Somebody is a programmatic specialist. Somebody is a social media influencer specialist. Somebody is a social media specialist and suddenly what you're seeing is there's a huge amount of new things that have come in and has it changed our typical day? How many of you feel a sense of unease in this? That's so many new bus words are being talked about and I don't know the full gamut of what this is all about and I do feel unease about all this because many of the things that somebody comes and tells me I never heard before in my life. But the only thing which I can tell you is look at evolution. We have always been having change. We have adapted over the years time and again time and again time and again. So is there a need for us to worry? The answer is definitely a no my side. What is this that we need to adapt to looking at what's happening around us if you're talking about digital transformation? I'm going to just share my thoughts on three things which are the bus words which we keep hearing. Any conference you go to nowadays even including this conference it's all talks about these three things. Artificial intelligence, digital transformation and the third thing is most probably you might not have heard it in these terms but I'm going to talk about it shifting customer interfaces. So let's take one by one. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. When people talked about artificial intelligence this is what I pictured myself doing. In a beach in a hammock enjoying the sun and the beer but what actually transpired? I don't have the time to actually go to the beach now. So what I also realized is this utopia of artificial intelligence doing entire marketing for us is a misnomer. So don't believe anybody comes and tells you that it is going to do the marketing for you. It's going to define your marketing strategy. It's not going to happen. At least in the near future it's not going to happen. So I'm an engineer also by training and artificial intelligence was taught to us in engineering 25 years back. It's not a new bus word that has been created now but what has happened is and it has been long part of popular culture. How many of you have seen Terminator? Matrix. Do you believe a cyborg assassin is going to come and actually kill somebody's son? Do you believe human beings are going to be used as fuels for furthering the interest of the rest of the artificial intelligence powered community? Matrix. We all have got this romanticized version of artificial intelligence which is what I call as strong AI and in other words artificial super intelligence which people have been talking about I don't think this is imminent. It's not going to happen so fast. What's happening it's also not going to drive your marketing strategy or the PR. Whenever you have a problem in PR take the example of Starbucks. All of you know about it what happened when somebody was not allowed the use of a washroom. Is artificial intelligence going to come and solve this problem for you? So as marketer we feel safe. This is not going to change your life but what is important is if you look at artificial intelligence and redraw the boundaries of what is artificial intelligence you will see AI everywhere in our day-to-day work and let me give you some examples. First thing stop pursuing the ultimate marketing bot. None of the bots are going to come and do the job for us the way we want it to be done. So stop pursuing those kind of things. Today if you look at it it exists media buying definitely use artificial intelligence big time. If you look at lead scoring for other leads that are coming into the organizations we do that. Propensity modeling from old techniques we are doing and we are seeing a huge shifts because of the data crunching capabilities of the artificial intelligence. So what do we do? Start with business needs clear use cases and not techniques. Don't go behind the buzzword of artificial intelligence. Go behind what it can deliver for your customers. Go with clear business use cases with clear business objectives set out and then see it will work for you. This what I call as the applied artificial intelligence. So go away from the theoretical artificial intelligence and move towards applied artificial intelligence. If you look at artificial intelligence where it has worked what is intelligence? Can somebody define intelligence for me? Fantastic. Where is a problem? There is a solution. Intelligence is used to solve a problem with an algorithm you call it artificial intelligence. As simple as that now look at it the empirical evidence of where artificial intelligence has worked. Whenever the use case is defined very narrowly artificial intelligence works brilliantly. The more the generic the use case we are staring at failures. So most important thing for all of us to do is to move towards this applied artificial intelligence which is defining a very specific use case. What are the steps that we need to do? It's not easy. You have to put in a lot of work. AI is not going to come and do the work for you. This is again and again I'm repeating because of the experience that we have had. We need to put in a lot of work. There are two things that we need to do. What is the first thing? Good AI depends on good data. Put it together. At least I can see this set of crowd will now obviously not their head when I ask this question. How do we actually grow in our personal careers? We put in a lot of effort in the first 10 years, 15 years maybe and that is the industry period being industrious about what we do. The next 15 years we do a lot of work to actually earn money right if it is one of your goals. What are the next 15 years all about? This is what I call as the enterprise period. We want the money to work for us. That's a goal of the life. When you want to retire you want the money to work for you. You worked hard to get the money industry period and the enterprise period is when the money needs to work for you. So as marketeers we have worked very hard to collect a huge amount of data and they are existing in different silos across board. Now we need to make the data work for us for the use case that we are looking at. So put it together. That's the biggest challenge that we'll all face and that's the first thing we all need to do. The second thing is data alone doesn't make any sense unless you add the human element because human element which is what marketeers are supposed to bring into any conversation allows us to get the common sense and the context that is still eluding missions today. So bring the human element because the human element brings the context to the conversation that we want to have. I'll give you two examples from HDFC Bank's life. What's working for us? Subject line prediction in emails. We do use artificial intelligence to predict the subject lines on the email communication that we do. It gives us a phenomenal open rates. We just put into a machine what is the subject line and what has been the open rates in the historic context. So it is able to pick up words and able to predict what is going to be the open rate next time when you send another email. Do you think you can work on this without the human context? Somebody has to still physically see what is the context of the email and then look at what the subject line predicts. Once you do that you will see a good uplift in whatever you are trying to do. Second thing, net banking behavior. We want people to move to the digital world. We want people to transact digitally. What we found there is more than 12 million of our customers who are already using net banking for many of their transactions. There is also an equal number of customers who are not using. So we have to understand what is it that we can do and how artificial intelligence can come and help us move these 12 million customers also into the net banking world. Humongous amount of data. We pushed everything into the artificial intelligence system and we said do a path analysis and tell us what is the path that these 12 million people who are already into net banking have gone through and what are the right steps for us to actually promote to the other 12 million was still not coming on to the net banking or to the digital world. It gave us a path. We piloted. What do you think is the success rate? It is telling us these 12 million had this path A, B, C, D, E. Follow A, B, C, D, E. Promote A first then B then C then D then E then they will stick on with your digital mediums. What do you think was the success rate? Artificial intelligence at work. It was not so great. Why it was not so great? Because the human context was missing. Now if I tell you this context you will understand yes that's right. What we found out with the 12 million who are not actually going on to the net banking world when we spend time with them as marketers to understand what we found is consumers who found convenience as the primary reason to move into net banking. They've already moved. The people who are now not moving into net banking for them it is not convenience which is stopping them. They say they're having enough time. Not a problem. I can go to the branch. What they were worried about? They were worried about security of their transactions. Now this is where the human context comes in. This is where the human intelligence comes in. The moment we started tackling that particular issue of security saying how much net banking is secure and give them correlations in real life of how it is as secure as what you do normally in the branch then the combination of human and the mission comes together and then we have a huge uplift in terms of the ability of us to convert people into the digital world. So what we are wanting all of you to take over is applied AI define the use cases narrowly then put the consumer context you will have lot more quick and long-lasting wins from the artificial intelligence solution. It's changing your life but still remember consumer context is what we are supposed to be bringing in as long as you bring that in you should not be worried too much. This takes to the second thing that we want to talk about which is digital transformation. It was a buzzword maybe a year, year and a half back and artificial intelligence had it for break first right? Now everybody talks about AI and nobody talks about digital transformation and maybe after one and a half years people will talk about blockchain in marketing I also already saw somebody questioning people about blockchain in marketing. So these buzzwords keep coming in what is digital transformation most of the organizations tend to do this because somebody else is doing it everybody is doing it so we lie almost an FMCG company you take any industry everybody talks about it. Now the first question that we want to ask all of us is technology or consumer who is first? This set is all about consumers. Technology or consumer who is first? Consumer right? Now I'm going to give you two examples then answer the question again. Apple very successful company it says how will consumers know what they want to know unless you show them so they say technology first. Now I'll give you another example Amazon another big successful company for us to learn from. They say consumers start from consumer and work backwards everything will be right. Now answer technology or consumer who is first? The underlying thing while superficially it looks very different but the underlying theme of them is whatever they do at the end it works best for the consumer. So when you look at digital remember does it solve a problem which your consumer currently has in your business? Don't go for the sake of doing digital but please view it from the lens of the consumer. The day you start viewing it from the lens of consumer in terms of what it is you will see. So what's a marketer's role? It's all about consumer experience consumer journeys and that's where we should focus on. There are lots of other departments and functions which will start focusing on cost because of digital but we as marketeers should be starting to focus on the consumer experience. And when you talk about consumer experience it's not about one person going to do this. It cuts across the entire company and I was just talking to Deepak in between and I remember D. Shivakumar all of you. He was telling me like digital is how do you define digital? You might have a chief digital officer in your organizations many companies will have it right? Somebody will be called as digital expert digital marketing expert and all the stuff. He said take the analogy of cricket. You have some people who are batsmen they say I don't want to bowl. Some people are wicket keepers they can neither bat nor bowl it's fine as long as you do a proper wicket keeping and some people are bowlers will not be able to bat full and there are some all around us. But all of them have to do one thing very well which is digital has to be like this everybody has to be a fielder. So since digital transformation cuts across the entire organization make sure that as marketing you need to understand that it is intertwined and try to be the inspiration behind getting all this stuff. This customer experience consumer journey is actually a sum total of the delight or the repulsions the consumers face across all the channels. Just don't look at digital. The channels which we serve to the consumers today might be very different. We have a phone banking channel in the bank. We have a retail channel. We have a digital channel. We have an outbound channel. We have many inbound channels. We have DSAs going and talking to people. It is about the consummate experience which the consumer derives and that's what we need to focus on. Again how many of you know about Radiocaps? Merucaps? Why did they fail? Why it's not there anymore? Bad customer service. If you look at it they defined the experience that they are going to target very narrowly. What they said is my experience is you are having difficulty in booking a cab in Bombay for example. I will give you a phone number where you can book the car. It will come. So they definitely solve that problem for all of us but they never bothered to see what happens if the car comes on time. Is it delayed? Is the car kept clean and neat? And if you don't like the driver's attitude or you don't like the car is there a way that I can give a feedback loop? Now when there is a new competitor a digital first company Uber, Ola, how they have defined this experience? Think about it. It's not an app which is there. Maybe for us Uber is an app when we started to think about it but today what we are seeing as Uber is I book the car. The car comes. Path is clearly known. Waiting time is known. I get into the car. I go to the destination. If I don't like the car I can give a feedback and if I don't behave properly the driver can also give a feedback about me and see how it is working. All of us have just moved on. So what we need to understand is it is the entire experience and not one narrow piece of the whole experience that we need to do. What is this experience? It is the customer focus baked into the product or servicing and that's what these examples are showing us. So there are four things that I want you to remember like I said artificial intelligence two things get the data and get the people together. When it comes to digital transformation just there are four things that all of us remember. Never make it a tick in the box. Purely view it from the consumer prism and see how it is going to help your consumers solve whatever is the problem. Evangelize the customer orientation at every opportunity you get within your organization. Don't focus on the front end alone. It is not the screens. It's not the user interface alone. It is the entire end-to-end experience from discovery to fulfillment. Look at the entire spectrum. Own that piece. Inspire people to look at it from that prism of an end-to-end experience. And the last bring people together for a common goal. This is the most difficult thing for everybody in our organization because we have vertical silos where horizontally optimized for a consumer the answer is no. We are vertically optimized for different functions the answer is yes. And that's how organizations are today. Create virtual teams. I'll give a simple example again. We have these term loans on credit cards. Credit card most of you people have. How many of you know that you can take a loan on your credit card? Many people right? We have this product and we also have a personal loan. We looked at the past data and we looked at what's happening what's the kind of difference that exists between these two products. The ticket sizes are low data tells you very clearly here it is like thousand dollars there it is like ten thousand dollars. There's a one is to ten difference in terms of the loan amount. When you actually went and sat with consumers what we found is people who are taking loans on credit cards want instant money. Want predictability that the money will come. Why do you want to go ahead and borrow on your credit card? Because there's something urgent that you want to spend it on or you have an outstanding somewhere you want to close it and then consolidate your borrowings and it's all small ticket items. You want to go ahead and go buy a tv to watch FIFA. You want a loan. You don't want to go to the personal loan. They want paperless transactions. So what we did we looked at what the actual consumer issue is put in all people together and we said first thing is get pre-approvals done which means tell the consumer in advance you have so much of money available for you in advance. At any point of time you can take it. So this pre-approval has suddenly changed the game. You don't have to apply anymore. You know that you have a lakh ten lakhs five lakhs whatever is it that is eligible for pre-approved available for you. No charges because it's a credit decision which the bank takes. The moment we have done it then we have to indicate to the consumer here is your pre-approved loan. Anytime you want to come in take it. You have to also make the discovery easy. So we went behind analytics looked at what was it that people who have already borrowed doing question who is it that looks similar to this kind of a consumer in our base went to them and started talking to them saying hey here is a pre-approved loan for you ma'am anytime you can take it and just two clicks the process login choose the amount choose the tenor EMI will come accept terms and conditions 10 seconds the money is on your bank account no questions asked because we are pre-approved right we know you you know everything about you more than your mother knows as a bank so this is what we have done and we put a team together across functions and say a shared goal is we want this to move upwards of 25 percent in the next three months. Origination digitally fulfillment digitally more than 25 percent six months we are already at 35 percent this is the power of bringing people together with a common shared goal and with the customer experience as the focus the next thing which the fight is going to be an experience is what i call as the customer interface so what's happening in this space so let me again ask a question how many of you bought a phone five years back so when you wanted to buy a phone what did you do ma'am before that where online where google today when did you last buy your phone this phone where did you go to find out before that where do you go today if you want to buy a phone first spot five years back it was google today it is do you see this change in the consumer interface when you buy when you want to buy a ticket five years back it was maybe google today it is straight book by show make my trip depending on what you want to do five years back if you want to buy a car you would have gone to google again now you go to car deco cars 24 whatever it is and then directly do what is the difference that has happened silently we all have noticed it we all have changed behaviors do we consciously do it what's happening what happened segregation of the market according to the niche again discovery understanding what others are doing and saying about the same product actual users getting reviewed we started trusting so many people nowadays it's not about anymore of whether we know them or not you go and choose something in amazon you look at the review one star no so suddenly the entire customer interface for many of these products have moved away from google isn't it staring in your eyes now they are all battling for the control of the search now if you are a marketer and if you want your product to be sold you need to be present in both you need to ensure that your product does the job for the consumers so that the reviews are good it's no more about search it's no more only about display networks suddenly the customer interface is changing and it's happening category by category depending on which category you are you have to start thinking what's happening in your category i'll talk about the category which i'm working for which is banking it's a jungle out there now and let me tell you what is that VC where do you want to go if you want to talk about financial aggregators you all go there bank bazaar paisa bazaar policy bazaar that's true so on one another spectrum for a discovery of a product human beings have this great need to compare right starting from finding a girlfriend to whatever we do now everybody wants to compare what i have versus what others are offering it's true so using that as the human insight there's enough people who are kind to now take the discovery portion out of the bank right look at the next one we all use google days amazon payments are going to come and these are big companies now they are competing with us on the other side of the spectrum which is the final transaction piece payments so as a bank you see your sales which is the first part of call moving to a finance aggregator and the transactions the payments which is the last side between the first and the last people are slowly pitching in the interface for people which is in the journey is moving away from the banks it's true for my category think about what your category does for you but we have an advantage the advantage for us is we are a transaction company people do come back to banks for transactions look at your industry look at your category and let me take airlines for an example how many of you have moved into jet airways website to do something if you're not flying very rarely but when you fly first port of call you said is make my trip not jet airways hotel booking you might have a preference towards the Taj but how many of you go back to a Taj website again and again never right but banks have this advantage that you do want to know how much money is there in your balance money has a great stickiness whether you're going to use it or not you just want to see it and feel happy yeah it is there nothing has happened i have this my salary has come so immediately when the sms comes you want to log in and see whether the money is there in the account great for us so the banks have an inherent advantage that the sales transaction of buying a home buying an insurance policy buying a car buying taking a personal loan for a holiday or buying a credit card these are once in five three ten twenty years event but there are daily events which are happening in your life where you are still going to come to the bank now understanding that what we are doing we are making sure that we utilize this opportunity of when you're there in the banks interface we talk to you we have conversations with you about what we can do for you we try and see whether we understand you fully well because of the fact that you have two humongous amount of data about what you do we exactly know what you did yesterday i can tell you that because you swipe your credit card whether you were in kamal lounge at 12 o'clock we get to know so using that we can make the conversations with you much more clearer concise precise and relevant for you so we want to be relevant in our conversations with you when you come back because we have this opportunity but that doesn't mean we will not be present in the locations where you are going to be present as consumers it's not of either or it has to be both so think about from your category perspective and see where the consumers are going to be there are you going to be present there are you going to be relevant in the context of what people are doing when you are going to do that you don't have to worry about the shift of consumer interfaces because you're thinking about your category and seeing what is going to happen in my category just take a step back and think through you will see a lot more happening in your category which may not have been noticeable when you just do on a day to day basis so take the disruption head on and use it to our advantage yes times have changed lots of things are happening in the last 10 years and five years so summary keep an eye on the disruption of the consumer interface every brand every category see this as your first port of call what's happening to your consumers where are they going now what is going to happen two years three years five years down the line are you ready use digital customer experience that helps you face this disruption again come back use the emerging technology like artificial intelligence rationally for use cases and for your business objectives to ensure that the disruption that's going to happen in the customer interface is taken care of finally i'll leave behind this thought with you put the customer first and enjoy your work day which is differently different and you will always have fun and hopefully all of us can put our legs up and have a beer in the beach thank you