Part of why we perhaps feel more irate about poor customer experiences these days is that we feel that the brands know us better and should avoid making obvious mistakes. If I’ve told you my preferences, goes the logic, you better respect them. Or if you’ve dealt with me a few times already, you ought to KNOW what I like by now and serve me accordingly. The “Do you know who I am” statement much beloved of the Indian blusterer takes on a whole new meaning. And yet brands have a continuous struggle to meet these expectations because a lot of this ‘knowledge’ is unstructured – it may be a Facebook or Twitter comment rather than a like or RT which is easy to understand and track. Unstructured data is what your local kirana shop uses to remember that you don’t like this or like something else better. Or how your favorite maitre d’ remembers that you like your water without ice. Or your tailor remembers that you prefer a comfort fit over skinny. As each of these businesses gets replaced by a large scaleable enterprise that delivers this service, our expectations of this understanding do not reduce, but rather go up. So how does a large company remember these about their millions of customers? The answer lies in mining unstructured data and then applying it meaningfully to the customer experience. This, in part, is what we’re going to talk about in the webinar I’m co-hosting with IBM today at 3pm IST on Cognitive Commercewith an expert perspective from Sanjay Tripathy, Vice President – Marketing, Product, Analytics, Digital & E-Commerce at HDFC Life and Kiran Ajbani, Head of Enterprise and Digital Marketing Solutions at IBM India - Do log on at 3pm to join the discussion.
The offline world has always had big discount sales coinciding with Independence Day or Diwali. But of course the scale of ecommerce is much, much, huger. Flipkart says that they sold more Apple watches on Day 1 of the sale than were sold previously online and offline combined. Ok, ok, the numbers are probably small, but still… For most customers the big attraction is the discount rather than the service. A recent Economist article says that most companies today look for an exit through a buy-out rather than an IPO. We’re certainly seeing that in India which I guess incentivizes firms to focus on mindshare and marketshare rather than profitshare. Will Twitter get bought by someone is the big question online. Don’t get me wrong – I love Twitter, but I don’t think customers of Hotmail or Orkut or Myspace were terribly loyal to the platform and so it’s hard to predict how sticky a purchase will be.
The Great Indian Festival Season is well underway -I’m off to Kolkata to celebrate Durga Puja and I wish you all a happy festival quarter.
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