2:52 – Digital Enablement in the Retail and Telecom Industry
Mangesh Chaudhari (Moderator): Nice to have you all. So, the first question I have is that everyone is talking digital and today, it has become okay to sleep with your phone or watch a tab and spend more time on the phone than your family. So digital is already here. I’d like to know your view on digital enablement.
What’s interesting is, Shafika you have so much experience in Telcos but these gentlemen bring the Retail + Telco experience. So I want to know how do you compare in contrast to each other. Sumit, what are your views?
Sumit Srivastava: I think that today digital has become a buzzword. But from the perspective of digital enablement, you have to think from many aspects. The first is the consumer’s aspect which focuses on convenience, personalization, and the wide level of service. The other end of the spectrum is from the merchant/telco/retail perspective where you have to think about what is consumer usage or purchase behavior telling me that then helps me build a better experience for the customer.
Moderator: Shafika, would you agree?
Shafika Houcine: Oh, yes! I cannot deny that for sure. I didn’t mention, I have twenty years of experience in the telecom industry and that’s pretty much all I know. I am very keen to understand your world in the retail industry but what I’d say for me is that I have to work with different organizations, different cultures, different people, different markets, and different regulations. For me, digital enablement is about making sure that we offer the best experience to our customers on our digital channels which include websites, applications, chatbots, etc. We have a whole ecosystem of apps including the self-care apps, payment apps, content apps. So how do we make that happen? For me, it starts with understanding what our customers want. We understand the pain points on a regular basis while also gaining more clarity on what they are happy with and what they are not happy with. We look at data. We have a lot of data. So beyond data what’s interesting is to make sense of that data.
So what are the insights or the story that the data tells us?
Once we know what the customer pain points are, we have our people build the right processes and technologies. For me though, technology comes last because it is more about what do we want to do, what are customers saying, what experience do we want to deliver, etc. We are also investing heavily on user experience and design.
The other important thing we try to figure out is organizational culture and its processes while making sure that we have the right people with the right skills sets who understand their jobs. This is another big pain point for us that we are trying to figure out.
We are trying to find the best people who can work on building a great digital experience and also know how to innovate, how to challenge the status quo, and how to change the way we work. We are working on how to change the way we work and building the right ecosystem of vendors and partners.
Moderator: Well, that’s a lot. You clearly are calling out the need of the hour. It is not just about having a fast car, you need a driver, a highway because otherwise it is not going to happen. That’s a great point of view. Bilal, would you want to add something to this?
Bilal Adham: Yeah, I mean. One point that you mentioned, Shafika, that stands out for me is that technology comes last. I think that accessibility, allowing your customers and employees to engage with digital differentiation is important too. Digital enablement also means diversification of portfolio for us.
As a business and an industry in Telco, you guys are probably calling your families back home not using international minutes but your data. So that becomes a bit more saturated. So what we are trying to do is diversify the new portfolio. One is accessibility, the next is building app revenue streams and the other thing is looking at your capability whether it is your intel team or your customers. Self-service is a huge thing with digital enablement as well.
It is really important for us to make sure that we have a good customer journey but also we have a good employee journey. That is equally important for us. We have discovered that there are some things that are a bit more holistic and we can take a lot from that being in the telecom industry.
What’s the point of having a slick and smooth E-commerce checkout when your back-end team is processing an invoice, right? Why should I be on a holiday and my team should request me to approve a PO and I am talking about ten minutes ago, right?
So, we all face these challenges but if you kind of focus on simple values then you can extrapolate that and take that back in our industry for our benefit.
Sumit Srivastava: Just a play on that analogy. Telcos sit on massive amounts of data. They can build a Ferrari, they want to drive that Ferrari but they are treated like a Punto which is terrible and I think that’s where we need to take this.