HDFC Bank’s digital transformation & customer experience journey amid the pandemic
In this discussion, Ravi Santhanam, Chief Marketing Officer at HDFC Bank shared their approach to personalizing the customer experience, what it means for HDFC bank to be contextual and relevant in their customer interactions, and why the use of analytics and machine learning is critical for marketers today. Ravi also shared important insights into the consumer banking experience and the impact and response to the pandemic.
Revenue marketing is what I look at. I don’t look at marketing for the sake of branding or communication, or the sake of anything else is not acceptable to me.
Research NXT: You have been a senior marketing leader for over two decades. I wanted to start this discussion with your journey as a marketer – what impact have you observed of the changing marketing landscape in the industry?
Ravi Santhanam: I’m an accidental marketer. I was almost seven years in hardcore finance – working for ICICI bank on the tech side and then a UK based Energy Company on the equity side. So, I’m a business guy, and then I moved into telecom to handle multiple business roles, and then moved into marketing pretty late in the day.
Revenue marketing is what I look at. I don’t look at marketing for the sake of branding or communication, or the sake of anything else is not acceptable to me. I have defined marketing in my own language as understanding consumers, creating demand, and generating revenue.
So from that perspective, it’s more about bringing revenue on the table for the company. Obviously, we talk to the consumers, and it’s about how you solve the consumer’s problems. It has to be a win for the customer, it has to be a win for the company, and it has to be a win against the competition, and if you can do that, you’re going to be always on top.
I strongly believe that while we all have a role to play in the function we work, one needs to consider how it impacts the end delivery of a product or a service for the customer? If you understand that and can improve on that, the company does well.
Now the “talking to” had to change to “talking with” the customer – the marketer had control over the brand and could have the narrative in control.
Research NXT: You have worked in two of the most significant consumer-facing industries – telecom and banking. What are your observations when it comes to technology in marketing? What are the best practices and challenges that you have observed?
Ravi Santhanam: When we look at it from a consumer perspective, things have fundamentally changed over time. From an organization’s perspective, you want to reach the consumer. You want to communicate with the customer saying – this is what I have, and this is the problem of yours that I can solve. When television came, everybody said it has all changed, and there were big changes in terms of the one to many communication, and that’s how it was for a long period.
As a brand, I talk to my customers – the operating word is talking to my customers. I will say – this is the product I have, and this is the benefit that you may have. There is always this consumer benefits ladder as marketers where we keep on pushing ourselves in terms of – what is the rational need that we can take care of and the emotional need at the top level that we can fulfill based on what we serve the consumer with. We keep pushing ourselves in that direction.
A brand was invariably built by the company having a thought in its mind and communicating that to the customer and there was an intermediary standing in between. It could be the agency, could be the distributor through which we were communicating with the customer. That was how marketing has happened for a long, long time.
MoreIn my view, it is no longer a choice for marketers – the use of new-age data science and AI/ML technology. This is what customers are looking for. How to use it and what technology is your choice, but if you are not going to use it, I think you are going to be irrelevant.
Research NXT: Given that there is this massive amount of data and analytics going on, Is there any use AI-led personalization wherein you’re trying to be contextual and relevant, and could you share some use cases which are AI-driven at your end?
Ravi Santhanam: We believe this is the directional wave, and the second aspect of being relevant is about presence. As marketers, we have always chased customers, and the choice of the media that we have always used to communicate with our customers has been the medium that the customer is actually using. As mediums continue to change – from press to a magazine to television, to social media to the internet – I need to be present in every media where the customer is present.
Presence is also about a soft presence. When you as a customer are thinking about a need, I need to be present wherever you are. So one is an aspect of relevance that I need to be relevant for you. I also need to be wherever you are, and whenever you think you need something.
How do I know where you are and what do you need from our brand?
As a bank, you have a tremendous amount of user-generated data. The first thing is to put it all together and when you put it together, you are in a position to do a lot more effective 1-1 communication – about what is the right thing for the customer to do at any point in time, and what needs to be done next.
When you have to crunch this kind of data, you need to have phenomenal computing power. We need to have human intelligence which is supported by machine language and learning algorithms. How good are you in terms of looking at a certain trend and then predicting that somebody else does it? There is a set of people who might end up doing it and when it comes to natural life, we can very easily segment and predict.
MoreFrom a brand perspective, and from a hardcore digital technology perspective, we have effectively used this time to get our models sharpened.
Research NXT: How have you ensured your consumer base was served well during the lockdown phase? As a marketer, what changes have you observed?
Ravi Santhanam: First off, it is the first in our lifetime that you’re seeing a health crisis like this. A health crisis leads to a public policy change. There are the social dynamics which change – social distancing is something that is happening. There are a lot of consumer behavior changes. Some of them are here to say, some of them will increase, some of them will vanish. These things are extremely difficult to predict as we speak. We will learn over a period of time.
One of the things we are very sure is digital will continue to increase its space. The space was anyway growing, and social distancing has pushed people to digital. That is not going to change; I think that we will get pushed further and further. The second thing is that experience is key. If the experience is not being delivered even today, people are not going to like it. They are sitting at home, they have a lot of time, and everybody is looking at the experience which brands are providing.
Now, if you look at those who are actually the winners, they are always the people who have been investing in customer experience. They’re the people who leverage technology to solve the consumer experience problem.
Today, people are very worried about personal safety and family safety. That has also slowly translated into income uncertainty, and this income uncertainty has two angles. People are thinking – first, whether I have the money, and second, how long will it last? People growing their salary or were looking forward to growth in the next three years, and this has put paid to those hopes – it may now happen in five years or ten years. This is creating a lot of worries in the minds of people.
The first thing we decided is there is no rule book. Whenever we encounter any kind of problem, we have always looked back in history. Whether it is your personal experience or the wider industry experiences or even cross-industry experiences, you will not find examples of people who have come out of this situation. So, the first thing we decided amongst ourselves is there is no rule. We told ourselves that we would break conventions and be ready for the new. Anything and everything that we need to do as the marketing organization, we will look at it. I read an interesting thing which somebody said – “Don’t Restart, Start.” Interesting coinage of words, but it is a very powerful coinage of words in our understanding. Restart assumes that I stopped something for a reason, and everything is back to normal. Whereas start means I’m going to look at what is available today, and I want to see if it will work for me or not.
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