Molly Kapoor has been in financial services for over 18 to 19 years. She started her career in 1999 with Birla Sun Life, then went on to work with ICICI Prudential for eight to nine years. Molly came back and joined Birla Sun Life in 2008. In these 18 to 19 years she has handled various profiles at various levels, right from handling a branch to a zonal office to a corporate office, and roles within the front office, back office and middle office, and now heading marketing.
In this conversation with Research NXT, Molly explains how Birla Sun Life is leveraging marketing technology with the help of agencies. She talks about the challenges faced while working with these agencies and reveals the best practices to overcome the barriers.
We treat our agencies as our own employees. Employees have certain KRAs and a variable component attached to them, and so do our agencies.
Could you share your journey in the financial services industry, and how it has been so far?
The journey so far has been very exciting and extremely challenging, in terms of how many different environments have come in 18 to 19 years. It would have been an era where everything was manual, everything was data entry, everything was restricted to Excel and Word, and the software was just home grown software being tested internally, to an era where we are now talking about IoT.
I feel very lucky to be a part of this huge transformation which has happened all across and specifically in financial services. One common thread is that I have always been fascinated by consumer understanding and consumer insights; that has been constant in my career, whether I am in the front, middle or back office. I have always dealt with consumers, so that has been very exciting.
What kind of channel do you see attracting most of your customers? Is it the conventional channels like print and media, or the digital channels like email and online?
If I look at consumer behaviour, earlier a person would look at a mutual fund as a fifth or sixth investment option, and hence we were only targeting people over the age of 35. However now we see that even the youngsters are very aspirational. They are earning well, they want smarter saving and investment options, and they are willing to learn, understand and experiment with new options to grow their money. The range has really increased now, from 35 to 55 years to 25 to 55 or 60 years, and until the time people retire. The trend has changed completely.
Now the consumption journeys of these consumers are different. If a set of customers is online we have to deal with them online; if a set of customers is offline we have to deal with them offline. The younger population, from 25 to 32 or 33 years, are absolutely on digital, specifically in our category. If I look at journeys from consideration to conversion, I think I have to insert all kinds of media depending on the journey that a particular segment wants to experience in this category. So it is from manual to digital, to manual, back to digital.
Secondly, by regulation the last mile, which is the registration space in our category, is manual mostly. So we need to have an offline presence so that people can come and register. In the last two to three years the industry has seen a lot of shift towards digital platforms. In our case, for example, we had what I would say seven to eight per cent of our budget allocated to digital, however now we are moving to 30 to 35 per cent allocation. So that has been the huge shift.
How are you tracking a prospect across various platforms to increase the conversion rate?
We are tracking the journey right from the time the prospect sees us, even if it is not our platform. Even if they see us on a third party platform where we have published, let us say, any communication from Birla Mutual Funds, they read that communication, do a search and land up on our website. We follow them whichever platform they visit. So remarketing and tracking is all in place.
On our online portal you can discover your needs, register your needs right away, and buy a mutual fund in 15 to 20 minutes. So the journey is very, very seamless.
So we are obviously tracking all our visitors across multiple platforms and multiple behaviours. We are tracking search behaviour, we are tracking your behaviour when you are on our website, we are tracking your behaviour when you are on social media. All of that is pretty much there.
To do this, are you using an off the shelf product or is it something which is built in house?
We have agencies which are doing the job for us. Only the customer management system is our own, otherwise most of it is outsourced.
Our core competence is not digital. We are just digital marketers, so we need not invest in huge technologies to do what we need as of now. The scale is not that much. We are happy outsourcing it. It is very convenient for us and we need not set up infrastructure either in terms of manpower or hardware and software. Right now we are very comfortable with outsourcing and that is doing our work.
You said you are working with agencies for most of the digital marketing aspect. Do these agencies only execute the strategy, or do they also help you in building the strategy?
Strategy is in house and it is executed by multiple partners. We have an analytics partner, an ATL partner and a digital partner. So we have various agencies that have to work in tandem with each other.
One challenge that you must be facing would be to make all of these agencies perform smoothly to get the end results. How are you managing these agencies?
Yes, you are right, that is quite a challenge. Specifically now there are so many new agencies which are mushrooming, so the challenge at our end definitely becomes really large. However what we do is we have made very streamlined processes for evaluation of the agency before empanelment. We have very strict criteria in terms of not just cost; we are very, very focused on quality. Both have to be balanced.
The evaluation criteria itself is quite stringent, and once the agency is empanelled, performance metrics are again divided between short term and long term contributions. We make sure it is a fixed kind of retainer which is given to the agency, and at the same time we also have variable payouts depending on the performance of the KRAs of the agencies. We treat our agencies as our own employees. Employees have certain KRAs and they have a variable component attached to their KRA, and so do our agencies. We have a platform to keep assessing them on a regular basis.
It would be great if you could share some best practices to handle these challenges.
We make sure before shortlisting any agency that we meet at least the best six or seven in that field. So let us say it is an ATL agency, we meet at least six or seven of the best ones. We make sure they pitch with their full passion to us. We are conscious of the cost, but we are not just conscious of the cost; it is very important for us to get a differential quality. We do not like agencies that are just doing work which they have done for many other companies. We want people who are thought leaders along with us, who are true partners in the true sense, and who can understand our philosophy and our mindset and execute our strategy.
We start with a fair evaluation and put strict valuation on certain parameters continuously. It is a three round process, after which we narrow down on the agency which we want to get on board. It is a little longer process, but at the end of the day we are pretty much sure that together as a team we have shortlisted the best. It takes three rounds for shortlisting a larger agency; for smaller ones we do not take that much time.
What are your expectations from the B2C Marketing Automation Report, India 2017?
It will be very interesting to see if there are any different practices being followed. Not the best practices, because best practices have become very common now. I would like to know if there is any differential practice or way of thinking that is emerging in this space. It will be great if you can have a separate section for key observations from the report.
