Enterprise Times spoke with Karmesh Vaswani, Executive VP & Global Head Consumer, Retail & Logistics, Infosys. The company has recently unveiled Infosys Equinox – a digital Commerce Platform driving human-centric and memorable omnichannel shopping experiences. Vaswani suggests, “The customer experience landscape is evolving every week. Companies can’t afford to get into a ‘set it-forget it’ mode. It will take embracing a human-centric approach to create distinctive shopping experiences that match the pulse of consumers.” Vaswani discussed his top five tips for enterprises to develop a more human-centric approach to commerce and communications.
1. Undertaking data monetisation
It is important for organisations to examine data monetisation within the business. They will need to audit how many data attributes are being collected. Is the enterprise collecting every user experience in the entire consumer journey? Can the business segment everybody coming just to interact with your website or digital real estate. Some users will come to just research on the website or a social media channel. Other users come directly to transact on the company website. It is important to understand the user pathways – how users are learning about the brand. This may take place by exchanging information with a family or a friend on a messaging channel. They could be on a social media channel or have ‘liked’ or commented on a discussion board. As a result, they may have got inspired to come and look for your brand, product or category. Brands need to understand these processes.
2. How is your consumer data genome pool?
Again, it is important to capture all these data footprints. Vaswani calls this the consumer genome pool that businesses should cultivate similar to the human genome pool. Each human individual, all 7.6 billion people in the planet, have a different gene structure, which is essentially DNA. The same is true for the interaction between a consumer and a brand, or a consumer and the retailer. Essentially, are businesses cultivating its consumer genome pool? Vaswani, believes many enterprises do not really understand the usefulness of being ‘liked’ on Instagram or Facebook. “You don’t have to worry about the relevance of the data. You just have to ensure that it’s captured, categorised, inventorised and made available. Then ensure the commerce platform can abstract intelligence for the sales or marketing teams,” says Vaswani.
3. Plan for moments of inspiration
How the business can give its customers moments of inspiration, moments of joy in interacting with the brand. The business challenge will be automating the process and blending more self-learning on machine learning applications. These are all layers that will need to be cultivated in the data monetisation journey.
4. Curating all available data
Once merchandisers have curated all of the available data, businesses have to make the commerce engine, more intelligent. For instance, automating relevant personalised messages or promotional offers to appropriate users. Build features on the commerce engine or marketing platform that reward customers using loyalty programmes.
5. Make all channels a human-centric digital experience
As Vaswani suggests, “This is the future of marketing – making it a human-centric digital experience. And human centricity is the core of this. Making the whole experience so frictionless, that customers feel engaged, wherever and whenever, they want to interact with the brand.” The brand promise should cover all commerce. Add everything from screens, apps, social platforms, messengers, wearables, chatbots. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and the Internet of Things. This is about building the framework and making all our digital experience human-centric.
