e4m-infobip webinar: ‘Every consumer engagement on digital an opportunity for brands’

Covid-19 has impacted businesses across the sectors, and auto and consumer durable industries are no different. One of the biggest changes that the pandemic has brought about is consumers shifting to the digital medium for almost all their needs. 

To get more expert insights into this phenomenon, the exchange4media group, in partnership with Infobip, organized a fireside chat and panel discussion. The webinar aimed to gauge the impact of the pandemic and help brands gain insights from industry leaders on how to navigate through these tough markets. 

The fireside chat between Sumit Asthana, General Manager, Samsung SDS, and Aravindan Somasundaram, Head - Solution Consulting, Infobip India focused on the topic ‘Journey from a Temperate Reality to a Modern-Day Experience’. 

If businesses want to survive in the current market environment they not only have to meet the customer’s demand but also exceed their expectations. A great customer experience is the result of a useful, easy, and enjoyable customer journey. 

Starting the conversation, Asthana sharing how companies can be more empathetic towards customers said: “In India, what consumers need is to have a look and feel of the product they are buying. Unfortunately, due to COVID people have become cautious to go to the stores and touch the products. Now, they want that experience just sitting at home. One of the things I have seen is Croma giving a user experience while people are sitting at home. If someone wants to buy something they can go to the Croma website and ask for a demo of the product through video calling. Customers can ask questions during the course. AR and VR can also bring a change in market trends.” 

Communication is the heart of human interaction. Talking about how infobip aligns with the beliefs of the brand Samsung, Asthana stated: “Infobip has been helpful in the transformation of what Samsung is in the journey of right now. For more than a year now we have had this association with Infobip. When we started communicating through WhatsApp around 10 months ago it was a great journey where infobip not only gave us a solution but also helped us in how we can make our WhatsApp journey successful. We would like to explore solutions that can help build better experiences for consumers.” 

Wrapping up the conversation speaking about Samsung's roadmap on an omnichannel approach, Asthana shared: “In our customer experience solutions whether it is a voice call, WhatsApp, at our service centre, etc our backend remains the same. For voice messages as soon as the call comes we have the help of the backend CRM and that is something we are trying to adopt for other channels as well. With this, the customer will get a personalized experience. This will give a positive impact on the consumer experience.”

The topic of the panel discussion was based on the topic: ‘Decoding the Digital Influence in Auto & Consumer Durables Sector’. The discussion had Amit Tiwari, Head Marketing, Havells; Deba Ghoshal, Vice President, Marketing & Key Accounts, Voltas; Aniruddha Haldar, Vice President Marketing - commuter motorcycles, scooters and corporate brand- TVS Motors Company; Shakti Upadhyay, Head of Marketing & PR, Kia Motors India; Shakeel Anjum, General Manager Marketing, Honda Cars India on the panel. The session chair for this panel was Shankar Iyer, Head - Customer Success, Infobip India.

The panellists discussed the evolving purchase process in auto and consumer durable sectors, ways to integrate and orchestrate channels to improve customer experience, and how to create a cross-channel customer experience.

Starting the discussion sharing his views on the shift of segmentation with WFH being the new norm Anjum said, “There has been a shift to a personal mobility platform. However, it is difficult to say if this trend will hold. The two data points that are currently available have seen a significant drop of almost 80% of commercial vehicle registrations and sales. There is a significant drop in the sharing platform bookings. At the same time, post lockdown there is almost a 15% jump in personal vehicle registrations. There is a demand in the market. Despite the economic downturn, there is a demand.”

Anjum added, “We launched our most popular model of Honda City which is Fifth Variant in July’20 and almost 50% of the city sales have come from the top end. Which is significantly higher than our previous launch. The customer is giving equal importance. At least, in Honda’s case, there hasn’t been a major shift to lower brand variants. It holds for other variants too.

"For other cities, the price points at large numbers also showed that the industry wasn’t shying away from spending money. The shared mobility segment is divided into two parts. The people who moved to a shared platform because of convenience, parking hassles, managing drivers, cost of maintenance, and so on. The second segment is that GenY consumers do not want to invest significantly in an asset. They just want to use a pay per use platform.”

Ghoshal shared: “Our portfolio has to cater to a large set of consumers, and that’s where we have to cut across genders, age, and so on. That is when engagement becomes very critical. During the peak of the lockdown, we took a look at our media agencies, the Havas group’s Meaningful Brand Survey brought out good insights for us."

Ghoshal added that 61% of consumers were looking for a brand to tell them how to use their appliances in the middle of a pandemic. The insight helped the brand focus on teaching consumers about using their appliances instead of pushing new propositions and features.

"That is when data and content came in," he pointed out, "We used data and created meaningful content for consumers in the middle of a lockdown. That helped us to engage in a relevant manner. We started seeing meaningful engagement taking place in all of our social media channels. We also created DIY videos like how to service your AC and appliances at home. During the festive season, we saw there were barriers in certain categories. There was pent-up demand but we needed to make sure that the consumer came on board. A mix of data and meaningful content helped us stay relevant and engaged."

Talking about how TVS motors engaged with consumers during the lockdown, Haldar stated, “We saw the demand take place in various categories. Very interestingly, in the rural market, because the mass transit shut down, there was a livelihood requirement and we saw the first upsurge come in from there. This was due to the need for personal mobility. Then for individual mobility needs, there were demands for add-on vehicles in urban sectors. The digital interface helped us to curate service videos for consumers. Interestingly the proportion of informed consumers walking in the showrooms were increased to 80-90%. The role of front line dealers changed from providing information to giving validation. It is still early days, post-COVID there will be a different segmentation.”

Sharing his experience, Tiwari from Havells said, “Today the consumer is much more informed than we think. We are just trying to fulfil as an enabler what the consumer wants. What we have learned and have started doing in recent months is focusing on the marketing science of ‘Netnography’ which focuses on every touchpoint of the consumer. This is going to be a playbook for us going forward. We know that is not only about the pent up demand. This is the combination of the future and also needs to be required for it. Around 85% of the consumer appliances sector runs a very traditional format of the dealer, distributor, retailer. To develop trust we developed a platform called O to O which is Online to Offline. We were generating leads for all our distributors and dealers and they were fulfilling that order. The idea is that at this particular point in time if you can engage a part of your consumer journey, you are winning a part of your consumer in a big way.”

Lastly, Upadhyay talking about his journey on understanding the consumer’s voice and his experience being a new entrant in the automotive industry shared, “When we started, the entire Kia product portfolio was designed keeping the new age consumer in mind. The best part of today’s consumers is that they love to express and digital is a boon. Every engagement the consumer does with our social media channels is an opportunity for us. For example, Kia Seltos was available to buy online from day one. Even with COVID our approach worked as WFH was buying from home and that was a rule for us before COVID. With the quirky, new age approach that Kia has, we have been striking a chord with the consumer. Our Kia Sonet launch was done during the COVID period, but from day one we got more than 6500 online bookings. In a way, I would say COVID was a boon for us as it brought us even closer to the consumer.”