MarTech Mumbai: AI can touch Bharat & India at the same time: Pratyush Kukreja, Haptik

MarTech Mumbai 2019 saw expert sessions focused on driving RoIs, omni-channel marketing, improving customer service, use of AI and machine learning, how Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) are transforming the marketing space, along with marketing tech trends predicted for 2020 and beyond.

In one of the expert sessions, Pratyush Kukreja, AVP Business Development, Haptik, presented insights on five ways AI will transform marketing in the next five years. He began the session saying, “Humans do a lot of repetitive stuff which can be automated by creating a machine to do those tasks and achieve those outcomes. So this is one way to essentially lowering your cost. But I think for marketers, lowering of cost is not that much of an outcome as much as increasing sales or increasing their brand value.”

Changing consumer behaviour trends can make the life of a marketer difficult and this is where AI intervention can help, Kukreja said.

Elaborating on the explosion of digital touch points as one of the changing behaviour trends, he said, “As the technologies are evolving and the consumer behaviour is changing, the touch points that consumers use to interact with various brands is also increasing exponentially. There is Android, iOs, Google, WhatsApp, social media and others. What this means is that the consumer journey is also becoming all the more complex.”

Technology is actually making the entire decision more complex because the consumer is jumping from one bucket to another almost on a daily basis, almost on a channel-to-channel and ad-to-ad basis. Finally, post-sales consumer experience on why a consumer will choose your brand over other brands is equally important, he added.

Kukreja further said, “The value proposition of AI is to enable people to achieve outcomes across this entire purchase journey. In the age of AI, this is a funnel to look at, where the entire purchase journey is going. The user first understands his own needs and concerns, the brand has to recommend the right product and options, then there’s conviction - communication of personalised offers, discounts and policies, finally allow the user to come back for more upselling and cross-selling opportunities.”

Marketers are using AI across industries to achieve the desired outcomes. He added, “Broadly, AI can be bucketed into these 4 Vs - Vernacular, Video, Voice and Conversational Marketing. These are the buzzwords when it comes to marketing, where AI is used at a very large scale.”

Elaborating on each of these AI bucketized items, Kukreja presented a Star Bharat case study for Vernacular. The campaign for the show Jai Maa Vaishnodevi targeted at the Hindi rural belt in North India leveraged on WhatsApp as a medium and used Hindi vernacular to interact with their not so tech-savvy audience. The impact achieved was 13 million unique users within 5 days of starting the campaign. Using Facebook and programmatic advertising, it drove over 11,000 hours of user engagement with the Hindi vernacular, rich-media content bot on Whatsapp, asking questions, learning facts and sharing greetings of the season.

Speaking about the RoI for the marketer in the above Star Bharat campaign, Kukreja said, “Here the customer is captive to you. They do not change their WhatsApp number often and hence their loyalty towards the brand is ensured. The brand owns the data, and WhatsApp doesn't own the data. You can retarget users at any point of time. Users however have to opt in for WhatsApp promotion.”

Using Video as a tool, Kurkeja presented the Tata Mutual Fund video campaign as an example, wherein the brand objective was to increase AUMs (Asset Under Management). To achieve this, the brand created a lot of video properties for different micro segments, promoted extensively on social media channels to facilitate higher brand recall over conventional channels.

The ‘Hello Sensodyne’ campaign used Voice as a tool to connect and engage with consumers. Using voice virtually on Google assistant helped pledge a brand association between Sensodyne and oral healthcare. Speaking about Voice, Kukreja said, “With the advent of voice assistants, the mic button on WhatsApp, Google assistant on our phones and Alexa devices in some of the urban premium homes, Indians are also starting to realise that using voice, they can interact with machines. And voice comes very naturally to all of us. The technology is at a stage, where a user can have real-time conversations with a branded asset and achieve a certain outcome.”

Speaking about conversational marketing, Kukreja said, “AI has the capability to touch Bharat and India at the same time and across industries at the same time. The entire user journey can be easily handled by a bot across different touch points where users already are - such as Facebook, WhatsApp, website or your app.”

Technology is at a stage where AI assets can be seamlessly integrated across channels for users on different channels, for seamless user experience and the history that they have on one channel is available on another channel as well. So brands can easily pick up from where they left off. This becomes a very powerful tool, especially when brands are fighting for the mind space of their consumers.

Kukreja concluded the session with a recommendation for marketers, emphasising on the importance of data in decision-making to know your customer better. “Store all the data of customers which could be transactional, behavioural, historical at a single place. Don’t have your data spread across different systems and different backend tools. Once you have the data, that’s when you will leverage it to make decisions around who, when, where and what. When a user comes in you are able to tell whether they are a new customer or a prospective customer, or a lost user who has rebounded to come back to your website,” he added.

AI can help implement decisions around these various touchpoints, having one-on-one personalised workflows for each of the users at not just at a segment or a cohort level. For an efficient post-sales experience, the consumers grievance redressal AI can help address consumer issues, Kukreja said as he signed off.