Beyond Last-Mile Delivery: The Future of CX in E-commerce with Shilpa Gupta

Welcome to Humans of cx, a podcast powered by Ozonetel. We share the latest insights and customer experience from industry experts to help you humanize your approach, placing empathy at the center of the customer experience. I'm your host, Garima. Thank you so much, Shilpa, for joining me on the Humans of CX podcast. It's fantastic to have you here with me today. Thank you. Thank you Garima, for inviting me, Shilpal, to begin with, help me understand your story. What really inspired you to get into this exciting space of customer experience and how did you get to know about this space? Actually, customer centricity, actually in me, I think that concept started when I joined Flipkart, right Before that I'd worked with PepsiCo and Diageo, but there you never really, especially when you're in the role of a supply chain or manufacturing, right. You're not really able to understand how your work actually translates into a customer experience. But Flipkart is a very highly customer centric organization and the entire focus on how every activity, everything that you do in supply chain and operations creates that customer delight was something very visible, right? Because when you work towards improving a speed of delivering a product to a particular customer, when you come up with a service which was cash on delivery, right? Or when you come up with. When I was handling large business at Flipkart large supply chain, we started the concept of delivering an installation at the same time. Like if you get a refrigerator or washing machine, it's actually not of any use to you until it is actually installed. So you have to keep thinking very differently in terms of how you create that delight for the customer. And actually for an E commerce company, thinking about it, your last mile delivery executive who is actually handing over the product to the customer, the face of the organization to the customer, and I was handling actually the last mile delivery for the large business. Everything that a delivery executive does, right, how he behaves in front of the customer, how he's dressed up, his body language, everything had to be thought through and we had to train them basically to create a very good delivery experience for the customer. So the a lot of interest in the entire customer experience started from there. And when I actually joined Homelane, it's still a startup and initially I was handling the supply chain and manufacturing, but then the founder Srikanth reached out to me. If you would like to pick up customer experience. And it's a topic very close to my heart. So I was like, why not? Excellent. I think something very interesting that you highlighted is about the Last mile delivery, Right. And I would like to understand, like what were the specific challenges you saw, what the gaps you perceived when it came to communication between the last mile delivery executive and the customer and how did you manage to overcome them? Because as you rightly said, it's all about unless that refrigerator has not been installed at my home, I will be anxious as a customer, right? I have paid the amount, I am waiting for the delivery, the fridge is here, but it has not been installed yet. So where do you see the gaps when it comes to communication between the last man delivery executive and the customer? If you could highlight a bit about that. So there are a lot of gaps actually, right? Because especially pre Covid when customers are not at home during the weekdays and working hours, right? And when the delivery executive is actually trying to reach out to them and a customer is not available. And even during COVID times, while everyone is at home, they are busy in the meetings. And a lot of times we also don't receive phone calls of the customer. So the delivery executive is also in a dilemma, right? Because he has to deliver certain number of products in a particular day and a route is also planned for him to ensure that he doesn't miss out on the deliveries. A lot of times he's stuck in a particular location just because a customer is not reachable. While a customer may still not be very happy about missing out or not being able to take the delivery on that particular day. So how do you really solve for that? While you can't be over calling a particular customer to really give them a pain during the meeting, but at the same time you want to ensure that their product is delivered on time. So driving that has been one big challenge in terms of ensuring that the delivery executive is able to reach out. Secondly, many times the delivery executive is always quite in a hurry because there are a lot of delivery, especially during the rush season. And all right, how do you ensure that they are still giving enough time to each and every customer in terms of explaining that the product is delivered? We started something called as an open box delivery for refrigerator and washing machine to ensure that the customer opens a box and actually checks whether the product is right or not. But obviously sometimes customer is in a hurry. Delivery executive also has a certain number of deliveries to be done. How do you still ensure that? Interaction between the customer and the delivery executive happens very smoothly. So it requires a lot of training to the delivery executive in terms of their ability to empathize with the customer. It's important to make them understand what they're doing and how it is impacting and how is it important for the customer and for the organization. Until the delivery person really understands that it is very difficult to drive that seamless interaction between the two. So you have to invest a lot in terms of training your ground folks. Absolutely, absolutely. And in terms of there was this time before COVID and there was this time after Covid. Right. Do you feel that this entire pandemic situation made us customers a lot more impatient? And in a way now the expectation that we have from every other service provider is on the similar lines. We want everything instantly. And how, especially for the E commerce brands, especially for the E commerce players years. How has customer experience, the entire concept of customer experience has evolved especially in these few years. Not like 10 years down the line, but especially these few years pre pandemic and post pandemic. I think one is pre pandemic and post pandemic. But also I think over the last 10, 12 years of E commerce industry being there. Right. 13 years, it has evolved a lot. I mean I still remember when I joined Flipkart 10 years back, that time delivering a product to a customer in Bangalore within three days was really thought to be a delight. Hey, wow. We've delivered it in three days and look where we are now. A customer wants a product in few hours and not just days. And that's how the entire market has evolved. Customer expectations have evolved. Right. If I order a mobile phone, I would never go to a platform which is delivering a product which is not delivering it today or latest by tomorrow morning. And there's so many options available as well. So I think every supply chain or every business has to keep evolving to meet the customer expectation. And in today's competitive world, I don't think just meeting expectation is enough. If you have to meet create a true customer delight, you really have to exceed expectations. And that's where it's a challenge for everyone. Not just the business but also the supply chain. How to keep thinking disruptively to make products reach to the customer as fast as possible and ensuring obviously it is defect free, the right product and at the right time. Absolutely. And where do you see an omni channel CX strategy fitting into this picture and what according to you is a truly omnichannel experience especially for these fast growing E commerce players? I think customers want to be connected to the brand in multiple ways. Right. Either chat or obviously the customer support service which is basically the call center where they can reach out to at the same time the social media platforms in terms of addressing their concerns. So I think not just e commerce brands. I feel everyone needs to be present pretty much everywhere to be connected to their customers and to be able to respond to their customers. Because you have customer across multiple age brackets right now, right? And some are active on social media. Then you have certain profile of customers or customers in their late 40s and 50s who'd be more active on WhatsApp or more comfortable with WhatsApp. Then you have the newer generation, which are more active on Instagram and reaching out through Twitter and all those platforms. So I think you have to be really there if you're catering to a wide range or customers of different cohorts. Basically, what is your message for these brands? Because now every other brand is trying to reach me when I am the customer, right? And everyone has an agenda in place and they're constantly messaging me on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and I am exhausted as a customer. I am exhausted. Okay, I don't want to buy this right now. I'm not in the mood. So why don't you start with a discussion? Because I know we talk a lot about empathy in customer experience, right? But when it comes to communications, somewhere, I feel as a customer that empathy is still lacking. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer, as you rightly pointed right in the beginning of the conversation, that it's not okay to keep on calling the customer when he or she is in a meeting or somewhere else. Right? How do we deal with this part of the story? Because yes, Omni Channel is important. It's important to be where your customers are. But is that enough? What more needs to be done? I think, first of all, understanding what kind of communication needs to go to each and every customer, that itself has been a big challenge because there's just so much surge of information. Even the organization in a rush to be relevant, sometimes you just push messages, irrespective of whether it is even relevant to that customer or not. Right? For example, I may not be even looking for buying a house, but I'm still once, if I six months back, if I search for a house, I still keep getting messages and calls on that. Right? Irrespective of whether I've closed the deal or not. So I think somewhere data will also play a very critical role in terms of where this customer is in the entire journey or whether the customer has really completed the transaction and not interested in any more purchase with this particular brand or for this particular product. Taking that data as a feedback again and ensuring that you don't reach out to that customer is very important. I think today, that itself is missing. And every day, irrespective of even if you've made a purchase and you're not going to make that purchase for next two years, you still keep getting those notifications. So, yeah, I think that there's a. Still a way to go on that I think, in a way, you rightly touched upon how important it is to truly listen to your customer. And is there any strategy in place at homelane? I'm sure there is, that you are. How do you ensure that you are actually listening to your customers? You're incorporating their feedback and then driving your initiatives forward? So at homelane, it's a very different business. If you see, right, our engagement with a customer is for a very long duration. A customer who is getting interiors done for a house is, once they book an order with us, they're pretty much there with us for at least anywhere between two to four months till the handover is done. And so taking feedback from the customer is extremely relevant and important for us. We really need to understand whether the entire experience over the course of months is going as per their expectations or not, or is there any disagreement or is there any issue that a customer is facing? So we have set up something called as a CSR team, we call them as customer success representative. And every project or every customer will have a csr. And the CSR is pretty much the voice of the customer in the entire journey. They will be a single point of contact for the customer, understand their pain points, understand if there is any issue, even if something is going well, they will have that feedback also coming back from the customer. So they are able to understand the pulse of the customer, take feedback very quickly. If there's some issue, pull in the relevant teams, resolve that issue and ensure that the entire customer project is back on track. So it has a lot more human element, it has a lot more empathy involved, and it is not just very transactional in terms of how entire customer experience is handled here. Brilliant. If you can take me through the transition from Flipkart to Homelane, as you said, it's an entirely different space, right? And there are different set of customer expectations, different set of priorities. How do you manage this and how are you looking at this change? And at the core of it, it's all about the customers, right? It's all about customer centricity. So the concept of customer centricity, add Flipkart and the concept of customer centricity at home Lane, how is that Looking for you. I think the concept still remains the same, right? Because eventually it all boils down to a fundamental question in terms of why do we ex and what are we really trying to solve for a customer or what are we really offering to the customer? I think once that is clear, right, that sort of helps you to break down into three or four OKRs. And once an organization has that OKR very clear, that's when each and every function can really step in to figure out how they can contribute to that okr. Like at Homelane, we know why we exist, right? We want to offer affordable interiors to the customer along with giving a very delightful designer experience, right. Which customers aspire for. We want to offer the right quality of the product to the customer. We give predictable timelines to the customer, which is a big pain point in this industry, in this space. So once we have very clear quality and as far as supply chain is concerned, the two objectives of meeting the right quality and the timelines, those are clear, right? Then it becomes very easy to understand how as a manufacturing process or a supply chain team or a procurement team will play their role in terms of meeting that customer expectations. So everyone will have their role in terms of creating the overall customer experience. It is not just the sales team or marketing team which can really create the customer experience. Every function has their role to play. It boils down to breaking it down into clear actionables. Right? Right. And as you mentioned that it's about bringing every team together right now there is also a lot of conversation and discussion going on around how within an organization, these teams exist in silos and that impacts the overall customer experience. What is your message for stakeholders in this aspect? No, I agree. So org silos can become a problem actually as far as customer experience is concerned. And not just customer experience, right. If you're trying to solve for any org deliverable, right. Org silos can become a pretty much a bottleneck. So it's very important therein for the leaders to step in, ensure that they're building the culture of collaboration and cross functional trainings. Multiple teams, in my view, have to come together. Like I said, if you have defined your organization's okrs very clearly, that's when all the teams can really come in together to understand what role will they play in terms of delivering that particular okr. And that also requires, by the way, support from each other. Because if function A cannot deliver their okrs until function B, that gives them xyz. And that's when both function A and function B have to really work very closely and with each other to ensure they are delivering the end objective. So building that culture of collaboration, ensuring that teams are coming together and jointly co owning lot of things, create a true customer experience is important. Brilliant, Shilpa. And also we have seen how massively Homelane has grown right in the past couple of years. So what would you say have been the key pillars of Homelane's success? And then maybe you could tell us about while scaling up, ensuring that customer centricity remains intact, how have you ensured that as well? I think three pillars mainly has been first, trust and transparency with the customers. Second is their entire culture of customer centricity. And third is predictability in terms of timelines, in terms of cost. These three things have been very important in terms of helping Homelane scale up, ensuring that we give the right quality of the material to the customer. And that's where trust and transparency comes. We've always tried to be very transparent in terms of what is the raw material that is really going into your home, what is the kind of plywood that we are going to supply to you. We even mentioned the brand of the hardware items that we supply. Right. Whether it is headache halfway or a private label. So that builds a lot of confidence in the customer in terms of ensuring that they are getting the quality materials when they're coming to home lane. Second is building the entire org or a culture of customer centricity by ensuring that customer doesn't have to go through the pain of figuring out themselves by going to the carpenter or getting the raw material. And that is how the unorganized segment works, works. So here the customer, the project management is taken care of by Homeland so they can get to sit and relax and ensure that the entire execution is handled by professionals. And third is giving the predictability of the timelines for this. We've set up a lot of processes, brought in a lot of teams to work in tandem and in closely in sync with each other to ensure that the timelines are completely met. We have set up something called as a control tower at Homelane. It is basically like how you have an air traffic control unit, right? This is ensuring that this team is ensuring that all the projects are actually moving right from the order book stage to the handover stage on time. And we have divided a project journey into multiple milestones. And if there's any milestone which is not going as per the plan, this is the team which will freeze a red flag, bring in the teams to intervene to solve for the problem and ensure that the project is brought back on track. So this team plays a very critical role in terms of ensuring that the entire timeline of the customer becomes very predictable and we are able to hand over the house to the customer within the time frames which time frame that we have committed. Interesting. I think very recently I was speaking with a guest on the podcast and he also mentioned about the role of predictability in customer experience. How important it is to deliver predictable experiences to customers. So what is your take on that? You just highlighted it that how it works out for you at homel. But what does it mean for the customer actually when they know what it is that they're going to get? If you could just elaborate a bit on that because I think as customers for any XYZ product, we definitely do not want surprises, especially negative sense. Right. So what is your take on that? I think predictability, if you ask me, is now hygiene for customer. I mean I don't think it really qualifies for even delight anymore. Especially for E commerce and all those industries. Right. If you see I will get your product tomorrow at 1pm if it doesn't come, it is like deal breaker in a way. I mean customer will never come back to your platform. So predictability now has really become hygiene. Customers have evolved and that's a basic that they need to create a true customer experience. You cannot just rely on saying hey, I'll give you the material or your product within the committed time frame that's given. Important is how can you reduce your tat or make your predictable timelines also faster than you than the competition or how can you really deliver it as fast as possible. And second is how can you really create a wow around the entire delivery experience or even the buying experience for that matter. That is what can really help you create a delight and win a customer loyalty. Right? Right. And in all of this, how do you look at the role of contact centers? So I think contact center is important, I mean at least in terms of gathering the first level information to understand the customer pain point and the problem. But I think how do we empower customer contact center? And I think some of the E commerce have done a brilliant job. Like in Swiggy, I've seen a lot of your problems actually get addressed by just few clicks. Right. In terms of contact center executive asking you just two, three questions and your issues resolved. Whether it is refund or no refund. But I think also how do you really enable them to really solve a particular customer problem rather than just take in and say that a ticket is registered, it is important that contact centers are able to give a more definite reply to a customer with predictability in terms of when the issue will be resolved, rather than just taking the first level information. Right? So at home lane, if you had to empower your frontline agents, what steps you would take and what other initiatives you would want to implement in order to ensure that there's a happy agent experience as well, so that it translates into a happy customer experience. So at homely, like I said, the entire customer interaction is leveled or rather the entire customer buying experience is also not transactional. It is not just a one time interaction that a customer has. Right. Customers typically associated with us for a few months and customer can reach out to the contact center at multiple points. So more than the contact center we've enabled it through, like I said, the customer success representatives, who has more context to the project. Because in this business context is a lot more important, right? Whether the issue is with the work, painting, hardware, where did it really go wrong, Whether it went wrong in the design phase, or in the production phase, or in the installation phase. So you need someone who has a little more context to the problem. Otherwise a third person who is just speaking with the customer for the first time will never be able to solve a problem because it is never that simple or it is not just about taking a simple refund decision or one step decision in terms of solving a problem. So customer success representatives, in my view, play a lot more important role to solve a problem because they are pretty much a customer companion right from the order booking, tiddly handover phase. And they understand where at what stage the project is, if there are any problems. They are very well connected with the designer, with the production team, with the central operations team to figure out what the right solution for this issue should be. So contact centric executives will still play a very important role if a customer reaches out. But they have to still be empowered in terms of pulling the right folks or the right teams together to fix that particular problem very quickly. Absolutely. And at the back end, Shilpa, how does it look like? Because there must be a communication infrastructure to ensure that the person who is currently dealing with the customer has complete context of the customer's journey. Far right. So there are CRMs in place and. But in terms of communication channels and technologies, what does it look like? So at the back end, obviously like you said, we have the CRM system which is basically helping us to understand the customer profile, the journey and where the issue is. But a lot of problems can only be solved through internal teams coming in together and speaking to each each other there. We use a lot of groups and the meetings to come and huddle up together and particular problem and go back to the customer and inform them about a particular issue, what the status is and how it has been resolved. So it still requires a lot of cross functional team, so a fresh test systems in terms of raising the tickets on the particular person. Because obviously you can't keep track of every time a particular issue, whether it has been resolved or not. So holding that person accountable by raising a ticket and ensuring that closed looping is done and the issue is resolved is important. Right. And since we've talked so much about customer experience, how it is evolving with time, how customer expectations are changing with time and there's so many new technologies in place now and everyone is talking about ChatGPT 1, 2, 3, 4. So like how do you think that this is going to change the entire customer experience landscape? And organizations are also talking a lot about balancing AI with human touch. Right. Because again, these businesses run on personalization and it's all about how on a personal level you're able to connect with customers because these relationships you build for a lifetime. Right. So how are you looking at this part of the story? Yes, there are new technologies in place, they are very promising. But at the same time it's important to ensure that your customers and even your internal team members do not feel isolated whenever there is a new technology in place. How do you ensure that like everyone is at peace, everyone is comfortable and that balance is there between tech and personal touch. So I think technology cannot replace the human element and the empathy part of it. Right. I mean still, if a customer is disgruntled, it is always nice for someone to speak to that customer and talk to that human element is very important. But I, I don't overstate the importance of technology as well. Right? It is important. I mean these are the tools which help you take the right decisions at the right time. That is where it will be a very important role. Lot of predictability in terms of predicting disruptions, in terms of anticipating customer problem can be enabled through technology where humans can not be as proactive or as quick in terms of anticipating those. So I think technology should play and will play a very important role in terms of enabling those decisions, in terms of helping people take decisions faster and many times anticipate problems also before they actually happen. So that's where it should be really leveraged to solve for the customer problem. Right? Right. Shilpa, I feel that Customer experience as a concept is still growing in terms of understanding when it comes to the Indian CX community. People have recently been talking about it a lot and customer experience is being seen as a very key component of every business that is there. So any new person who would want to join this space, what would you tell that person? Why does the space matter? And what is it that they should look forward to when they are seeking a career in customer experience? I think anyone seeking a career in customer experience has to be really have the knack of solving the business problem actually, because a business exists because of the customer and every business is in a way trying to solve for the customer, right? So if you're able to create a customer delight, then pretty much the organization has delivered everything because then your top line, bottom line, everything is taken care of, right? As long as you're delivering a right experience every time. So a person who is really thinking about customer experience has to. It is not just about being able to talk to a customer or being a very good smooth talker or being a good listener. It's also about ability to really solve a problem, ability to really be able to think on the feed or really come up with solutions, ability to collaborate with multiple teams to really create processes which are scalable, where multiple teams can come in together and work together. So it is a lot more than just being able to talk or being able to listen. In my view. It's a very holistic role and it requires a lot more than just being good in dealing with people. Thanks, Shilpa. And going forward, any key trends that you're closely looking at, especially within E Commerce and especially for companies like Homelane, what are some of the key aspects you're closely looking at, watching and trying to understand how this will impact your bottom line going forward in 2024 and maybe five years ahead. I think in terms of trends, it's very important to watch out for how the market is evolving and how customers are evolving and what are the expectations of the customer, what are the new things that are coming into the market, especially when it comes to home trends and all right, so it's important to keep up with that as well in terms of the entire interior space, what is the new thing that customers are really looking for and that can really help in terms of adopting it very fast and then obviously innovating our supply chain. Make sure that our processes are much more efficient, much more resilient and much more fast to deliver the product very quickly to the customer. So it's an evolving space I mean, as customers are evolving, we have to evolve, processes have to evolve, supply chain has to evolve. Absolutely, Shilpa. And I think it's been wonderful listening to you and learning from you today. And I think I'm definitely a prospect for Homeland because I'm struggling with designing my home at the moment and I know how much of of hassle it is to bargain with tenders and even the labels and it's just a pain. And I love the fact how Homelane is actually managing the project end to end and simplifying it for the end user. Right. And there's so much that I'm looking forward to, especially in this space because yes, there are multiple players, but you know, how do you deliver everything in an affordable price range and ensure that the customer is happy at the same time? I think that's a challenge. That's a challenge you're trying to solve for and it's quite an interesting problem to take care of. And in that respect, I'll definitely request our listeners to check out Homelane and see if there's something for them as well and if they can connect with you on LinkedIn and understand more from you. I think it's been lovely listening to you. Shilpa, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Garima. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for listening to Humans of cnn, a podcast brought to you by Ozonetel. If you enjoyed Today's show, visit ozonetel.com to learn more about how our robust omnichannel communications platform makes it the industry leader within the customer experience space. You can find Humans of CX on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts and other platforms that are featuring podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe and share. Thank you so much for listen.