Trends and Challenges in E-commerce Customer Experience with Sandeep Sachdeva

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 for joining me today. Sandeep. It's such a pleasure to have you on the Humans of CX podcast with me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted to be here and probably be able to add any value to. Definitely. So, yeah, I'm excited. Lovely, lovely. Sandeep. Sandeep. To begin with, let's understand your story. Tell us what really inspired you to get into customer experience. Let me just start from the start. So I had a very humble beginning and I was born brought up in the city of Amritsar, theatric city, a very foody city. So that is where I was born, brought up, did my engineering out there before, started venturing out in more metro culture to understand what I want to do. While I was a computer engineer, I took my hands on software programming for a bit before realizing that's not something that I have a calling for. So experimented a few things and one of them was I started supporting technical service. So once I started supporting technical service, somewhere back of the mind it was that to help somebody through a difficult situation is something that I'd love to provide solutions to help them get back into the line. And the industry was kind enough for me to give me certain kind of good perks, etc, and also I think in the way how it happened was there was a time I was part of IBM and they sponsored my MBA degree as well. So it was fun and it continued moving there. But I think the real sense of understanding that CX is where I want to make my career was in the first few days of supporting laptops. Right. So people used to work on laptops and they had these concerns that if something is not working, etc. Etc. I think there was a kind of divide and satisfaction in terms of how I was able to support them over a call or on a time that became a life. Absolutely. This is brilliant, Sandeep. And since you mentioned that you come from an engineering background, Right. And there are people who have so many questions about customer experience, what is it that they need to understand? What are the skills they need? For whom is this space created? I mean, it's not for someone coming up with a specific set of skills and background. Right. So what is your take on this? What would you tell people who want to Explore a career in customer experience. I think first, the foremost sense that you need to have is that you need to have a sense of customer satisfaction. You need to have a sense for supporting a human. So if you are one person who will be walking across a road and you find somebody who needs help and you are not going to be the one person who is going to raise his hand and say, you know what, let me just try to assist this individual. CS is not neutral or you will not be able to walk the talk. You will actually not be able to do justice to yourself or to the job or to the career. The basic element that the foundation has to be orientation towards support. If you have a supporting attitude, whether it comes to your family, whether it comes to your friends, etc. I think you should start with that. You need to have a very strong mental attitude. Because what also happens is in customer service, there will be times when you will have people who will be rooted, there will be people who will be mean. They will do you because they are facing a situation and you need to be a great listener there. You can't interrupt. You need to let the other person went out and then try to support that individual and do it over and over again, right? So it might be your 50th call of the day, right? Your last call of the day. But it's the first call for that customer that you're taking. So keeping that calm, keeping that supporting attitude is something that needs to be there in case you want to be successful in this career and not carrying forward that baggage or somebody said something bad. If you are going to carry that away or why did you say that? Then things will be difficult, right? So you can't carry it forward. You're like a psychologist, right? So everybody comes in who's in a depressive mood. If psychologist starts getting affected, what will happen is they'll get into depression themselves. Right. Similarly, a customer service executive advisor, supervisor, anybody on the line, they need to be those psychologists every go, right? So I know for a fact that they listen to a lot of unwanted comments, but that's part of the life, right? Right. And I think in a way you have beautifully articulated what is true customer delight, what is empathy in customer experience? And I would love to understand from you, Sandeep, about your journey so far in Snapdeal and how have you seen these concepts evolving? The concept of customer delight in itself, the concept of a great agent experience as well. How do you bring like a balance between these two and ensure that a great customer experience is Delivered, a cohesive customer experience is delivered. The first thing is that any culture or any theme that you want, or if you want the company to walk in one direction, it has to come from top. So you need to have management support in terms of making the organization customer first. There is a beautiful saying that in every meeting that you walk into, you should leave a chair empty and that chair should be for the customer. So every decision that you're making or every plan that you're making, you always need to consider your end user, end customer before taking that call. And once you start thinking from that perspective, the culture starts to work. So it is not one golden rule that you can follow, but it will be series of small steps that you will do and at every junction which will make this possible. We have been in this journey and I'm very glad and I'm very elated that I have management which is very supportive of putting customers first. So that comes from our values. We are a customer organization and customers are the most important piece of the entire culture. So every time when we go through or make a project we how can we improve the experience to the customer? How can we deliver the product even faster? How can we ensure a better quality product reaching to that customer every time, every successful attempt? And if he's facing any issue and he calls up the customer support, it should be a first response solution to him. And there are a lot of background work that you have to do for that. Right? There'd be many processes which would keep on evolving which needs to be re looked at. So what is probably a great experience today might just be an expectation tomorrow. I'll give you an example. E commerce organizations started delivering packets, involved let's say four days, five days, next came the next day. Next came organizations like Blinkit and Zepto. Right? They deliver in 15 minutes. That's the next thing that it's evolving right now. Customers pay premium for that kind of service. The second part of your question, which I have not answered so far is how agent fits into this entire piece. I believe the happy employee can only make a happy customer. So till the time you don't have a happy employee, you have a disgruntled employee, you will not have a happy customer. So we try to have different things that we do. One of them is empowerment. So everybody likes to take decisions. If you have a space that you can take certain decision on yourself, people are doing it. And people love sustainability. And that's the DNA that we're trying to build where we say you have the Authority, you go ahead and do the right thing. For the customer, doing the right thing is the kind of code word that I want to embed in their DNA sequence that do the right thing. Your process is saying something, but did something because you felt right. I'll support you. Right? I, I'll stand by you. So it is not that I, I didn't do that because my processes are laid out in that way. So if there's a situation, you take a call, it's absolutely fine, then we come back and we see that, okay, what is missing or how can we improve things even further? Let's follow. So empowerment is one big piece. Second, I think one element that we always try to look at is giving them some space for themselves too. Right? So it should not be that the eight hours that I'm coming in, I'm only stuck to the work that I'm doing because it'll become monotonous for them and they are eyes and ears to me. And if I don't listen back to them or I don't give them space to tell me how I can improve things, it becomes a mundane activity. So that's the second piece that we do. So A is environment. B is give them space so that they can innovate, come back, give process segmentations and then make the entire system even better. Right? Right. Sandeep, another part of this customer delight is in fact a challenge which customers are experiencing. I, as a customer have experienced and I feel that no customer loves to repeat themselves and they do not want to wait. As you also highlighted how we have moved to 10 minute delivery. Right. So these two things somehow result in fragmented customer experiences, fragmented customer interactions. How are you looking at this challenge and what is a truly omnichannel experience for you? Brilliant question and just spoke about is what is going to be a future of cx? So how I look at, and probably there are some projects which we are already working on is that there has to be certain amount of standardization and easy access to any query that a customer is putting. Right. You will have different set of customers and also we will need to understand and appreciate that I'll have a customer who is highly educated, who doesn't even want to talk to somebody to resolve this situation. Right. They just want to go to the app, do certain things, find a dmi, do a chat and just get out of that situation that he or she is facing. So there are combination of things that have to be done. A, there has to be a generative AI which will have to play a Pivotal role in developing chatbots, voiceboards and currently we are working on both of them in terms of providing a first level experience to the customer. So if you have it, in my words, it'll be a vanilla query. If you have a basic query, it can easily be answered through a voicebot, through a chatbot, the answer is right there. It can be given as a self service to a customer. B when it becomes complex is when it gets passed on to an expert. So in this way you will get a faster experience, you will get right to the point experience all your first level queries, getting answered in the spec and then whatever is complex situation. Let's say if you have a query where I need some images from your side, so that's a complex query, so that's where I need multiple interactions with you. But if you just want to know where your order is, you should just ask the board that may I know where my orders are? Can I know when my order will be delivered and what should be able to reply to that or text you back saying that this is what it is. So it has to be a combined experience. And the second part which is going to happen and is happening as well is that you can ask that question not only on the native app, you can ask that question on WhatsApp, you can ask that question on our social media side, you can ask that question in case an organization has in store. So there has to be a consistency of what you were talking. So which means it has to be managed by excellent CRMs which are working across the channels. Omni CRM which takes all this data for the customer, combines it and makes it easier for either technology, which is the bot or a human, to answer you correctly from the place you left the last question. Right, Right. And Sandeep, in all of this, how do you look at the diversity of our country and the language barriers that do come across? Because I think you and I, we have discussed this a couple of times that when I as a customer from Patna, if I'm frustrated, I would not like to express my frustration in English, even if the customer support executive is talking to me in English. Right. And this is not just a matter of communication, but also it sets that precedent. Is the person really willing to understand me as a customer if right in the beginning you are not even asking me what language I am comfortable with and you are starting with the question or the response? I think that sets a really, I wouldn't say a very bad example, but thought of a negative setting to the whole thing when you Understand or when somebody hates you, right. It is your native language that comes. You will not call your mom in English, you will both in your native language. That's how we are built. So right now how we are solving this is that we operate right now in about 10 major languages that India has. So anybody who comes in can talk in his native language. But if I say future right, how it will be is that the V bot that I was talking about earlier will be able to respond back to you in the language that you're speaking. You not even have to say that I won't speak in Hindi or Bhojpuri or let's say Tamil. If you ask a question in Tamil it will automatically answer even though. And let's say if the bot does not have that answer it will pass you on to that Tamil advisor only it will not pass on to somebody else. And we are very diverse lot of languages and as technology builds in further it is only going to get better and better. Right? Right. And also adding to this Sandeep, how are you trying to bridge the divide that is there in terms of our customers in urban setting and our customers in rural parts of the country? You are absolutely right. The demands of urban customer versus somebody who is sitting there two tier three is way different. A person who is sitting in an urban area or more educated person so as to say they are well versed with the systems, they want their answers written, they don't want to talk. Whereas somebody who is in tier 3 or a tier 4, they are new to Internet, they are new to E commerce, they are new to all these elements and they want somebody to talk and get that answer. So in the way we have created our entire system is that there is a very easy accessibility. So our phone number is up there on that, up there on the mobile side. So it's old school where you can just dial the number and reach out to an executive to support you. And this is for taking care of my tier 3 tier 4 customers. Also there are DIYs and there are chats available which and Geni AI will be the next element to that where urban customer with a click of a button can know what you want. So it is going to be two diverse channels for two diverse kind of customers and they can be amalgamated channels. So your chat converting into a voice which means you started on chat and there is one element that you're not able to understand and you just click and you get a call back at the same time and you just resolve that piece. So yeah, in combination and Alteration of these channels coming together is going to be the fundamental 90% of it is already there with us. I'm so happy and delighted and proud of that. And we are only going to get better and better. Absolutely, Sandeep. And going forward, customer experience in E commerce, how are you looking at that part of the story in terms of what are some of the key trends that you're closely looking at and what are a few pillars that you feel are not going to change? These are the fundamentals of the entire fabric in CX within E Commerce and what is here to stay. Okay, so how do I see it in future? First of all is I want a customer service which we have no contact. I get to know in your mind what your question is and I give you that proactive answer is the delay, right? When I get to know that your delivery is delayed, how can I communicate it better to you so that you don't even have to come to my customer service? That's probably the next level of customer satisfaction, that customer delight. B There will be certain problems that will stay in E Commerce for some near future and that is going to be our SCM related or supply chain related problems. And why that will stay is because we are a very diverse country and there are too many hands involved in delivering one packet from pickup to a destination. One of the analysis that I was reading was that There are about 27 pair of hands that touch your packet before it actually reaches you, which is phenomenal. I mean if you look back on it, it is such a phenomenal number. And when these many manual things happen it is prone to sound errors. Right? The error can be 1 in 100, it can be 1 in thousand or 1 in ten thousand. But there will be some speculation of an error. As technology keeps on building it forward, these errors will reduce. But with my perspective and my experience, I think they're going to stay for a shorter period of time. For a long period of time. Yes, there will be solution that you don't know what you don't know, right? So maybe tomorrow there will be some aerial robots picking up packets from source and delivering into your house or your chat. And I don't know what the future is all but right now this problem is consistent and it's going to stay rest proactive communication will solve many other problems that are currently existing. Right Sandeep, I think I've got some great insights from you today and I would like to mention this Sandeep, that today I felt that somebody is understanding me as a customer as you said, how important is psychology when it comes to delivering a superior customer experience? I think today who spoke to me not just as my guest and head of customer experience at Snapdeal, but as somebody who is completely understanding the context and completely understanding who the modern customer is. And I think that really added a lot of valuable insights to the conversation. Sandeep. So thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to releasing this episode soon. I would also request my listeners to catch up with you on LinkedIn and maybe understand a bit more about CX and this excitement exciting space of E commerce. Thank you once again. Thank you for your kind words. Garima. Pleasure is all mine. It's something I'm passionate about and I love to connect with anybody who wants some more details on CX, you can connect me on LinkedIn and that's the only social site I want. Right? So yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sandeep. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening to Humans of cx, a podcast brought to you by Ozonetel. 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