Articles

New Products, Hyper Personalization & CX 2.0

Published

January 12, 2024

Excerpts from a panel discussion on what every NBFC is making rapid strides:

Panelists

Vipul Nirwani, Head – Digital Products, Motilal Oswal Financial Services
Abhishek Kothari, CEO, Pepper Money India
Pradeep Singh, Head – Risk Compliance & Business Strategy, Netafim Agricultural Financing Agency
Vasanth JeyaPaul, CEO, CAMSPay
Sabyasachi Sengupta, Business Head, Trillionloans
Anil Pinapala, CEO & Founder, Vivifi India Finance
Pravash Dash, MD & CEO, Arthan Finance
Moderator: Dr. Suresh A Shan, Former Head – Digital Innovation & BFSI Industry Expert

Suresh: We see a transformation happening from corporate digital towards customer digital, where every individual customer is taken as corporate. We have a diversified panel where you will get enough information on how they create value system for those customers. How do you see the customer expectations 2.0?

Vipul: From Motilal Oswal point of view, we are in the wealth generation business and all customers join us to invest and grow their wealth. Every customer has different and unique needs. There are people who are just starting their career. They were very different, needed, just starting investing the data, harnessing that wasn’t spoke about.

Abhishek: I think the golden rule that one should follow is that for as an organization, while the road to relevance to a user could be long enough, which means working really hard to put the right algorithms in the right segments, and all that, but the one thing that we could all do is not to be irrelevant to the customer. Customer is sharing the data with you with a certain expectation, and today’s customer expects “I’ve told you something about myself, at least act on that and do not tell me something that I do not want to know.” We keep sending emails to customers who have never opened an email for the last one year, because we love to do that, because it’s easy, because you have a tool. I think those little things go a long way to create a good CX. And then of course, personalization and hyper personalization is a long enough journey.

Pradeep: From the point of view, we are reading data, we are understanding customers. We are at a juncture where we have to acknowledge that customer is also understanding how we are operating and how smartly they can fool us. So we have to be very careful and engaged with the systems that this knowledge is two-way. They also know our desperations. Earlier when we used to source cases, sales used to filter it first and then credit used to have the ultimate say. Now everything is following a template and the system user has to just do his thing and pass it on. The customer has also learnt this and so we usually face difficulty in those cases where all the documents and processing was perfect because the customers knows the system better than us. So we have to be careful when we are talking about personalization and have to think from this angle also.

Anil: We are a digital only lending company. And as we expand our business and as a we look to improve the CX in a country which is so diverse, multilingual, partially literate and partial digital literacy. So, what we are now focusing on is to have a customer experience where the customers will be able to talk and fill in a loan application and where customers can be video onboarded, which will be the way we can kind of truly achieve financial inclusion. Even in the forms are in vernacular language, it will be very difficult for a lot of customers to kind of go through the loan application process. So, our focus is to use AI, voice, video and other tools to improve the onboarding process. And that, we think, is a great way to bring more financial inclusion within the country.

Sabyasachi: When you look at personalization from a core lending product surveyor, even now there is an over-reliance on standard underwriting parameters, such as bureau score, income data, salary slips, etc. Whereas there are a lot of other data points around customers that are widely available now which were not available at a few years back. How do we smartly use this data to better tweak loan offer lending offer to a customer – that’s part one. The second part of this is that even the product that is structured you generally have certain fixed parameters such as amount, rate, tenure, etc. with some variance. But some customers may want a personal loan for say just 45 days, whereas someone may want for 6 months. So how do we structure the product in a granular way which exactly meets the customer requirements, and how well the customer can repay that matches the cash flows of the customer. We can do more in terms of hyper-personalization.

Vasanth: With various technologies for every part of the journey – onboarding, servicing, conclusion – everything is can be solved by technology and by digitalizing the whole process. But the customer does not consume all of that holistically. So, to make all things like onboarding are automatic or touchless, we have to help more and more customer segments to adapt, irrespective of whether they understand digital or not. That’s the kind of leading approach we have to take.

Pravash: What we are offering is money, which is a commodity. So, there is what and a how to make this commodity into a product. Most lenders are doing the what such as loan amount and tenor and flexibility and all these things. The how part is very, very critical because that’s that is what is going to differentiate the organization. You have to build your customer journey and customer experience so that they will stick with you. These days, the customer retention cost is at least 10X of customer acquisition cost. So you definitely want to retain your customers and grow further. So it’s not a choice, it is a compulsion to create a best user journey and user experience for your product.

Suresh: Thanks for all valuable inputs in this wonderful session.