Your customer is your future and communication is the key: Bosco Mascarenhas

Bosco Mascarenhas

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. In other words, the purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates more customers. If we do not communicate with the customer and keep up to date with some of the technologies that the customer is already used to, we will slowly and surely run out of business, says Bosco Mascarenhas, Head Business Development, Seshaasai while explaining the importance of communicating with customers to grow a business during the 7th NBFC100 Tech Summit in Chennai.

Bosco Mascarenhas

Seshaasai started off way back in 1993 and for 26 years, we have been catering to the entire corporate segment. We are ISO: 9001, 27001, 14298 and 7816 certified. 

We are also Visa, MasterCard and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) RuPay certified which helps us provide support in the payment space.

We provide secure print solutions to the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance sector (BFSI), telecom sector, retail segment as well as the education space. It would not be wrong to say that every home in India has received some communication from Seshaasai in some form or the other. That is because we provide solutions starting from Microfinance to some of the largest banks in the country. 

We cater to a whole range of telecom service providers as well as utility service provides. We use modern-day technology to ensure that support organisations meet their customer requirements in the easiest possible fashion. 

Data security is at the core of what we do. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being one of the prime factors that people need to be aware of, I am happy to say that our systems use all possible data security measures. 

Today we have a presence in 12 cities of the country we provide a whole range of solutions across the country from all these locations. We can make consolidated statements for Mutual Funds and depositories and generate a single statement for customers across all their investments against a single Pan Card number. 

We have contributed to providing Aadhar cards to over 60 crore Indians. 

We are powering quite a few of the Smart Cities. The Government of India (GoI) has announced about 100 Smart Cities and today we are powering close to 15 of them. 

We are a data processing powerhouse for some of the largest banks in the country. 

You might have heard that a satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. In other words, the purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates more customers.

If we do not communicate with the customer and keep up to date with some of the technologies that the customer is already used to, we will slowly and surely run out of business.

We can help organisations ensure that the communication they are having with their customers is relevant and up to date. 

Some statistics from the international marketing forum, from data published in January 2019, show that:

  • 58 percent of your customers reach you through your company website.
  • 52 percent of your customers respond to emails that you send out to your customers. 
  • 46 percent of your customers respond to phone calls that you make to your customers. 
  • In-person engagements have dropped down to only 30 percent today. 
  • Direct mail and print, which were predominant ways of communication with customers, have dropped down to only 27 percent today.
  • Social media is slowly on the rise. It is currently at roughly around 27 percent.
  • Only 27 percent respond to traditional ads. 

From this data, every organisation can know where they need to put their money in order to communicate with their customers. 

Another statistic, 86 percent of the consumers are willing to pay more if they had a good experience in their initial purchase. 70 percent of the customers would actually return back to you if you had solved some of their problems. 

Communication mediums are required to interface between the entire corporate set up on one side and the customer on the other side. These mediums of communication can be the traditional print, e-mail, the web, mobile and social media. We have tried to bring all of this onto a single platform. 

Right from the time of customer onboarding, there are certain crucial communications that need to go out to the customer. This communication could be in the form of an SMS, for which we have introduced SMS Bitly. 

SMS Bitly would take the customer to a website where the customer can respond to some amount of input depending on what kind of product he/she may want to purchase. From there, a direct e-mail can be sent out to the customer. 

All this is interlinked and also being captured through some of the interfaces on social media. You can use this platform as a cross-reference for future requirements. For instance, if somebody has taken, maybe a car loan today. I know that this person is living in a home with a family of four members. How is it that I can address some of the personal requirements of that customer? So using some of the demographics that I may have captured of my customer, how is it that I can cross-sell and up-sell? How is it that I can provide certain promotions and offers to my customer depending on the data that is collected? Customers that are associated with me for a longer-term, how is it that I can provide probably, better interest rates to that customer. How I can provide the customer with certain coupons and discounts on something that is related, maybe not related to my business but related to the customer’s needs. 

How is it that I can capture the customer’s preferred medium and communicate with the customer in that preferred medium be it e-mail, web, mobile. How is it that I am able to track the communication until the time it reaches the customer. Today, most organisations which we have dealt with, they have no system of capturing whether the customer has received the message or not. So then if I have a sent a claim request to the customer, the customer probably has not received that communication and that is how the customer has not made a payment. So what we try to do is through this overall homogeneous platform, try and ensure that the tracking of that communication from the time it has generated to the time it has actually reached the customer is actually captured and visible to anybody in the ecosystem within that organisation. 

And what we also do is along with it, provide for feedback, what is it that the customer thinks about me or the services that I am offering. So this platform that we have is called the Rubik. 

Now how can I make that response? One is by annotations, this is typically being used I would say in credit card space in India wherein I have swiped my card for maybe around Rs 5000 somewhere or I have gone and withdrawn cash using my debit card for Rs 10000, when I received my statement it only says, debited Rs 10000. Now, what is this debited Rs 10000 for? So what it helps me do is when I receive my statement it helps me go and annotate it on my statement and say that yes this Rs 10000 was withdrawn for XYZ purpose. For my further reference and I save it in my folder, It has been during my tax filing, establishing links. Here what we do is for instance, if you need to trigger a response to a customer wherein you would need to say convert his purchase into an EMI, so directly linking it out here, I am pushing that customer onto a website, wherein I am asking the customer as to how many EMIs that customer would like to go for? 

So I can choose-out here what is the sort of EMIs that I may look at when I provide for the EMI, it tells me what is the EMI and I say submit. So once this data is submitted, it goes back into the data repository with the marketeer with the organisation and the marketeer definitely in the statement that he has sent out to the customer, will convert that probable expense into an EMI expense. We have also navigation, wherein, I may move from one portion of my statement to another. So for instance, in such a statement I am moving from checking out the simplified part of the National Savings Certificate (NSC) investment for my customer to a detailed one. So making that statement much more convenient for the customer, I can also use Dynamic HyerText Markup Language (DHTML), that is using HTML as a means of communication with the customer. 

So wherein a customer receives his statement, he directly clicks on the link and he’s directly taken to the statement made much simpler for the customer, now the customer can see and view, he can filter, he can decide what is it that he wants to do with the statement. We use augmented reality, it is about using different mediums to communicate and respond and get responses from a customer. So this is a campaign that we have done for HDFC life, wherein using a mobile app, the customer receives his statement, he can directly snap onto the statement and there is a trigger that is generated for the customer on his mobile phone in terms of his call to action. Now depending on the statement that the person receives and the demographics of that person, the call to action can be conveniently changed. 

This in a way helps the customer, correspond and communicate directly with whosoever he needs to communicate in the organisation in a much better, smarter way. We also do something called as campaign management which is interlinked like sending an SMS out. I send print interlink all of this and create an entire campaign. What we’ve done recently is also embedding voice into statements. So for instance, if somebody received his statement, it will actually play out his entire outstanding that is there and the pay by date when he receives his statement. Now, this is something that we are trying to do to communicate with people who are blind. We’re also doing work on Braille, wherein statements can be sent out using Braille. 

This entire flow is about how is it that this communication that is actually generated is actually tracked end-to-end until the time it reaches the consumer. Now it also takes into consideration the integration with multiple courier systems, India Post, as well as the e-platform. So I can provide, on a single platform, an entire detail as to whether the customer has actually received, read an e-mail, whether the customer has actually received that article or the communication that was meant for him and all built into a single dashboard for the customer. 

Goods and Services Tax (GST) was touched upon. Now it is not only about your customers. Your customers also send invoices out to your customers. You are also interacting with the other set of customers who are your vendors. Who in turn provide invoices to you, ensuring that this entire communication is built on to a single homogeneous platform and ensuring that at the end of the day, each of your invoices is GST compliant is also something we do provide on a single robust platform. GST e-genie is one of the products that is we are also a govt approved GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) and among the initial 34 who were approved by the GOI to provide this entire channel to the GST Network (GSTN) for large organisations so what we do is we help build the gap between some the core systems and financial systems. 

We have our own tax engine built into the system, we generate the invoices and finally provide the GST Returns (GSTR) to the GSTN. And finally, providing for necessary dashboards for management to understand as to how is it and where is it they need to focus their attention on in terms of ensuring your entire GST compliance. So a whole bunch of solutions keeping the customer in mind and ensuring that the customer continues to be sticky with you and provides additional business and returns to you for the time to come. So overall if you look at the entire product range that we cater to. We have Rubick, which is the customer communication platform, we have the deliverables management system platform, we have  GST e-genie as the platform for GST compliance and we have our own accounting software called Genie books which is on the lines of probably a Tally or Zogo to ensure some of the smaller organisations. Today the Genie books are available for free on the GSTN for small traders to download and use, to ensure that their accounting is GST complaint. So this is one of the CSR that we have taken up with GOI where we have provided our accounting application for free for traders to download and use. 

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