Phygital is gaining attention in almost all industries now: Vishal Rally, Senior VP, Tata Teleservices

As businesses pivoted towards digital workspaces, Tata Teleservices empowered them with innovative and reliable solutions that increased flexibility, improved productivity, enhanced employee experience and reduced operational costs. Vishal Rally, Senior Vice-President, Product & Marketing, Tata Teleservices, shares how the company strengthened its portfolio of enterprise grade solutions

From your own transformation to your customers, everyone is at different levels of this digital transformation journey. Where do you see your own digital transformation journey heading?

The Indian economy is rapidly transitioning to a digitized economy at the macro level, and the same is reflecting at the micro-level as enterprises strive to climb the digitization ladder. Post pandemic, there has been an exponential digital shift as enterprises recalibrated their business models and scaled-up digital transformation to ensure their survival, growth, and market leadership. Thus, as one of India’s leading digital connectivity and cloud solutions provider, it becomes imperative on our part to offer secure and reliable applications and services that enterprises need at an affordable price-point and support them in their transformation journey.

We have always been ahead in implementing smart digital technologies as we evolve to improve our overall business operations in line with the industry dynamics. Our growth plans are centred around streamlining our portfolio of services especially in the areas of SaaS, IaaS, IOT and Cloud. We are continually strengthening our digital connectivity highways on which companies, big and small, run their businesses. We are also enhancing digital capabilities across the value chain, from demand generation to service assurance and operations to better our customers’ experience.

How did Tata Tele Business Services rise up to the occasion and manage expectations and requirements in the new normal? Please share your overall experience in supporting the changing needs of your customers through innovative business services during the pandemic

This pandemic was unprecedented that triggered both demand and supply side challenges for businesses across industries. Employee well-being and safety has been our top-most priority while as a provider of essential services, we ensured that our customers get uninterrupted telecom services and face minimal interruptions. We also ensured timely service upgrades and provided round the clock support to all institutions like health that are at the forefront of fighting this pandemic.

As businesses pivoted towards digital workspaces, we empowered them with innovative and reliable solutions that increased flexibility, improved productivity, enhanced employee experience and reduced operational costs. We strengthened our portfolio of enterprise grade solutions such as Smartflo – an advanced cloud communication suite; SmartOffice – a one-box start-up kit with voice, data, apps and storage, SD-WAN iFLX – an intelligently flexible solution (built on Fortinet’s platform) for network optimization, EZ Cloud Connect – a dedicated private network gateway to Public Clouds, Ultra-Lola – a technologically superior point-to point offering, with latency in microseconds for BFSI and Stock brokerage firms, Collaboration Solutions, IoT Solutions, Cloud Applications, and a comprehensive suite of Cyber Security Solutions across industries. We also offer world-class unified communication solutions in partnership with Zoom Video Inc. All these solutions appropriately address the needs arising out of a distributed and remote working environment and enable customers to maintain business continuity in a flexible, scalable, and secure manner.

At an organization level, we moved extensively to digital modes of engagements across stakeholders be it partners, employees or customers. We have wisely invested in modern technologies that supported us in readjusting our marketing strategies and are now aligned with increasing customer preferences. At present, it is extremely essential for businesses to evolve with the times, and we have begun to do so. Our recent win at the IDC Innovation Awards demonstrates the effectiveness of the sophisticated marketing solutions that we have implemented.

Please elaborate on TTBS’s business marketing strategy. What role does technology plays in this aspect? How do you think technology can transform customer engagement and satisfaction?

TTBS has a progressive approach of partnering with businesses as a technology enabler/subject matter expert to chart their digital growth strategy. We have grown to be a one-stop platform for all the digital transformation needs of enterprises with our comprehensive suite of smart solutions that are scalable, easy to deploy, and are available in an asset/capex light model. It is our endeavour to use our deep customer relationships to develop products and solutions that enable our customers to compete and win in their respective business segments. Our goal now is to democratize technology so that any business irrespective of its size can become digitally agile and future- ready.

Technology will remain a key differentiator as businesses learn to build resilience in their processes and look for newer solutions to collaborate effectively. Digitally driven businesses that continue to modernize their operations stand to create long-term customer affinity. Also, there is a strong sense of push for digitalization from customers who have now become comfortable with all things digital, and they prefer working with companies that offer superior digital experience and frictionless and secure business transactions. Just to cite, we have introduced a Customer Experience Portal (CEP), an industry first platform that provides our potential customers a first-hand experience of our products and services so that they develop a clear understanding of what our services can do, how they can benefit from our offerings, thus helping them in making informed decisions.

Apart from this, we do believe that businesses should keep the human element alive while developing their marketing strategy and that is why exploring new models such as hybrid or ‘Phygital’, a combination of physical and digital are essential in redefining their growth

What is the significance of ‘phygital’ experiences and how do you foresee this Phygital world reinventing the telecom industry to support its next phase of growth?

Past year has also put the telecom industry back in focus as telecom is the core back bone of all digital businesses. Many players in this sector are quite aggressive in their approach and strategy. With advance technologies, there is a higher scope to tap the untapped market, therefore companies are looking at grabbing the opportunities to cater to the growing needs of the customers.

The new concept of ‘Phygital’ is gaining attention in almost all the industries now and this hybrid model is allowing businesses to focus servicing their customers both personally and technologically—i.e., Physical and Digital. This entails offering a digital platform while also maintaining in-person activities and there the connection between the two is seamless. The rationale is to assure cost reduction, better performance & standardisation, resource optimization, earn trust and build credibility. With a digital serving platform, businesses may save a substantial amount of money on many aspects of store management while keeping the safety protocols of their staff including social distancing in mind. This approach could help them connect to a larger customer base who wants to operate from home and at the same time keep the in-store shopping feeling alive. In a nutshell, this creates a win-win situation for both businesses as well as the end-users, helping companies to build customer loyalty and brand appreciation.

What were some of the pertinent challenges and issues at hand that fuelled the need for opting for AI embedded CX cloud Tools like Eloqua cloud?

We have a sizeable customer base and are putting in place building blocks that will allow us to grow exponentially in the next few years. Towards this end, we are expanding our product/service portfolio as well and needed an all-conclusive advanced marketing platform powered with AI that would enable us in reaching out to our potential customers with targeted campaigns with finer granular elements to benefit their businesses. Oracle Eloqua is the most comprehensive, integrated marketing solution that can be woven with our existing data analytics to generate effective and unique cross channel marketing programs. It further would enable us to create customer loyalty through improved real-time interaction with customers, accurate insights during critical campaign cycles, better inventory management, higher employee productivity, better resource allocation, effective forecasting resulting in more efficient business decisions.

Please elaborate on your collaboration with Oracle. How has using Oracle Eloqua cloud and marketing tools supported the business to improve what you deliver and how you deliver to your enterprise customers?

Oracle is one of our prime technology partners to enhance our marketing strategy. We have been using the Oracle Eloqua solution, a marketing automation platform that combines all critical customer-centric market operations, to automate all our core marketing processes centred on data management and campaigns.

This solution has enabled us to build and run multi-channel campaigns, all fully integrated with email, social, events, website, and many more. Personalization of content based on buyer personas raises awareness and optimizes the demand of creation, allowing for one-of-a-kind experience at scale.

Oracle solutions have benefitted us across all domains. Overall, it has aided our teams in running targeted campaigns to better serve the targeted industry segment reduce time to market and increase customer engagement.

What are some of the quantifiable business benefits due to the Oracle cloud solution? Please compare the pre and post scenario and explain the key benefits

The Oracle Eloqua solution has greatly aided us in consolidating our marketing campaigns onto a unified platform, increasing usability, and allowing our teams to carry out customizations. The solution has assisted in the democratization of campaign creation and execution. Further, it enables us to improve our workforce capabilities; for instance, a two-man team can enable, educate, and empower extended teams to run structured and data-driven campaigns independently and autonomously. Additionally, it improves data-driven decision-making by establishing a central repository and dashboards that generate strategic, actionable, and predictive insights.

In terms of business benefits, the cloud solution supported us in reducing cost and we were able to save by 10%, the projected savings of 15-20% over the next 1-2 years. The usability also contributed us to increase time efficiency, as campaigns can now be created with the click of a button, resulting in significant time savings. Overall, our productivity increased by 100%, and our time to market decreased by 50%, promoting long-term savings and profit maximization