There is no denying that the industry is posed with challenging times given the competition. Digital disruptions have given more power and choice to the customer and brand loyalty is no more an award to any brand for a long time. This is vital to all brands as they look to maximise customer advocacy and share of wallet.
Talisma Corporation offers Digital Engagement Platform which help brands navigate challenges across all stages of the customer journey – from prospect management, customer acquisition, service and retention to loyalty and advocacy for the perfect customer journey experience has solution to address the issue.
Talisma helps brands drive revenues and stay ahead of the customer to drive his expectations.
“Our solutions look to address three critical challenges towards brand profitability – enhancing the cumulative brand experience for customers across the entire customer journey; power their sales strategy for increasing growth and revenue; and a holistic approach that is seamless through the journey towards loyalty,” says Raj Mruthyunjayappa, MD, Talisma Corporation.
The company has always addressed large enterprise deployments with its solutions across industry verticals. BFSI has been its major success story with four out of top five banks in India as their customers. Insurance and housing finance majors are its customers too. Talisma is now bullish about looking to consolidate its position and market share across other industry verticals and geographies.
“Bandhan Bank is one of the most recent customers. CB Bank of Myanmar is another recent win. Nepal is yet another market that we are focused on in South East Asia,” Mruthyunjayappa adds.
Stringent competition
Customer is the king as always and especially in the consumer space industry today, there is an entitlement for every consumer that he will choose to do business with the companies the way he wants and on his terms. If they are not aligned with the way he wants to do business, he doesn’t do business with them.
“If you can buy groceries using your mobile, you should be able to do anything on your mobile. The customer loyalty is nowadays on their fingertips, which also means that they can just choose another button and the loyalty is over. The question now I how can we retain customers? There is no way to have relationship with them. But now with everything being bought and done over the phone there is no emotion, there is no personal touch to it. So whether you are a good or bad or an acceptable brand is decided by a consumer purely by how they get the services, which include the buying experience and service, after sales, maintenance or it could be even simple questions. So just in time service is the biggest thing that is now driving the consumer behaviour. With just in time services coming in you also need to provide just in time service across all channels the customer chooses. They may choose to say I will call from mobile, they may choose laptop, or they may just use their apple watch. They could just choose how they want to do business; you will have to enable them to do that, be it Instagram or any other social media for that matter and how do you actually make that happen is one part of the pressure for companies,” he explains.
Elaborating on other pressure points of businesses, Mruthyunjayappa states that the transaction prices are dipping. And the fight to maintain consumer base, the struggle to acquire new customers is ever increasing. “If you look at the airlines, they are struggling, telecom is struggling and the list goes on. The reason for this is the cost of operating, whereby driving these businesses is becoming very expensive. The need of instant delivery of best services to customers is becoming difficult. These businesses are battling with the scenario in terms of how to lower cost of operations, and still provide the best of services.”
Taking about the third scenario, he says, “We are talking about an era where no service is the best service, which means, there are enormous options available to the customers and that is the future,” he adds.
Looking at these three paradigms, he points out, “We can understand that this is probably the biggest struggle period for the industry today. The only way to address this three dimensional problem is by building customer digital profiles and personalised customer journeys where they get the feeling of belongingness through the journey with the brands or companies. And this exactly what we (Talisma) ensure by using our digital customer engagement platform. It is effectively addressing the three challenges that the industry is facing.”
Solving business problems
Talisma enables industries to create digital profiles of the consumers which includes consumer behaviour, sentiments, and the way they like to engage with the brand. “With our AI tools we can almost go to the path of saying- when you send an email in what mood you have done that – is it with happiness, frustration, anger, etc. If you have a chat with the brand we can tell them if you are a happy customer or not. We can have the customer managed by somebody who is higher on seniority. We can tell based on the customer engagements whether he or she are is a long term, futuristic customer or is it just a transactional value that the customer wants,” he says.
Talisma helps brand managers leverage the power of Social, Mobility, AI, Automation, RPA, Analytics functionality in new ways to enhance productivity, customer satisfaction and experience.
Future plans
Elaborating on the company’s future road map, Mruthyunjayappa says, “Till date we have primarily played in the business to business domain. Now we are getting in to two lines- one is the government, where one of the first contracts for which we have engaged with the government is on the GST network. And the other one is the SME. Nobody has been able to break that code with SMEs simply because the adoption of technology at the SME level has not been great. Thus, we have built a solution using WhatsApp. Our solutions for SME will be driven by the technology they are actually familiar with.”