Enabling worldclass customer engagement for retailers

Narvar is an enterprise-grade customer experience platform for retailers to inspire long-term customer loyalty, at all steps of the post-purchase customer journey. The company has played an instrumental role in the customer post-purchase experience for some of India’s largest brands namely Tata CLiQ, Lenskart, Himalaya, Forest Essentials, Bata, etc. “The platform designed from the ground up to drive long-term customer loyalty and deliver post-purchase experiences that retain, engage, and delight customers — from cart to doorstep, and beyond. As Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, our products enhance the overall experience of customers throughout their shopping journey,” says Amit Sharma, Founder & CEO, Narvar.

Founded in 2012, Narvar has so far served over 400 million consumers worldwide (and counting) across 7.1 billion interactions, 38 countries, and 55 languages. “We have expanded our presence from US to UK, rest of Europe as well as India and we look forward to expanding our presence in the APAC region,” states Sharma, adding that their integrations with over 450 carriers globally and experience of working with different order management system (OMS) providers has made it extremely easy to on-board clients with a faster go to market timeline.

“We have almost doubled our revenue and employee headcount, deepened our executive bench, and added over 100 new brands to our roster of customers including Tata CLiQ. We are doubling down on India, as the market has huge potential,” adds Sharma.

He points out that Narvar is connecting the missing pieces of a customer’s journey – right from order tracking to delivery notifications and beyond, Narvar has everything a brand needs to create a seamless experience after purchase for customers. “We see the use case across industries. These could be online marketplaces, brands, offline big box retailers, financial companies, etc. India has a huge growth opportunity and we have designed and customised our products to suit the Indian needs. We enable retailers to provide clear, transparent and immersive experience to customers from pre purchase to post purchase,” mentions Sharma, adding that the platform has been positively impacting various businesses across metrics like increased customer confidence, reduced cart abandonment, a better customer experience and higher customer retention.

Narvar aims to help retailers champion their customers at every step of the journey and is therefore focused on creating solutions that offer a seamless experience. “Today, one of the biggest challenges faced by most retailers in India is related to logistics. We have the capabilities to conduct predictive analytics and provide our partners not only shipping related information but also features that give their consumers more choice about return policies, delivery guarantees, and expanded offline pick-up options,” informs Sharma.

One of the products, Track, eliminates shipping anxiety and earns customer trust by removing the guesswork on the exact status of an order. Sharma mentions that by keeping customers in-the-know, and communicating on their preferred mode of communication, retailers are able to remove barriers related to purchase; because informed customers are delighted customers. “Through our products we give customers more choice by allowing them to pick up and drop off their parcels at specific points, resulting in higher flexibility and convenience. Additionally, we synthesise millions of data points to give customers an estimated delivery time at the product checkout page. This enables confidence and results in higher cart conversions,” he remarks.

Narvar has localised one of its products for the Indian market to manage non-delivery issue (NDR) for retailers. The product enables customers to reschedule or redirect their order delivery based on their preference through an entirely self-serve mechanism, resulting in higher delivery percentage. “We do all of the above by using machine learning algorithms and AI to provide accurate and smart solutioning to our clients,” affirms Sharma.

Sharma further informs that they have directed a significant share of their investment towards data analytics and are growing the R&D wing in Bengaluru as well as customising their product technology for the Indian market.

Giving a few examples of implementations, he says, “We work with different sized retailers in India. These include the likes of Tata CLiQ, Lenskart, Biba, etc. Our approach with each of them is to identify gaps in their existing customer journey and power them with solutions that can drive seamless experience and happy customers. For example, with Tata CLiQ, we realized that because of the different category segments they operate in, each customer journey has to be different and thus the solution for each had to be optimised and customised according to the category. For Lenskart, on the other hand they were facing huge NDR issues and the focus was on how we can help improve their delivery scores. This is where we introduced our Exceptions product and saw significant improvement in not only their delivery numbers but also operational savings.”

Further sharing his views on the ecommerce space in India, Sharma states, “India is in a very nascent stage of ecommerce business. While the country is projected to have over 200 million digital shoppers by the end of 2019, retailers still tend to focus on acquiring customers, building logistics and site enhancements to create some differentiation.” He asserts that retailers need to give importance to customer retention, and brands that realise the importance of retention and superior customer experience will go a long way. There is also a huge opportunity in the adding local languages to cater to the diverse diaspora. “As 5G comes into the picture, we will see more shoppers online from across the country and localisation will be a huge differentiator. The effort at our end is to educate the market and share case studies of how brands have benefitted significantly by focusing on the post purchase journey of customers,” concludes Sharma.