Indian brands are waking up to the idea that the customer experience can be a vital factor in helping generate sales and build loyalty, with e-commerce firms in the forefront of this shift as they start to employ “customer delight officers”.
“Historically, Indian brands have been somewhat laggards when it comes to customer experience,” David Shulman, chief experience officer at VMLY&R, told Brand Equity. “But that also creates a lot of scope in the market,” he added.
“Considering India is still growing and maturing as a market, it becomes easier for a brand to present themselves as different from others if they start focusing on making the overall experience of the customer better.”
Nor is this just about face value, Shulman explained: “it helps drives actual ROI and helps the business.”
It’s something that e-commerce firms, at least, appear to have taken note of, as one HR company has found.
“Over the last 10 months we have been witnessing growing demand for customer delight officers (CDOs) from top-notch e-commerce firms in the country,” Sudeep Sen, Assistant Vice President at TeamLease Services told BusinessLine.
“In the last 3-4 months alone we have placed 150 CDOs in these firms,” he said, explaining that their role extends beyond “vanilla” customer service to encompass the use of data analytics to assist both sellers and high-end customers on their platforms.
“They are focused on ensuring repeat purchases and extracting consistent wallet share from customers and also helping sellers with business inputs on what to sell, when to sell, to which demographic and at what pricing, consequently helping sellers to sell more,” he said.
Sen expects the number of CDOs in e-commerce firms will more than double over the next year.
Siddharth Verma, Practice Head, Direct Hire at Xpheno, has seen similar growth and observes that these jobs can be part of a career path to senior office, culminating in the chief growth officer role.
Sourced from Economic Times, The Hindu
