BackFrom physical to digital: Adobe’s impact on ICICI Securities’ digital journey
Adobe's analytics tool is helping ICICI Securities understand customer behavior and provide the right solutions. The company is also focused on hyper-personalization, delivering the right solution to the right customer through effective communication channels.
PremiumThe Banking and Financial Services Institutions (BFSI) sector has been at the forefront of driving digital transformation with insights from customer data being at the epicentre of innovation. Much before the pandemic, the sector started embracing digitalisation, and they have evolved from physical to phygital and now digital operational models. All along this journey, the customer has been at the centre of all the transformations as organisations seek to deliver hyper-personalised experiences using insights collected at every touchpoint along the customer’s interaction with the brand.
In a special interaction, Zankhana Srivastava, Vice President, and Lead – Digital Cross Sell, ICICI Securities Ltd., speaks about the digital transformation journey of ICICI Securities and the gains and challenges that it brought for the organisation. Some edited excerpts:
Q: At Adobe’s Best of SUMMIT event, we discussed how experience-led growth is foundational to the success of every business. As an Adobe partner, can you share your perspective on how digital transformation is evolving as an area of priority for businesses today?
Zankhana Srivastava: Let’s start with a background of the BFSI sector. Earlier, we used to do a physical business where you would go to a branch, meet your relationship manager, understand the product, think through it, and then make a decision. Then, we saw phygital times when we saw a transformation from physical to digital. At this time, people looked for a face to interact with and the digital mode was also evolving at that time. And, today, the customer is expecting a completely digital solution. So, we are evolving because customer needs are evolving. We are moving towards digital transformation and that is definitely the way forward. We are looking at a digital business and a complete digital transformation, for which we have sought help from Adobe.
Q: What role does digital play in accelerating business growth and what are the key challenges?
Zankhana Srivastava: When we go digital, we see that everything is simple, everything is doable, and we will be able to achieve our goals. Digital transformation comes with opportunities as well as limitations, which one needs to look at. So, when you want to embark on your digital transformation journey, first migrate all your assets like company websites and apps onto digital. Everything must be connected through one platform so that you have a single view of a customer and you can know the customer better. Then, look at the cohorts of the customers and understand them based on their journeys, interests, past purchases, present journeys which they are going through on the website or app, and then accordingly, modify your entire digital experience based on their preferences.
Along the journey, customer insights are ever evolving. At first, a customer in a particular age bracket could prefer a product, but the preference may change for another product. So, the digital solution has to be ever evolving as per changing customer needs.
Secondly, when you are aspiring for digital, it is very important that the integration is done end to end. Also, you need to be ever evolving as customer cohorts and profiles are very dynamic. The third challenge is creating a hyper-personalised solution for your customer using tools like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Q: Digital transformation also opens up a world of opportunities for organisations. Do you agree?
Zankhana Srivastava: Yes, the opportunities that digital brings are immense. To connect to a customer, you don’t need to call or meet the customer in person. You are there to see when and where the customer is browsing. Secondly, it takes no time to deliver a message or communication to customers. The agility that you can bring to your business is only through digital.
Q: Looking ahead, what is next on your organisation's digital mission for customers?
Zankhana Srivastava: We are already utilising three tools, which are giving web and app analytics, putting across a personalised solution to a customer, and reaching out to the customer in a 360-degree manner, offering omni-channel communication using the drip campaign. The way forward for us is to provide a very intuitive and simplified journey on direct purchase which is what we are doing currently on digital transformation. We are aiming to simplify every customer and product—purchase journey to ensure that the customer is getting the right solution. So, that is what we are currently looking at — simplifying the digital journey.
The second most important thing is looking at a customer from a 360-degree angle. Right now, we are not looking at a customer on the basis of the data we have, but on the basis of what the customer is doing on a different platform. So, how to collate that insight, put across in one cohort, and then put across some micro segmentation of the customer.
Q: Can you tell us about your company’s strategic partnership with Adobe, and the impact of the Adobe Experience cloud solution?
Zankhana Srivastava: It has been more than a year since we have been utilising Adobe solutions and the journey has been fantastic with the three main solutions. Analytics is bringing us all the important and impactful insights for the customer. It’s not only about giving us the knowledge about where the customer is going, but also where they are coming from, why they are dropping, and why the customer is not able to purchase and go ahead. It offers insights into both perspectives so I can understand what the customer’s problem statement is and then provide them with a solution.
Analytics is very important because that forms the base of providing a solution to a customer. Adobe by far has been our best tool, which we have utilised because it is giving us immense knowledge that is helping a digital marketer like us provide the right solution, which is also personalised to the needs of the customer.
Q: Where is your organisation on hyper personalisation? How is Adobe helping with that?
Zankhana Srivastava: We have already started our journey over personalisation, where we are offering the right solution to the right customer, and that is helping us right now. I would say that we have taken 3-4 steps ahead, but we need to reach up to 10 steps. I would like to mention that we have a campaign, which is omni-channel. So, if my customer is hooked to my email channel, then why should they unnecessarily be spammed on WhatsApp or on SMS? The campaign is offering me an insight that this customer is most comfortable with this channel, and we use that as a cue to decide which channel to communicate with them over to make it more effective.
So, with a reduced set of communication and with an effective set of communication, Adobe’s tech is helping us to win more and more customers on digital. In a nutshell, we were not mapping or measuring business coming out of DIY behaviour so far. Now, with Adobe’s solutions, I am really happy to say that we have a separate segment called DIY, which is "do it yourself". And, that forms a separate vertical altogether for our company.
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio.
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