Real time analytics is our biggest strength: Ranjan Sharma

What is the Vision of the organisation for their business in 2020 in terms of focus towards IT within the organization?

We are just not into offline retail; in fact, we operate via multiple channels. By 2020, online and offline will merge to become omni-channel. So, all technology investments within the organization are going to be around merging these two channels and allowing the customer to move seamlessly. In the nutshell, the focus is on to go physidigital.

What would the key areas where the technology will play a key role in the time to come?

Technology is going to be the key driver in making the entire shopping journey easier. Technology is the biggest enabler in terms of customer experience, customer engagement and tracks the journey pre and post purchase.

How you leveraging data to your offline stores also shed on challenges you face in achieving the same?

The biggest challenge is, we don’t identify who the customer is, especially in the offline store. Whereas, in case of online you can instantly identify him and track his journey as soon as he logs on to the website either via cookie or any other way. Technology is moving towards aligning both the customers together so it can become the single customer repository. It is the biggest initiative that we are running in terms of compiling the customers’ data from online and merging it with offline data, so we are able the track his entire journey with the brand.  

The kind of engagement we do in online store, a similar kind of engagement will start happening in the offline store where it is going to be much more intuitive and much more engaging for the customers as and when they are near the store, within the store, point of check out and post check out. As of now, loyalty mostly happens at the time of check out. We want to pre-pone the entire phase and bring at the time of customer walks into the store rather than waiting for him to go to checkout counter.

Have you introduced any sort of technology such as Magic Mirror to your physical stores?

As of now, we have not introduced Magic Mirror. Our focus is on multiple things, starting from creating a mechanism to identifying the customer as and when he is there by means of wifi, beacons, etc. So there are multiple technologies revolving around some of them in pilot stage.

Disruptive technologies like Mobile Apps can be helpful to win customer or it is just a marketing technique?

As of now, m-commerce is nothing but a webpage/website on a mobile device. Earlier, there app and webstore were running separately but with responsive apps it has become easy to manage to maintain. This will also give a far better experience to the consumer and will allow him operate as per his convenience. Getting a customer to download an app could be an expensive preposition, so we are not looking towards mobile app strategy for now.

Can your share the percentage split of online as well as offline in terms of revenue? And where is the maximum traction?

Our online business is stable around 15% and rest coming from offline. The traction remains even except that online is creating a lot of noise and hence the traction is more event based.

Can you highlight one technology that has changed the game for Bestseller?

One of the biggest technologies that we are banking upon today is a point where we are able to do real time analytics and that is helping us big time. We have the technology that is allowing us to report the sales, margin, target, etcKPIs at a gap of three to four minutes, which in return has made the store much more agile.