How TBZ is leveraging Oracle's Autonomous Database solutions to transform the shopping experience?

In today digital era, retailers are no more fighting with their peers; instead their war is with different technological interventions in order to be the most competitive in the world. With growing competition, it has become extremely vital for retail brands to innovate continuously and implement cutting-edge technologies to fulfil today’s demanding customers’ need. They are looking for next gen technologies that can give them holistic view & correct representation of their consumer’s choices and insights from their existing data for better understating the selections of their customers. Over the time, the industry has exceeded its limits from an aspiration to an expectation to outperform in this space.

Leading the way is Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri Limited (TBZ) , an iconic and century old brand with presence in 14 States, 29 cities & 41 retail stores nationwide. An Oracle Cloud customer, TBZ is India’s first Jewellery manufactures who came up with the buyback guarantee option for its customers. According to Deloitte’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2019 report, the company ranks #87 among the top 100 global luxury companies. With Oracle’s self - driving & self - securing aspects of the ADW cloud, the customer was able to improve their delivery time, current operational costs and improve consumer satisfaction. In an exclusive interaction with Pooraan Jaiswal, CTO, TBZ, he talks about TBZ’s digital transformation and customer engagement strategy.

Can you give a brief overview on the current state of jewelry and retail sector in India?

India is one of the largest exporters of Gems and Jewelry. Our industry contributes significantly to the nation’s economy, being a major contributor to the total foreign exchange reserves of the country.

With customers leaning towards high-margin categories such as diamond and diamond-studded jewellery, the industry is expected to continue to see stabilized profitability.

What kind of role do emerging technologies play in transforming this industry?

The jewellery sector is now open to experimenting with new technology more than ever before, especially in the areas of design, manufacturing and customer experience. For instance, 3D printing combined with CAD has made jewelers’ lives easy. Even customers can get involved in the whole process of designing the piece, improving the personalization quotient.

While it’s still early days, blockchainglobally is increasingly finding its use in our industry as a means to make sure that the chain of custody of gems and stones remains legit. There are use cases emerging in the supply chain as well.

TBZ has been at the forefront of modern technology adoption in our industry. On the customer front, we’re leveraging Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), transforming the whole shopping experience - online as well as offline. Customers can try jewellery virtually via AR, without waiting for the actual piece of jewellery. In our stores, we have e-catalogues, which helps us to show all the designs in our portfolio.

What kind of challenges do brands in the jewelry sector face?

With evolving customer preferences and market dynamics, jewelers have to constantly innovate, become more agile and come up with new ways to delight customers beyond just the one-off sales experience. In yesteryears, jewellery buying was perhaps more seasonal or an occasion led – for example, marriage was considered the main occasion for buying jewellery- that too with limited choice in designs. Thanks to a young, vibrant, upwardly mobile demographic, we’re now seeing jewellery purchase all year round,with customers demanding more new designs. Only modern technologies can help us keep pace in such a dynamic landscape, to make sure we’re one step ahead of what customers want to buy and bring that into the realm.

How is TBZ performing in this age of cloud to improve consumer satisfaction?

We are the first in our industry to compile all our designs into one e-catalogue. So, whenever a customer wants more options to choose from, she can refer to this e-catalogue, which gets updated very frequently. We are currently piloting Augmented Reality (AR) in four of our stores in Mumbai, so that customers can actually try on the jewellery without having to wait to actually wear the physical piece.

We’re also leveraging the internet of things (IoT). We’re embedding a minute sensor device in select high value jewellery pieces, to try and better understand consumer preferences as well as draw more insights into aspects such as how many times a particular jewellery piece was tried on, after how many trials that piece was sold etc.

We have a robust customer relationship management software that’s helping us betterunderstand our customers’ behavior and capture feedback so we can act on it.Though still in a pilot stage, we are using the information collected from our IoT devices to gain a deeper understanding of our customers. All the permutations and combinations of data are helping us to do our product planning in a much better way.

How has Oracle helped you improve your retail business?

Given their vast experience in delivering enterprise technology, Oracle understands our business and requirements like no one else.We’ve enjoyed a very fruitful, long-term partnership with Oracle.

Given our own appetite to push the innovation envelope, we were perhaps one of the first few jewellery organizations globally to try out the Oracle Autonomous Database. With Oracle Autonomous Database in picture, we do not need to worry about performance or maintenance of the data or even human errors anymore. We’re now better able to concentrate on our core business.