Now we are all set for a panel discussion and it is the experience economy that we will hear different voices from across the spectrum speak on, the battle ground changes. So before we invite the panelists I must also say that right after this we are going to have a fireside chat with Mr. Rahul Agarwal, CEO and MD Lenovo India, who would be in conversation with Ms. Vasuta Agarwal VP and GM of Inmobi India. But before that there is a panel discussion that awaits us, a whole range of speakers. I would also meanwhile ask the moderator of this panel Mr. Ramesh Ruthomas, President and Chief Knowledge Officer of Equator Media Advisory to please be ready to step up on stage in the interests of time. I'm also going to start inviting all the panelists, one after the other. We have Mr. Ramesh Ruthomas who was the moderator, literally wearing the moderator hat if you will. May I invite Mr. Samar Singh Sheikhawat, Senior Vice President, Marketing, UB Group, Mr. Santosh NS, Marketing Head, Fujitsu India, Mr. Sujit Sudhakaran, Senior Director, Brand Marketing, Mintra. Also Mr. Sushant Sriram, Marketing Head, Xiaomi India. With that it is over to Mr. Thamiz to take forward the discussion. Hi everyone. How are you guys doing? It's the end of a long day. Yeah, everyone's sleeping. That's good. All right.  So the experience economy, it's a new one. You know, when I started, I started 30 years ago, the first thing I heard was product differentiation. Everybody's competitive advantage. They could make something other people could make. And then a little later I heard about how this thing called media is going to wash away all competition and therefore you had branding, communication, all of that.  You got it right.  And now I'm hearing there's something called experience economy. We'll check out, we'll find out what that is. So you've got these four very distinguished, accomplished people representing four very interesting categories. You've got cell phones, the biggest cell phone seller in the country. You've got somebody from e-commerce, right? You've got someone from technology and you've got somebody who sells alcohol. You couldn't get a better combination than that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by allowing them to introduce themselves for half a minute or so. That'll be interesting for them to know who you are. My name is Samar. I work with UB. I'm part of the marketing team. I've been there for eight years and I can say for certain that I'm older than all these guys. Except me. Yeah, I think after the duro flex session, I think people should feel sleepy. No offense. So I'm first of all privileged to be part of this experience panelist. I'm Santosh and I've been with Fujitsu adding the marketing for eight years now. And I've been working with agency in the past as well. So I have a background of working on the client side and also servicing the client side. I'm Sujit here. I look after brand marketing for Mintra. I'm also like him have been partially part of my life has been with the ad agency system and then marketing. So that's what I'm all about. Yeah.  So you might have figured out. My name is Sushant. I head marketing for Xiaomi in India. And yeah, so excited to be here. I'm going to get thoroughly confused. There are two colleagues of mine in my audience in the audience who will tell you that I could completely confuse the names. And there are four SS. I'm going to screw this up completely, but forgive me. So I'm going to ask the audience. Yeah. When was the last time any of you guys went to a restaurant without checking the ratings? Go on guys. Sorry. All the time. All the time. Is there anybody in the audience who never checks a rating before you go to a restaurant? Okay. It's a minority. I said so. All right. This is I think equally true. If it's not for you won't go to the restaurant. However much you've heard about it from other people. It's equally true for cab hailing. It's true for watching the movie on Netflix. I think it's going to be true for doctors as well. Very soon. So if we're in the rating economy, right. It's just a reflection of how much experience matters. Interesting piece of statistic. I believe in 2016 Forbes put out a report which said that the Fortune 500 lost 62 billion dollars of revenue as a consequence of poor customer experience. If that were to be true and we are in the rating economy which puts out how poor that experience is, then the question to the panel really is have companies already started structuring themselves for marketing to orchestrate experience. So is the CMO now going to become the chief experience orchestrator? You want to start? Sure. So as you're talking about how we don't visit any place or consume anything that's not rated a four or above, I was struck with how I think it was apt that I was part of this conversation because I spent a long time in an e-commerce marketplace business.  And spend a couple of years in a travel content business which is again around ratings and reviews and so on and so forth. So you're right that increasingly people are looking to validate their future experience by somebody else's past experience. But the reality is that people have always shared their experiences in the past. It was just called word of mouth. And it didn't have the ability to travel as far and as impactfully as it does now. And I think that's the fundamental change. And at Xiaomi, we actually spend a lot of time actually listening to our fans as we call our community of consumers and actually working with them. But the reality is, hey, you know what? People have always been sharing experiences. It's just that now the ability for one bad experience to have a fairly sizable impact tends to be that much larger. We'll come to that, yes. You asked whether the CMO becomes a chief experience officer and craft's experience I really don't think anybody can craft an experience. Because today the experiences are actually crafted by the users. Because just going back to the point you made that if enough people haven't given a full rating to a restaurant, nobody goes there. I can only ensure that I do things in my control which will ensure I get more full ratings. You're right. Today we are more and more bothered about the experience part of it. Just to give you an example in the e-commerce business, one tipping point for consumers is when they have a good return experience. It's rather surprising because when I always want to sell and I'm saying that when somebody is returning a product that they bought from me, it's going to be a tipping point for them. That's an experience. Experiences need not always be about the physical experience or the experience of having variety, et cetera. It could even be an experience where the consumer is getting past a fear of his. So in a lot of new businesses, consumers have doubts. How does that experience of getting past that fear or the doubt he has in his mind is very important today. So that's where I think it goes. Now in the B2B business, you know that one bad experience can screw up your entire target for the year, right? Particularly in technology. It's big businesses. How does this work? How does it play out there? I think if it was solved, then we would have been top one now. Sorry to say it again. If it was solved, that mystery would have been top one and always remain over there. But I think it's a challenging story to have. I think we all know that services industry is growing pretty fast than the product and more and more cloud is being adapted. Services industry is going to be bigger than ever. And when that happens, I think it runs for a longer period of time. I think nobody would like to get into a services day, which is like a short-term period. So it has to go to a long-term period. When that happens, I think it's a good advantage for a company or any organization that these things work very well. So you put your sincere effort to it. You go by value of your company. You give an experience to a customer where they believe that, you know, you are adding value. It's just not by giving what they want, but they should feel that you are making their business think higher for five years or down the line. So that's what is going to be a challenge for any marketer now that, you know, you need to be working along with sales and sharing some insights which they can talk to their customer, build across, provide a good customer service which again depends on consolidate all the feelings.  So now we talk about, yeah, we have all these solutions, but this doesn't really work across. So we really commissioned a survey where our security breach is often very constant. So you use your palm vein. The reason why we're talking about it, this is an experience which we talked about now. And the palm vein really means you need to build life because the blood flows into it. And the second thing is you might always have iris also successful with that. But the thing is that you still can scan the palm vein but when there is an emergency, your blood flow pressure is measured. So emergency goes across 9-1-1 or anything in other country, which means it's a more secured way where you have to be live enough, you have to be present yourself where you take a fingerprint scanner or take out the head, everything done. But that's the experience we are going to give a customer that this is what makes your business work. So the whole mindset changes for that customer and he thinks that the company knows me more than what I would see my future is going to be. So that is the biggest challenge and if we crack that, if a customer we can predict that future is going to be 5 years down the line this and your company needs to be investing this, then we get into the customer experience not only but we can hold on to the customer longer period of time. So poor Samar has the biggest problem. He's in the most interesting category, the most desirable category for most of us, but he's not allowed to talk about himself, right? Government doesn't allow him to talk about himself. He can't brand, so to speak, in classical terms. He has no choice but to give a good experience. So let him talk about that. Your question was company structuring themselves to provide that experience. I think the answer is no. No. They aren't structuring. Do they need to? Absolutely. My understanding is that companies in the service industry are definitely structured towards providing consumer experiences. Are they always successful? No. Do they get away? Yes. Do you know why? Because as Indians we really don't complain so much. Compared to, let's say, the developed Western economies. The consumer has always evolved ahead of any brand in any company. I mean, very rarely in history will you get an opportunity, will you get someone like Steve Jobs who could perhaps anticipate what customers or consumers wanted even before they knew it. Most of us work for companies that sell goods and services that are always struggling to keep up with the consumer. But absolutely we need to provide those experiences in our business. The very basic experience that I need to provide is a cold glass of beer every time. And that's not easy because with our temperature fluctuation, with our power situation, with our electricity breakdowns, et cetera, logistics, transportation, something as basic as that. That is the beholden right of every consumer to demand is not easy to deliver on all the time. Of course, they're more complex and more sophisticated experiences that we try and build with our association and sponsorships. But I think corporate India is only just about beginning to wake up to the need to provide you know, customer experiences. I mean, I've, I stayed in a hotel in Bombay three days in a row and their main job is customer experience. And on various counts they failed miserably. You know, so for instance when I was checking out, their system crashed. And I, it took me 25 minutes to check out and I almost missed my flight. At the end of it, they couldn't give me a bill. So they gave me an extract of an Excel sheet from their system and I had to sort of go back and they said, we'll mail you a bill in 24 hours. It's been 48 hours and I still haven't received it. So, and that was just one of the experience. Now that's very basic for a business that you expect will provide experience. So I think they're not structured. They need to absolutely and they will have to do it very, very shortly and with great speed. You guys think that the investment is going to come soon? It has to be an investment. It can't just be incremental. Yes, it has to. My sense is that at least for a business like ours, a large part of that is done with technology. Right? Because the, just to give you a very simple example, how deeply can I invest in technology which allows a faster return of your product, a faster selection of a product. So it's a UX design that comes in. So investment, yes. For different business, I think it would be investment in different things. Probably in our kind of a business, technology becomes a significant part of delivering an experience because we have, we don't have a cold glass of beer which I can touch and feel. It's just a thing you keep swapping on your phone. So I need to make that experience the best. That's probably the first time people interact with a brand like mine. Right? So that's where the work goes in. Even in our business, how our app-based or online that we call ourselves, there's always a people factor to it. In our case, unfortunately, the only people that you interact with in our case is probably the delivery guy. He's probably not the most erudite guy to probably be a face and a spokesperson for the brand. How do we kind of create a basic level of expectation of delivery of experience is probably another challenge that would face. These are aspects where that level of investment comes in, supply chain. How many pin codes can I deliver in how many days? How many pin codes can I deliver in 24 hours? How many pin codes can I deliver in 48 hours? That's again an investment. So it depends to my mind but he has definitely investments. Sure. It's going on. It's my point. You know about four, five years ago, I remember this story about, many of you will remember when the forest was launched, the Apple companies, right? It generally had an aerial problem. And I remember the amount of bloggers and, you know, customers, hardcore loyalists of Apple wrote in saying there's no problem with the area. Just that the customers, these new guys who are buying it, they don't know how to deal with it. So just need to know how to hold the phone properly. And apparently, according to some reports, they got $400 million worth of positive evangelization just because the forest had a problem. The point I want to bring in is if the experience economy is upon us, are we actually developing metrics that help us to capture and manage experience? For example, in our business, when we do a brand valuation, something like loyalty, what we call repeat purchase rate and advocacy measured by an NPS tend to contribute far more to brand earnings and brand risk than things like the traditional measures of salience and awareness, right? So do you think companies are now getting on to the bandwagon of measuring things like NPS, repeat purchase, loyalty and figuring out, you know the whole story and that's been true even 30 years ago that a customer comes back to you as profitable as the customer who came up the street or saw an ad of yours. So it's not something new. But are we mentricizing for this? Absolutely. I think, you know, E.J., we're all filling surveys all the time, we're filling feedback. I don't know what comes out of it really and how many times that's acted upon but I think there's a realization as I said a little earlier that there is a realization. I don't think they've fully structured themselves to provide that because as he mentioned you probably look at what you can call the customer lifetime value of providing that service versus an immediate payoff because it's not going to pay you off immediately and it sounds like a cliche but customers are not loyal to brands anymore. Brands have to be loyal to customers and it's really not an exceptional level of customer experience that you need to provide. You need to provide a consistent level of experience so it doesn't matter if someone is better than you as long as you are ex all the time. So I'll give you a really simple example. In Delhi there is a restaurant called Kakeda on the outer circle in C.P. Now, it's very famous for its brain curry. My grandfather ate there, my father ate there, I've eaten there, my daughter's eaten there. I've been going there since I was 10 years old. The brain curry still tastes exactly the same. To me and the restaurant's dirty, it's filthy, you can't park, you have to walk, you have to wait but the food is to die for. Now they have decided that that is all that they will deliver and they've delivered exactly that for the last 100 years. To my mind that's great customer service. And are you saying that as a consequence of that consistency their loyalty and advocacy is going to be high? That was my question. So it will certainly be high for someone who's been there, for existing customers. I'm not sure it will be enough to drive new customers because then it will have to go on word of mouth. Most organizations today when they're doing a customer survey if they have to ask a single question, it would typically be Ramesh, would you recommend this hotel to your customers or your clients?  All because of you. People might have already gone there. Just as much as what he mentioned a little while ago he had a bad experience at a hotel in Bombay. 200 people in the room now fortunately he hasn't talked about which hotel it is. But there are 200 people in the room right now who actually believe that there is a hotel in Bombay that has terrible service. Going back to an earlier point that I was making which is people have had good experiences, people have had bad experiences. They're just getting severely, severely amplified now. Now going back to what you were talking about which is, you know, can you actually create a metric around it? Around great experience. It's actually related to what someone was just talking about. Hucking back to an example from an e-commerce experience of mine but I think it's true for most businesses every 100 transactions have a percentage of transactions that don't go well. Which is let's use terminology that I'm familiar with which is called bad-bired experience. BB, it's a percentage of whatever transactions. One of the biggest contributors for bad-bired experience in most businesses I would presume is what is called significantly not as expected. Consumer, it's actually one of the reasons by the way on e-commerce platforms. What is the reason for why you want to return this product? Because it is significantly not as expected. Here are two words that I've been trying to link. Bad-bired experience significantly not as expected. You're talking about experience in the context of an expectation. The Dhabha doesn't promise itself to be the most spic and span, the most on a list of ten attributes. It promises to be a place that serves really really amazing food and it does that consistently well. I think a lot of expectations that people have can sometimes be misinterpreted thanks to a lot of the marketing chatter. You start making promises as marketers. It gets tempting. At Xiaomi, for example, we have never done a brand campaign. Honestly, I don't even know what our brand is. What I do know is what our set of products are. I'm really, really truthful and honest about them. Because at the end of the day, the experience that people have about relating to a phone that we sell actually has to do with the context of what were they expecting this phone to do. Incidentally, Xiaomi phones tend to do a lot of things really, really well, but I think the overarching point is an experience should be seen in the context of an expectation that I think marketers will increasingly need to hold themselves accountable for what is the expectation that I'm setting in communication predominantly. Because that is one of the biggest sources of how people get knowledge and information. Just on the point of are we measuring it? Yes, everybody is measuring it. NPS as a measure has existed in the auto business forever. So it is not that people are not measuring it, but the larger question is in the current context are the available metrics comprehensive enough to actually tell you whether the experience that you're delivering is good or not. Let's take NPS, it's just a number. You have promoters, you have distractors. Does it really give you the full picture? Probably not. So I think that's the other challenge. Going back to the point that he mentioned about expectation, that's very important.  You just cannot get away with saying whatever you feel like saying. You have to be honest because you will get caught because it's very easy for people to compare, very easy for people to dig more information about what you really are going to offer. So honesty is pretty much thrust on us today. Honesty is pretty much thrust on all market yesterday. You cannot be smart with your copy line and get away with it. That age and time is really passed. You have to be honest and you have to live up to, and you have to be honest to the extent to which you can deliver and keep delivering on it. It's okay. It doesn't really matter whether the competition of yours is doing better than you, but as long as you do at a level where you promise to do, you will still do well as my point of view. Sujit, to the point of the metricization, your contention is that we've got good headlines but don't have enough sophisticated diagnostics. Because the problem is if you take just the top line measure and say, about what a number I give you at the end of the day. There are multiple shades to it, there are multiple layers to it. I need to consistently understand whether those layers are right, are new layers getting added, you don't know. So while, yes, it's good to know our top line measure on a monthly basis, I think it's very critical for you to go a little deeper to understand what is, how a consumer even evaluates experience, right? So for example, today, I cannot wait for a cab for more than five minutes. If my app shows that he's going to be there only in 10 minutes, I say more than expected, wait time, I cancel it and book another cab, right? Because expectation has been set to five, but Ola might be thinking or Uber might be thinking, 10 minutes is good because internationally, probably it's 15 minutes, that doesn't matter. The consumer's expectation has gone somewhere else. So which is why I'm saying that while you have the top line numbers, it's very critical that you go deeper to understand are the fundamentals changing at different points in the world. High ticket items, once in 10 years he buys. What happens? See, first of all, I just wanted to tell the awareness which you tell. They cannot be replaced by score. By? Score which you mentioned about. So that still has to be there. Then we come up to loyalty or NPSO. There are a lot of things, NPS, CPE, RR. The score, everything is there. I think we would have come across more scores than any time. But what really matters is, have you retained the customer? So I just have one question to audience here. So how many of you would like to retain a customer, then going over to a new customer? Can you just raise your hands? Everyone, almost. So I think the start says it all. So I think we spend more than six to seven times the money to gain a new customer, then retaining a customer. And if you retain 5% of customer, you can increase your business by 95% of the business. So that's what we believe in. So we put more effort on retaining customer and add value to the customer. Because the next, when we come across to marketing how it happens, is the customer speaks for it. So now what happens is voice of customer plays a critical change. And automation is really becoming important. Previously, you send an email and some bad experience happens on the other part. But the email still should go. We'll keep on going to them, which is not a good thing. Because on one hand, that customer is unhappy, and you are sending him, okay, buy another one here. So, but automation, technology plays a key role. As in we all are investing in it. So technology plays a key role and automation. It's just not automation. So you can still stop going that, emails are still going automatically. But the orchestration is what is important. It stops that there. Because it tries to solve the problem. And you need to be very, I think you know, you have to be everywhere. But at the same time, you have to be very consistent and very communicative. Because lot of now, the content which we deliver to our customer is something which they want us to deliver. It's not we are giving something new creating, but it's something what they want us to give. And that is also the power of digital media. So about a couple of weeks ago, I think it was our best known airline today, had a problem. The guy got beaten up. Unfortunately, somebody took a video of it, and it went viral, right? So this whole business, I think, there's no discussion on marketing today complete without talking about the digital piece. The four letter word. Two things happen. A bad experience, yeah? UGC happened as a consequence. User generated content, as you all call it. Multiplied by the ability, as Sushant said, to take it viral. Bad experience. Multiplied by the capability of going viral is lethal on one hand, and can be very powerful on the other hand as well. If you've got a good experience, right? How do people actually manage this risk now? It's a crazy risk. I think severe heads must have rolled at that airline, as a consequence of the thing going viral. I don't think it was so much the issue of the incident happening, but it went viral. And because it went viral, a lot of people said, hell, yeah, that kind of stuff happened to me as well. Somebody else is doing. It could have happened to me. This is a bad guy. How does an airline manage that? How does anybody manage that? So, I don't know whether you've seen Aditya Ghosh's response. He's a personal friend of mine as well. So, if you've seen his seven-page response to the director general civil aviation, the list of state, et cetera, et cetera, where he's taken screenshots of the entire video and tried to present a picture. You know, the video also starts at a certain point in time. We don't know what transpired prior to that, and we don't know what transpired afterwards. It's unusual. I mean, that experience has probably never happened to any one of us. I'm not saying the airline is not to blame, but I didn't see the consumer getting any negative feedback either. I personally think that perhaps the customer was also to blame. Having said that, it was obviously really badly handled. The point that they made, you know, I've been part of Cadbury's when they had the Weevil Infestation. I've been part of the team that handled the pesticide controversy at Pepsi. And there was no social media in those days. I mean, we would have been hauled over the coals. However, our root salesmen were beaten up. Our vans were burnt. Plants were vandalized. You know, there were areas in the country where we couldn't wear Pepsi shirts and go to work, et cetera, et cetera. I think as a nation, we are very quick to judge. And that is because Indians are very obsessed with the results. We're not as concerned about process. Because process is boring. It's not glamorous. It's not sexy. It's nose to the grindstone. So everyone wants Virat Kohli to score a century every time he comes to bat. No one has any idea and no one is interested in knowing what goes into making Virat Kohli what he is. So we are very concerned with results. We are very quick to judge. And in today's times, you know, it's really, really hard.  And so you just have to be honest, keep the narrative going, keep them engaged, keep telling the truth all the time. But not necessarily the entire truth. So if a customer asks for something, tell the customer only what he or she wants to know. Because giving more than that can very often get misinterpreted. Also keep telling people, do not abandon your common sense. You know, has this ever happened to you? No. It's highly unusual that something like that happened. And yes, badly handled, you know. But technology can do all sorts of things. I mean, I don't know how many of you have seen that clip of Rahul Gandhi saying that everyone thinks that Rahul Gandhi said it, he did not. It was said by someone much higher in the land. And his team edited the video in such a way that it was made to believe that Rahul Gandhi said it. Having said that, Rahul Gandhi is probably eminently capable of saying it. That's the point. The intelligence of the analytics team of the BJP cell lies in reasonably assuming that this is possible for this to happen. And assigning it there. And assigning it there. So that's also customer segmentation and targeting. But you know, I mean there are always two sides to the same, two one coin. Suffer, I agree with you completely. But that's the reality. The fact of the matter is it can go viral and can go damage. And it can also multiply. So yeah, go ahead. To answer your question, can you control it going viral? No, you can't. If something has happened in today's time and age, it will go viral. You will have to be ready to, you know, address that problem. Yeah, my question is how do you manage it? Because it's going to happen. See, only one thing you can do. You can be forthright and honest. Right? If you know as an organization or as a brand you've been at fault, accept it and gracefully accept it. Yes, you don't need to go into the gory details as he said, because there are certain organizational aspects which the consumer need not know. Right? But there are certain things where a consumer also feels good about the fact that he's actually got the brand to its needs. Right? A lot of people today like that fact. But you know, you are not big enough. I am the boss here. So the moment you give him a sense that you are the one who's got the control on the situation, but you're still controlling it. It's a tough one. There are brands who manage to do that and brands who don't manage to do that. There are daily escalation issues. It is much easily managed. Yes, such situations, I think in today's time and age, it's better to be forthright and be as objective about it as possible. The moment you seem like defending yourself or defending some individual in your system by not wanting to accept it, the viral will only keep continuing. Got it. Sorry, but I'm just wanting to clarify something. I get the feeling that I perhaps have played a role in demonizing what digital and social media is doing and impacting brands. Hey, you know what? The answer to your question is, sure, when something really terrible happens in a customer experience, it will spread. And just as I said, I don't think there's any meaningful where that marketer should spend energy in controlling the spread of it. The counter to that is, hey, you know what? If something is really good about your brand or your products, that too spreads. It does. Xiaomi is a brand. I mean, we have spent close to a fraction of what anybody else in the smartphone category spends on traditional marketing. We'll live on digital platforms. We'll live as a marketing engine on social media. And we have actually been able to succeed for reasons that I think everybody else has mentioned about, making really good quality products, being honest about them, and hopefully being able to get people to have a good experience with our products and hoping that they propagate it. So to your question, hey, if something terrible had to happen with a brand, whether it's an airline or a smartphone brand, is there a way to counter it? Not in the immediate term, but we have spent the time and energy to build a community of people who actually have had good experiences. Here's the deal. One straw never broke a camel's back. So one terrible experience. Please correct it. Please fix it. Please ensure it doesn't happen again and move on. But you ought to be able to figure out what's good in this transmission medium. Brands like Xiaomi are fundamentally built on being able to build a community of fans and being able to propagate the things that work in the product, the ways that the really amazing ways the product works. So you're saying build the base of apostles, make it strong so that the exceptions don't damage you. I think social media is very powerful. We all know that. And we try to build followers, likes, page, everything. So we are happy when there's like 3 million, 20 million likes, all those things. But we should be prepared for the consequences. And mistakes do happen.  And it's still not the time that artificial instaker taken control and machines are going to come. So we need to accept the fact. I think the very good thing about Cadbury's or they created a campaign just fall off with Amitavachan coming up saying that it's nothing, sorry whatever happened, but this is all safe now. And it moved on. The brand exists now. So it's people, people recognize with the brand who come out and say that we did a mistake. We are rectified it. We rectified it because we are concerned about you. And how many manufacturing industries, which is car owners have come in. I think in last three years I've seen so many brands who have recalled car and they have come out openly and said this is the thing. So I think we have to leave it that no, there will be complaints which happens. But anyway, I think airline is something which I hate always. Most of the time I end up just once ten minute light and they don't let me in. And every time they can just change the schedule two hours, three hours without anything over there. That's the fact. Give an example of how it was badly handled. So if you look at Nestle Maggi Noodle's saga. I mean we've been, I've been eating Maggi Noodles for 40 years. It hasn't killed me. And if I were to indeed die, I can think of no better way than to die eating Maggi Noodles. So, you know, I really don't know what the fuss is about. You know, I mean there are so many more carcinogens and so much other stuff because that's what told to us at Pepsi that we are putting in pesticide. First of all it's more expensive to put pesticide than to make it regularly. We're never going to do that. And then it leeches in through groundwater and so on and so don't want to get into that. But look at the way it was started. I mean I hope there's no one from Nestle here. But what actually happened was about three years ago a food inspector in Haldwani wanted his, you know, and I think Anurag is never going to invite me again. He wanted his son to get a job at Nestle. And some lower level sales functionary there said no. Now this is the thing of reality of doing business in India.  And you see PFA is a non-bailable offender. See you can go to jail. And cited some obscure rulings et cetera, got some products tested in a non-accredited laboratory and showed certain levels of poisonous materials et cetera that were higher than prescribed norms et cetera and just snowballed into what it was. So it was actually two and a half, three years in the making. Now you can argue and say Nestle's got this holier-than-thou attitude you know compliance, governance et cetera, international. The CEO lost his job.  They've always had a foreigner. It was their paralysis of response. They did absolutely nothing because they just didn't anticipate how big it would become he was talking about and how quickly how big it will become. I mean today everything gets magnified instantaneously. And that is where you, as he said, you have to be objective, you have to be honest, stay on script, don't get personal and continuously engage, let the optics matter a lot. Let the consumer know that you're addressing it and keep getting back to that consumer until it's addressed. You know my simple example is a long line. If you stand at a counter at a long queue, no one will complain as long as the queue keeps moving and the lady behind the counter doesn't abandon her workstation. If she's there all the time disposing of consumers, people will not complain. So the optics matter as well. I think just one. Marketing is too important just to be left to marketers. I think everybody represents marketing.  No, I think somebody who's HR or anybody, any function, they go out, they behave. That reflects the brand. You carry brand everywhere. That is what the example of Indigo is. You know, you're carrying a brand.  But as long as you're at work, you carry the brand and you're marketing that product, every employee product. So that is something which you need to carry. And I would be very happy getting a complaint because there are two kinds. One is people, that's how we measure all NPS and all this. One who tells complaints, which is very serious because he's loyal to you. He wants you to improve. Yes, there might be chances out of 10 of those, you might lose one, but you will gain more than 100 because of dealing with the line. Exactly. So that is something which I would be very happy to gain a complaint and rectify it because you have more chances of winning that thing and then retaining it. There are some people who just doesn't complain and leave that thing, but which I will be very more concerned because somebody is not complaining and there's just out of the box over there. So it's a good thing to have and resolve it, something which is strongly difficult, but we should do it. So the Maggie story is ended on a good note. And I think there's an aspect of the Maggie story which I think best reflects what you spoke about building your band of apostles every day. So in the restaurant down the road which some of my colleagues like to go to, it's called Kitchen of Joy. It serves food, street food from Calcutta and they serve Maggie as well. So in the middle of the crisis, we just dropped in for what we call Shingaras, the Calcutta version of Samosa. And I was looking at the menu and it had this so much price, this so much price. He says Maggie, it was blank, but it said across there, back soon, back soon. Yeah, that's how confident people were about a brand like Maggie having so many well-wishers and so many apostles that it's going to come back with the bag anyway. So to my last point, who's the richest guy in the world, you know? You were reading the papers, right? It just hit $100 billion. Okay, so two, three days ago, there was a front-page news report about a guy from Mysore who was a customer of Amazon, right, who wrote to him and got a direct resolution affected by Jeff Bezos himself, right? This is the richest guy in the world, sitting as the chairman of one of the best-known companies in the world. All of us use it. My question is, is the customer experience story gaining so much ground that it's going to actually get to boardrooms? I've been on boards now for about 12 or 13 years. I haven't seen those days when I started. Any agenda, board agenda, containing customer experience or customer anything for that matter. But people seem to be taking it more and more seriously. My question to the panel is, do you see sometimes in the not-so-distant future, boards, like they have today, finance audit committees and have compensation committees, do you see customer experience being audited and reported in some form or the other, becoming a fundamental part of board agenda every quarter? This quarter, how did we do on customer experience? Did you see that? Someone stuck? Already there is how I would say. It may not have become the top agenda point in the board meeting, but at least for us on a weekly basis, how we perform on delivery experience is a critical thing and it's not a problem of the supply chain team who is the one who is responsible for that. It's equally, the marketing team is responsible for it. The online sentiment management team is responsible for it. For example, if there is an escalation on a particular issue, it's very critical for us, what is the turnaround time? If you've set a turnaround time, it has to happen within that. If there is a drop in that, that's equally critical. So are you saying that it gets reported to the board? It gets reported. But has the board started looking at it as important as profitability today? Probably not. But I don't think it is too far away. Why probably for e-commerce, it's very important probably becoming very central to our ability to retain customers. It's lifeblood. It's lifeblood, right? It will become for everybody's my guess at some point. Do you think so? Shishal? I think a series of bad experiences that a brand or a company provides ultimately does reach the board room and does reach the board of directors. Very simple. It has an impact on bottom line, right? Every business that is either going through a challenge right now or that has not survived has essentially gone through a place where people were experiencing a set of feelings about a brand and its delivery of its product or its services. Was not being met, kept clamoring for it. NPS score showed up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Didn't get acted upon.  So to your point, are they showing up in board rooms? They actually are, right? Especially in high involvement categories, right? We launched a phone yesterday, right? Now, hopefully, you know, it does well. But if the word of mouth around that, right, from the initial people who buy the phone and experience it, if the word of mouth and the experience of those folks is not good and that gets transmitted, you know, we can be rest assured that, you know, it's gonna come up in our weekly dashboard as not as a customer sentiment score, not as an NPS score. It's gonna come up as number of units sold score. Very simple. It's gonna come up as a dollar number or a rupee number. So to your question, of course it shows up, right? It obviously shows up in different, you know, levels of frequency, right? There are categories where the effect is not immediately felt, right? But truth be told, I don't think we should try and identify separate KPIs for, hey, you know what, are we delivering great experience, right? If you're getting people back to come and transact with you again and again as a brand, I think you're doing a good job. If that curve starts falling off in whatever cohort you're looking at, then you have a problem, very simple, and that will show up as a profit number, very simple. Okay, my point is, for example, today governance is an important part of board agenda. Okay, poor governance shows up in many ways, especially if you're a listed company. Does poor customer experience gonna show up soon? I think so, because if you see the way board agendas are changing, I mean, the new Companies Act mandates, for instance, 2% investment, 2% PBT investment into designated CSR projects. You need to have a CSR head, you need a prevention of sexual harassment policy, you need code of conduct, we have alcohol policy, business ethics policy, gifting policy, governance compliance, all sorts of things, and those are discussed. It's inevitable that this will also become part, I think it's happening faster in service organization than in brand offering organizations, but it is inevitable that it will happen. You mentioned the experience of that gentleman in Mysore, close the home, look at what Sushma Swaraj is doing. I mean, any Indian stranded anywhere can tweet directly to her and she'll move heaven and earth to get them back here. Maybe Matt Damon should have sent her a tweet from Mars, but look at the optics of what she's doing. I mean, it's fantastic, I mean, when would you ever have had an external affairs minister who you can tweet to and who will sort of arrange documentation for you if you're an Indian stranded in any corner of the globe? So absolutely, I think it's, and she doesn't need to do it as an external affairs, she can hide behind the miasma and the bureaucracy and the red tapism, et cetera, no one will get to her, but I think they're smart enough to know that the world has changed, expectations are different and I think they're gearing themselves to deliver accordingly. So I think it will happen, but it needs to happen much faster. Then it is right now.  I think it reaches boardroom, that means, you know, there is some fault in the process. I think that is something, as in somebody is not doing their good job or as an organization they have a fault which has to be rectified. So when it reaches that stage, either you rectify the process or you make some preventive measures how it can be controlled. So that's something which soon will be there. But what I'm telling you is, you know, we have to look beyond numbers. I think with power of social media, these things are coming. It's not that something happened, didn't happen in Indochore past, whatever, you know, due credit, whatever incident happened, I'm not aware of it. But the thing is, something like this happens, it would have happened in the past. It's only at that moment somebody raised it and become vital, then you act on it. That's not something, that is something which is scary part. The whole thing is that here you have some resolution placed in before that you don't come. For example, let's just take a letter. You just go by percentage, okay, 99% delivered. But that 1% means lot of numbers, it's like, it can be 10 million. So sometimes you need to go by numbers and sometimes important that one person, it can be one which is not delivered, that can be some celebrity who can raise us and he has like huge number of followers. I might be somebody, you know, I have a complaint and post Indigore, I've been like seeing so many messages which is again created by people. So that is what I say, so many content people create and that's so much thing which has brought it to notice. My question is, will boards take notice of it from now? All three of them believe yes. I think it will be because to resolve that, that's the step. So folks, it's pretty clear that even at the highest levels of leadership, the customer experience economy is here to stay, right? At the highest level and I, there is unanimity here and I have no disagreement that there is, it is going to be a board agenda item very soon. Questions from the audience, do we have time for them? Two questions. So the first hand goes up in front, why don't you ask the question? Fastest finger first, the next question which is the last one. Here, here, right in front. Yeah, Mr. Thomas, I agree with you that a board has to be accountable, but do you see a difference between board and owner? Because what I feel is, Maggie Neudels has a case study which you have been talking. It has been allowed to escalate. So where was the board? So it was absence of owner which resulted in escalation of this kind of a problem to an unbelievable extent. So do you see a difference between ownership and board? I mean, you have been part of many boards. So I see till the fire reaches the owner, nothing happens. So ownership is very important. This is what I felt. Do you agree with me? Differentiating between the board and the owner, you're saying in the case of Maggie, Maggie, it escalated because the owner didn't take charge. No, do you agree with me? I don't know, board owner, I will simplify it to the fact that there has to be an individual or a designation in an organization who has ownership of it. So once you make somebody an owner of within an organization, it becomes his or that particular team's responsibility to ensure that it doesn't escalate beyond uncontrollable proportions. As he said very clearly about the Maggie case, somebody should have taken cognizance of the fact that this has the potential to snowball into something big. Somebody didn't. Maybe they didn't have ownership of an individual. My point is that probably today we've not designated somebody. I could say that it's not a marketing problem. It's a delivery related problem. But it is not. You've got to differentiate between being the largest shareholder, which is what you mean, versus somebody who takes 100% ownership of the problem. That's the difference. One last question. Owner may or may not be part of the board. And if he's part of the board, he or she, then he's equally responsible. If he's not, then he should sack the board. Because it shouldn't have been escalated up to his level at all. One last question. Hi, sir. Mr. Samar, you have lightened a lot of points from different companies. It would be nice if you throw more light on how you handle negativity in your organization. Negative publicity of your organization. How did you manage? Negative publicity of my organization. I'm being very polished. I don't want to point at the point. Problem, you are aware of it. Are you referring to the Vijay Malia story? Yeah. How much more polished can you get? I don't know. First of all, you should give her a medal for courage. Everyone wants to ask this question, but no one asked me this question. Okay, so for the 976th time, are we recording this show? I mean, I'm going to lose my job at the end of this. Vijay Malia does not run the companies that he is chairman of. He has never run the companies. There's a professional board in place. There are professional managers. That's point number one. Point number two, whatever issues are concerning him, they have nothing to do with United Breweries Limited. See, I've gone blue in the face telling people that all the issues are related to United Spirits, which is now part of Diageo, and United Breweries Holdings Limited, which is the holding company and UB Global, which is the global exports company. It has absolutely nothing to do with United Breweries. However, because Kingfisher is the most powerful brand that he has built, inevitably people think it is a matter related to us. There's no single case on UBL. We are a joint venture with Heineken. Heineken is a majority stakeholder, and we have no issue at all. So I keep telling people it's almost like saying if Rohit Sharma is injured, then Virat Gulli should rest. I mean, there's no connection between the two. But I think we're in a really blessed position because the airline, for instance, I think one of you, someone asked a question about the airline, or someone mentioned here. While Kingfisher Airlines was operational, it definitely had a huge positive effect on the bear business. Fortunately, even after it is shut down, it has had no impact on our business, not on volumes, on revenues, on share, on PBT, on EBITDA, on consumer perception, brand tracks, everything. I think people are mature, intelligent enough to understand that just because Kingfisher Airlines is not operational does not mean I will stop drinking Kingfisher beer. So there are different organizations, but I have to say that while they were operational, it reflected enormously positively on the bear business. And it's a shame because I think it was the finest domestic flying experience in the sky. And I'm not saying this as an employee of UB. It was just, I think, that people were not prepared to pay extra for luxury at that time. And also, as is known, fuel prices were much higher than they are now. But not getting into that. So I hope I've clarified your question that it has nothing to do with us. We had negative feedback on our social media platforms and our digital channels. Absolutely we did. But everything was about the airline, everything. So we would initially forward it to the people until there was no one left to forward, too. You know, so... And sometimes you need to hunker down and just let the storm blow over, especially if the storm is not of your making, you know. And to, I think, his point, early on when people complained, organizations would just not respond, hoping, praying that it will blow over, tomorrow there will be someone, will be assassinated, something will happen, and bigger news will take over the front pages. That doesn't happen anymore. Keeping quiet is today seen as an admission of guilt, either complicit or otherwise. So, you know, I think it's been said, be objective, be straightforward, be honest and continuously engage until the resolution has been achieved. I'm told it's time for one last question. There is? Wonderful. It's time I've had that... The panel has earned it. Hi. Hi, this is Abhasmata from Vyoma Media. My question is to Sushant. So, basically, curious to know what do you believe has been instrumental in Xiaomi's phenomenal success in India, and how much of it do you attribute to experience marketing? It sounds like a really long answer, but I'll try and break this down. We've been in India for about three and a half years now. We're under the number one smartphone brand. We made really, really good products. And I'll take examples of experiences in how each of these played out. We made really good products. One example of how people's expectations and experiences played a role. Because we have a massive community of fans that we engage with, we actually kept asking them, hey, what would you like to see in your phones? Something that doesn't exist right now. And one of the things that somebody mentioned is, hey, you know what? I use a dual SIM phone, so I can operate across two numbers. But when it comes to apps, think of WhatsApp. I need to figure out which of these two numbers I will have to configure on my WhatsApp account. So you could have one phone. You could have two phone numbers on that one phone, but you will be forced to use only one WhatsApp account, which is suboptimal because there might be situations where you don't want to be on the same WhatsApp account after you've told your boss that you're sick and you're seen online chatting with your friends about evening plans. You don't want to do that. You want to say, hey, you know, last seen eight hours ago or something like that. I hope my boss is not watching this. So what we did, and this came in from a fan. Very, very simple. We actually built it as a feature into our phones. So now on any Xiaomi phone, you can clone an app. You can create another instance of the same app. So you can have two WhatsApp accounts, two Facebook accounts, two Instagram accounts, two Snapchat, whatever. The point I'm making is that this is an experience that we are offering through our products right now. But this experience, or this vision of an experience come to us on our own, no. It came to us because we actually engaged with our consumers and really, really proactively asked them. The second thing about experience and word of mouth and how it gets built online, we're actually, I think, the first smartphone brand and perhaps one of the most consistent, where we actually give out our device for people to use even before we launch it. Yeah, we actually give it out. We actually give it out to 100, 200 fans, as we call them, saying, feel free to use it. Feel free to use it. No holds barred. We'll try and gamify it a little bit. We'll have missions that you need to do, et cetera, et cetera. But the point is, if you feel good about this phone that we're about to launch, talk about it. Tell your friends, hey, you know what, Xiaomi is about to launch a really good phone. That is actually the cornerstone of how we've actually been able to succeed. So there is no great secret sauce. Actually, sorry, the third point. We don't do NPS service. I spend 45 minutes every day on our social media channels responding to people's comments on my own. 45 minutes given every day. And I respond as Xiaomi India as an employee of the company. The best result of that is almost every day I have an updated version of understanding of what our consumers are seeking or what our consumers are hating on that day. We launch a new phone. It has a bug. It's not able to latch on to a GPS network, where for Uber is not working, there for Google Maps is not working. How do we get to know this? We get to know this simply because we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to hear, trying to listen. Not through pulling out the call center records of an outsourced call center or some setup like that. Not through doing a quarterly deep dive exercise. We actually do it literally every day and every minute. So just two or three examples of how focusing on experiences that people aren't having right now in any smartphone, but would like to adjust a couple of ways that we just try and keep it real. All right, super. How many people in this audience are still not convinced that customer experience is going to be the most dominant influence on business in the future? Not bad. You've really won the audience over. So 10 out of 10 for you guys. A big hand for them, please. Great experience. I must say, listening to all of you, I'd invite Mr. Darshan, co-founder, Devi. I'd request all of you gentlemen to stay back for a bit. Also, Chitra Prakash, Treasurer, Pepper Creative Awards, Trust, Kerala. Would you please come on stage along with Mr. Dibi Dutta, Group CEO, Alive.  To the moderator first, Mr. Ramesh Dutthamiz, President and Chief Knowledge Officer, Equator Value Advisory. Mr. Samar Singh Sheikhaavath, Senior Vice President Marketing, UB Group. Santosh, Marketing Head, Fujitsu India, Sujit Sudhakaran, Senior Director, Brand Marketing, Minthra and Sushant Sriram, Marketing Head, Xiaomi. While the photo moments are on I'm going to get that time to tell you once more who've been the sponsor partners of this debut-making enclave presenting partner Deccan Herald powered by Partner Colors Online Partner Manorima Online Gold Partners Indian Express Associate Partners Asian News Network Co-Partner Tribes Communication Engagement Partner Veyon Community Partners Ad Club Bangalore, Ad Club Madras Pepper Creative Awards Trust Kerala and Picklejar Webcast Partner 24 Primes Digital and Business Media Partner Business World Thank you. Thank you once more.


Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup with People's Dispatch where we bring you some of the top stories from across the globe. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Number of COVID-19 deaths reaches 100,000 in the US. Brazil overtakes US in daily death toll. White spread outrage over police racism in the US after the murder of George Floyd. Indian social movements decry arrest of feminist activists despite bail orders. NUMSA criticizes commoners' management for failure to pay salaries. Costa Rica legalizes same-sex marriage in a victory for progressive movements. We begin with an update on the global coronavirus pandemic. The total number of COVID-19 infections has gone up to over 5.7 million with over 352,000 deaths as of today afternoon. The number of deaths in the US has crossed 100,000. Brazil, which has been witnessing an explosion in infections over the past week, on the other hand, has surpassed the US in the number of daily deaths. The South American nation reported over 1,000 new deaths on Tuesday compared to 770 in the US. In the meanwhile, doctors and health care workers are raising concerns about extremely unsafe working conditions. In a statement issued earlier this week, doctors at the Almanira Hospital in the Egyptian capital Cairo have threatened to resign en masse. This came following the death of one of their colleagues, Valid Yaya, who died from COVID-19 on Sunday. Three other doctors also died of COVID-19 on the same day in Cairo. Doctors complain that the Ministry of Health in Egypt has not provided them with enough PPEs. Doctors have also alleged that the government failed to take effective quarantine measures, leading to a higher number of infections among medical staff. Some of them also complained of the lack of testing kits for frontline health care workers. A few doctors in other hospitals in Cairo have already resigned to protesting the lack of equipment, tests and adequate facilities. The Egyptian Medical Syndicate and National Trade Union Federation of Doctors has released a statement warning of a medical catastrophe in the country. The statement warned that the health system in the country could completely collapse due to failure and negligence of the Ministry of Health. According to the EMS, 19 doctors have died due to COVID-19 in Egypt since March of a total 350 who tested positive. In our in-focus sections, we bring you a conversation between Vijay Prasad and Arun Dati Roy on the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and the role of governments. Today is a very special day. We have with us Arun Dati Roy, the author of two luminous novels, The God of Small Things and the Ministry of Atmost Happiness. Last year, she published her collection of non-fiction with a very great title, My Seditious Heart, a title that I think is not only very clever but very opposite. Recently, during the midst of the COVID-19 great lockdown, she's written two pieces in the financial times. First, the pandemic is a portal and now after the lockdown, we need a reckoning. Arun Dati Roy, welcome to NewsClick. Well, let's start with the first article. The pandemic is a portal which the financial times ran and I mean, I know this article circulated enormously. Could you tell us a little bit? Firstly, it's written in your phenomenal style. It's really lovely. But could you tell us just a little bit about this idea of the pandemic as a portal? I think when I was writing it, I had just come back from actually walking to the border of UP and speaking to the people who were the great reverse migration, the great exodus from India cities. And I realized that something was tectonically shifting, you know? The power of the entire world now over people, I don't think there's been a time in history where the whole world could be locked down for good or for bad. It was a very frightening idea for me that people, governments, states, authoritarian, democratic, communist, whoever could exercise such power. And then when you exercise that power, the chemical experiment of people who were outside the purview, outside the imagination, outside the calculations of these states were these millions of people who started to walk, you know? And then as the lockdown even went on for a few days, you saw in a city like Delhi, the sky's clear, the peacocks come, the birds sing, the, you know, smoke disappears. And I thought, you know, is this, are we dying or are we being born, you know? Because as individuals we don't have a choice about when we are being born and when we are dying. But perhaps as a species we do, you know? Some control we could exercise on this. And so I thought we are in a portal between worlds, you know?  But then suddenly when you saw the potential of healing that the show that the Earth put on, you know, we thought, okay, maybe there is a moment of hope in the midst of this despair, or maybe it's just greater despair. But certainly it's a moment of rupture, a moment of choosing. So that's why I thought of it as a purview. Now going to South Africa, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, NUMSA, has criticized the management of the airline com air for its failure to pay its workers their full salaries. The airline's management opted to go for the business rescue provision early in May, whereby the company will be protected from its creditors, but placed under the control of the business rescue practitioners. At that point, NUMSA had condemned the move as a way to escalate retrenchments. Fakamele Luby Majola, the national spokesperson of NUMSA, spoke to people's dispatch on this issue. The National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa condemns in the strongest terms the fact that the management of com air has refused to date to pay workers their salaries. Our members have only received salaries for the months of April, as well as for the month of March. In the month of April, the company made a unilateral decision to take leave and use that leave as a means to pay workers' salaries. This was not something which was consulted on, they simply took that decision. In the case of the month of May, workers have not been paid at all. There's no explanation for management about what the situation is, whether this money will be paid and if it will be paid, when it will be paid. We've just been told by the CEO, Renault Standard, that the company has applied for the COVID relief from the UIF, but beyond that, there's no explanation and there's no detail about when workers can actually expect their income. Secondly, this situation is made very much, much worse by the fact that prior to the lockdown, com air issued section 189 notices to workers of its intention to retrench. And it's very clear to us when you look at the behavior of management and also the subsequent decision to place the company under business rescue that COVID-19 is actually being used as an excuse to restructure the company. The management together with the BRPs have unilaterally suspended benefits and conditions. I mean, this is unlawful, but they've done so anyway. And the BRPs have done it without even bothering to consult any relevant stakeholders. We see very clearly a pattern of behavior between the BRPs at com air and the BRPs and SAA, where they literally are just a law unto themselves doing as they please and are accountable to no one. As Noomsa, we condemn this in the strongest terms possible. Our members are demanding that the CEO must resign. They say under her tenure, disastrous decisions have been taken. And the fact that the company finds itself in distress right now is a direct result of her poor leadership. And they demand that she must be removed. Because in their view, she has no strategy for saving this organization. The statement was issued on behalf of Noomsa by Pagami Lechubi Majola, who is the national spokesperson and also the person who recorded the soundbite. Finally, Costa Rica has become the first Central American country to recognize same-sex marriage. In August of 2018, the Supreme Court had asked the Costa Rican Parliament to amend the family code which bans gay marriages. The court had set a deadline of May 26, 2020, which was yesterday, to make the amendment, failing which same-sex marriage was to automatically become legal. The Parliament, which was deeply divided over the matter, neither voted to amend the law nor did it appeal for an extension of the deadline. Nevertheless, Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado tweeted celebrating the new amendment to the law. Alvarado had promised to act on the ruling issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2018, asking the countries in the region to legalize same-sex marriages. The legalization of the same-sex marriage is a big, big trick for the left and progressive movements in the country which have been struggling for it for over a decade now. Moments after the legalization, a lesbian couple Darita Raya Agar-Güedas and Alexandra Cueros Castillo got married. Their marriage was broadcasted on the state television. And this is all we have for this episode of The International Lady Roundup. For more such stories and videos, log on to our website peoplesespar.org, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Thank you for watching.