Customers want omnipresent brands, convenience and on-demand service

Young consumers want personalisation, respect and transparency; are more likely to cut all ties if brands don't comply: Adobe

Personal and convenient, is how they want their digital engagement, consumers are telling brands in India. Also the majority of consumers in the country would rather go face to face with their shopping assistants and prefer a concierge service for almost all their online dealings, much more so than in any other country. For brands looking to craft meaningful user experiences, it is important to be to be everywhere, do everything and get close to those who they wish to serve.

A customer experience report by Adobe shows that consumers in India are most likely to want personal service (Japan least likely) and 2 in 3 consumers in India prefer to interact with a human instead of computerised assistants on digital platforms (less than 1 in 4 in Japan).

The study found that seamless and personalised experiences are key to keeping customers happy with 82 per cent of Indian consumers demanding tailored experiences. Also even though consumers prefer human interactions, a vast majority (79 per cent) of people are happy to have automated experiences if they are done well. As expected, this is higher at 84 per cent among younger consumers aged 25-34 years, the report said. The survey shows that if expectations are not met, it could impact businesses’ bottom line, with 1 in 4 consumers abandoning their cart as a result of having challenging user experience and customer care.

Sunder Madakshira, head, Marketing, Adobe India said, “In the past few years, India has seen competition across brand categories intensify, with businesses giving their consumers more choices.” 

To a great extent, the Adobe report ticks the boxes that several other behavioural reports have in the recent past. The KPMG 2018 report on customer behaviour (Me, my life, my wallet) found that the majority (87 per cent) are willing to trade their personal data to a company for better customer experience and personalisation (26 per cent), better products and services (24 per cent) and better security (21 per cent).

Anand Chakravarthy, managing director Essence India says that India has a wide variety of consumers, both in the ‘world citizen’ category with the best expectations as well as the consumers from ‘Bharat’ who are new to the digital experience. “Brands know that the first category of consumers will expect services at par with their global counterparts and offer them the same as is evident from the rise of global OTT and ecommerce platforms here. However, while in the short term, brands did get away with lower quality of service to the second category of consumers, in the long term, brands know that they will evolve their expectations rapidly and catch up to it.”

The focus on customer experience is an imperative brands can’t ignore, irrespective of the medium or the platform the two engage on. Hence the rush to set up experience centres and zones even among traditional brands such as Fab India, Royal Enfield among others. 

The other insight that brands are taking away from such reports is that they need to be wherever the consumer is. Hence a digital brand must live in the physical world (think Pepperfry and Pepperfry Studios) as must a pure offline brand find its place online. And this is true even for the way they market themselves. No campaign can afford to ignore traditional media, neither can brands stay away from the social media timelines of their audiences.