Havells is driving its digital journey across two broad themes, firstly creating the moments of truth by acknowledging that every interaction taking place between dealers or consumers has to offer a stellar experience. Secondly, digitally enabling and simplify their business processes and thus drive efficiencies across the value chain.
“In order to support these themes, we are architecting our digital platform around business capabilities like personalisation, forecasting, recommendations, analytics, etc. Customer delight, product leadership, and respect for individual have been always ingrained in our culture. Digital is also putting emphasis on agility, leanness and collaboration,” says Ipininder Singh, Technology & Digital Transformation leader, Havells India.
Last year, Havells was focusing on building and enhancing digital touchpoints with its multiple stakeholders, i.e, dealers, retailers, consumers, etc. And now, the company is looking at introducing intelligence and personalisation in those digital touchpoints, and build digital platforms to enable seamless amalgamation of various underlying technologies.
“We are combining geospatial intelligence and machine learning to show 360-degree view of dealers to our on-field salesforce. For the supply chain, we are leveraging machine learning to enhance our forecasting models and drive efficiencies. We have also piloted iIOT to drive the preventive maintenance of machines at our manufacturing plants,” explains Singh.
For customers, Havells has launched a digital catalog with AR (augmented reality) capabilities, to simplify interactions and intuitiveness. Havells is leveraging AI for consumers to register their products or raise service requests. Singh and his team have developed algorithms for products and give recommendations to their customers. They are focusing on providing the omnichannel customer experience through WhatsApp. The company acknowledges that the user interfaces are going through a sea change and thus they are rolling-out bots using NLP engines.
“In order to drive efficiencies in our internal processes, we have already made a start with Robotic Process Automation (RPA),” he further adds.
Digital impacting IT’s role
Organisations used to focus on optimising individual touchpoints that customers had with them, but now consumer experience is more horizontal, and cutting across functions. “We have a lot of collaboration happening across functions. We are experiencing co-creation happening within our business teams, and the era of IT working in silos is long over. Also, IT cannot stop at the delivery of solutions, it must lead the change,” says Singh.
Hyper personalisation
Today companies are not only competing with organisations with the same product line, but competing against the experiences the customer seeks for the personalisation, speed, and simplicity.
Singh continues, “Hence, there is an entire platform being developed to drive personalisation and recommendation for customers. For our B2B space, we are working with one of the large e-commerce giants to customise their algorithms which they have used successfully over years for their B2C customers.”
Havells is heavily consuming machine learning to create suggestive orders for its dealers, forecast seasonality impacts amd provide intelligence on trends.
On B2C front, the company is gradually adopting innovations like AR, AI for product information, etc.