Ag Talk | Smoothing the e-tailing experience in India, PAYBACK's Rana

Although nascent, loyalty programs in India have evolved beyond discounts and coupons. Today, we see programs spanning every industry, from airlines to ice cream. Nearly every brand has a reward program and all industries are well represented. While loyalty becomes a crucial differentiator in the era of intense competition, we can expect to see some of the best international practices being adopted for insights into customer behavior.

PAYBACK is one such player which is trying to woo the customers by giving them a multitude of advantages.It  is India’s largest loyalty program which offers many advantages over traditional, stand-alone customer loyalty schemes restricted to one brand or company only. The power of PAYBACK stems from pooling loyalty benefits from many attractive partners: Using one single card, members earn loyalty points when they shop at a wide range of different merchants and brands - offline and online.

On the advent of etailing and the madness that is around, if one sees the pink paper over the last 90 days one will either see an Amazon.in, Flipkart or a SnapDeal doing a billion day sale, a 24 hour sale, 48 hour sale and app sale and that’s a little crazy. Clearly, we have seen that there has not been consistency in the consumer's shopping habits. He goes where the offer is better.

To get deeper insights into the brand's growth plans in the way forward, we at Adgully caught up with Rahul Rana, MD and CEO, PAYBACK India.

Adgully (AG): When was PAYBACK launched?

Rahul Rana (RR): PAYBACK in its current avatar was launched in November 2011. A number of things changed. We got a completely new set of partners, we changed the customer proposition, we made significant investments in technology, we add new lines of businesses, online joined the business and a lot of this has been shaped by the trends that are happening in the market. So what you see today are very different things from what we were four years back.

AG: What is your USP?  What are your core areas of specialization?

RR: We are a marketing services company. Within the scope of marketing services, we look at creating a unified customer experience, irrespective of which brand they interact with in the circle. That is in the form of the way we communicate with our customers, the way we create offers for them, the way we fulfil their expectations, the way we service them, we create a unified experience.

Secondly, this is aligned with our coalition partners. We fundamentally work to make our consumers lives more interesting and better with the way they interact with our business. So we’re both a B2B business and a B2C business.

Telecom  costs in India unlike many other countries  is  quite economical  and available to everybody. People across all economic strata can pay for a mobile. However customers are not making the most of the device this is where we step in , we work with  telecom operator  to engage with  the customers and cross sell other opportunities. For instance, it could be for one player  a dongle, a Wi-Fi connection or for someone else  a DTH connection for that matter.

So the objective for each player is driven by the needs and opportunities its customer base offers . It also depends on the growth curve of the industry.

AG: What have been the innovations in the category?

RR: We have launched something called as ‘Shop Online.’ This is a platform where you can come, compare your prices, buy the products and at the same time get points for what you have bought. So on this platform you are getting three things, one you are getting comparison, second you are getting user reviews and third you are getting rewards, so there is every reason for you to do every transaction from this way.

AG: Which are the five key categories you work with?

RR: In telecom we work with Vodafone, in financial services we work with ICICI, American Express, in Retail  Future Group, in the online space we work with every significant player including MakeMyTrip, , we also work with Hindustan Petroleum in the Fuel category. We  are  associated with  100 + partners  and we intend to launch many more new ones.

In the last 50 days we launched  Gadgets as a different product category. And then we made a payment category and now we are moving to the third stage to “How you pay, to where you buy ,to what you buy.”

AG: How do you ensure you are offering the right opportunities for your customers in the online environment?

RR: When a consumer logs in for the first time he creates his account, his account automatically gets synced with his phone, if not he has to identify himself. Going forward he can check  all his balances, he can do redemption online, he can shop online and so on.

AG: Please share some traffic details of the site?

RR: PAYBACK.in receives over 1.15 million visits per month. Out of which more than 65% are unique visitors ( for the record unique visitors means those who have visited the site at least once a day).”

AG: Any plans of launching a more user friendly site?

RR: We are launching a new version of our site in March, and our app V1 and V2 is coming in the next 30 days. The new version of the app is more interactive.

AG: What have been some of the  key milestones so far?

RR: From November 2011 to now our customer base has grown to more than 25 million, we are now over 30 million plus and we are adding at the rate of 800-900 thousand new customers every month.

The number of partners we have added has grown dramatically. Our online channel of interaction has increased a lot.

In addition to that we have created a lot of innovations to connect with  a wider customer base. For instance earlier it was mandatory to carry one's card for every transaction,  now transactions can be carried out from  mobile. The best part is you can use the entire network when it comes to redeeming points.

AG: Any marketing campaign  that you working on?

RR: When we launched PAYBACK we did a 360 degree marketing campaign which was on TV, print media and on our portal and partner location. And depending on what we want to do, we continue to use those channels.

AG: Which are the markets you are present in?

RR: Currently we are in Germany, Poland, Mexico, Italy and India. We are soon launching in US mid of this year. Apart from that we are also looking at expanding in Europe (Spain & France), we are looking at Britain, Brazil, Japan and we have teams who working the same.

AG: According to you, how are the ongoing online sales going to affect customer loyalty?

RR: My fundamental belief is that e retail hasn’t happened yet. It will happen. If you look at the broad GDP of the country, the GDP of the country is over 900 billion. How much of that is actually online, say about 10-12 billion, out of that about 4 billion is Indian Railways, and another 3 billion is Yatra, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and so on. People also buy online tickets from websites of companies, so all of that constitutes about 2-3 billion even if it grows at 100% which it’s not; it’s going to take a long time before it actually reaches a meaningful scale. So I think it promises to happen. We will see a lot more of it happening.

Today I think the bulk of retail is still happening in the brick and motor model. The second part is that, today a lot these businesses are in the online space, that’s why they’re throwing discounts which have been unheard of, which perhaps is going to be very difficult to make a sustainable business model. They’re all bleeding.

They’re doing this to create habit, to create trust. Once you create this, they believe that if they don’t discount that much, they will still be able to have a sustainable business model. Perhaps true, it depends on global economy and how these companies have performed. The point being that the online business model without discounts is yet an unproven model.

AG: What is your opinion on exclusive ecommerce tie ups?

RR: I  think such partnerships  are  created to encash on the opportunity  which  is available at that moment however these  are not long lasting relationships. It’s not a sustainable model. These  are momentary  trends, be it online or offline.

AG: What are your plans for 2015?

RR: Continue to expand our programs with the existing partners and customers and create more value for them. Second is the digital evolution that we started on and we intend to continue on that front. And lastly, add certain categories which are not a part of our bouquet today. By Archit Ambekar | Twitter: @aambarchit

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