Adgully Exclusive | Creating customer experience index: Customer Centria's Kim Saldanha

Customer Centria has been founded by C R Vinay. Customer Centria creates opportunities for brands to interact with customers throughout the engagement lifecycle. The company offers a complete bouquet of services from marketing automation, analytics & insights, interactive marketing, virtual experiences to loyalty management.

The company saw their offerings as a very clearly gap in the market, and the lack of awareness on its value creation potential, was one of the key reasons Customer Centria was founded. Some of the clients that the company currently has in its kitty are Goderj, Airtel, Being Human, Videocon, Bajan Allianz, Bharti AXA, Reliance ADAG etc.

Adgully caught up with, Kim Saldanha, Vice President ' Marketing, Customer Centria, to know about what sets the organisation apart and if marketers real understand the word "engagement'.

Talking about Customer Centria, Saldanha, says, "We pride ourselves for foreseeing and gearing companies to focus on the customers. We get companies to learn from every conversation they have with their customers. So we provide our clients an end to end engagement strategy. Unfortunately customer management is a much abused word, people have not really understood their customers as yet and how their customers can really be engaged through innovative tools."

So wherein really lies the challenge?

Saldanha, explains that the biggest challenge really lies in understanding which medium the customer really is likely to respond to you on. "The other big challenge is instituting an organisation's mindset change. An engagement strategy has to be imbibed in the very working and culture of an organisation, because after a successful understanding of the customers, the organisation has to absorb the feedback accordingly," she adds.

Customer Centria talks with immense pride for its work on Gojiyo.com, which the team was proud to co create and run. It has been featured by a UK research consultancy which tracks global brands, consumer trends etc. It marks Gojiyo as one of the most innovative social networks from around the globe as part of its digital trends mapping.

Moreover for IDBI Federal Insurance's Wealthsurance Customer Centria created a very engaging campaign and the baseline of which said "Jisne bhi Suna, Khareed Liya.' "We asked the client for their database and then we segmented the database and we arrived on different kinds of people who will buy this insurance. So taking a cue from the customer segmentation we caricatured each segment. There was a wheel of fortune representing various segments, a user had to drag the pointer to their segment and then the user would be provided insurance information suitable to that category of audience," she adds.

Saldanha further says that the company is looking at initiating a research where they are looking at creating some sort of customer experience index. "At the end of the day if I am marketer I am also a consumer so we want to do it vertical-wise and define really the various customer experience parameters. We will unveil this research somewhere in September this year."

Talking about social media, she says, "Sometime we disagree with a lot of marketers. For us social media is geography and not a channel. It's a place where people are networking and when you understand that the whole method of handling social media changes. It is not about managing a Facebook page but it is about creating a relevant conversation."

Saldanha feels that 3G will revolutionalise engagement purely in communication perspective. "So as 3G penetration increases the integration of a marketing plan's various channels will be completely seamless. So from a marketers perspective it might seem complicated but it's imperative," she says while signing off. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]