In order to stand out, brands need to make empathy the future of experience: Nitin Singhal

Shrugging off the disruptions of last year, businesses and agencies are looking for a strong revival in 2021. Adgully – as part of our annual TRENDING NOW endeavour – has been presenting the strategies and views of a cross-section of industry leaders as they go about reclaiming lost time and market opportunities and build for a stronger future, armed with the lessons of 2020.

Also read: Adobe Appoints Nitin Singhal to Lead its Digital Experience Business, India

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully, Nitin Singhal, Managing Director, Digital Experience, Adobe India, speaks about how the digital landscape has changed in the pandemic period and how empathy has become one of the key differentiators for brands to gain a significant share of the consumers’ mind.

The pandemic has redefined how we do business in the times to come. What have been some of the learnings from the past year in the Indian ecosystem?

2020 was a very extraordinary year – COVID-19 has had an incredible impact on the way we lead our lives, both personally and professionally. If you look at how the economy has fundamentally changed, we have moved from a world with digital to a digital-first world.

Businesses have had to pivot from delivering delightful, personal, relevant interactions to supporting critical needs of our customers with empathy. Businesses have had to address several challenges – remote working, the ingest of new digital customers, the need for greater convenience, changes in buying behaviour, as well as how well they were able to engage their employees and ensure their well-being.

I’d like to talk about a few stories that are quite interesting and I get inspired by the business resilience that these customers have been able to demonstrate.

Let me take a very important example in the travel industry – IndiGo has been our customer for many years and has been hugely impacted by COVID-19. At a time when air travellers were deeply concerned about reaching their destinations with safety and security, IndiGo was one of the airlines that was able to build resilience by accelerating their digital transformation efforts. They improved upon the digital engagement with their customers so that they could trust the safety that the airline brought during their journey. IndiGo already had digital processes in place for bookings and check-ins online, but they accelerated their digital capabilities to offer a much better experience and reassurance to their customers during these challenging situations. I think IndiGo was one of the airlines that embraced the digital transformation very early on and they also understood the customer sentiment and made sure that they were able to automate and deliver content that was tailored to what their consumers expected.

To cite another example from the airline industry, we had a similar experience with Bengaluru International Airport Ltd (BIAL), one of the leading airports in the country. They saw a very sharp decline in the number of air travellers due to COVID-19. However, they took on the resolve to maintain a strong foundation to accelerate their digital capabilities and improve customer experience. The company created a fully digitised customer journey – from parking to boarding – and was one of the first airports to go completely contactless end-to-end. Their clear and consistent engagement with passengers coming to the airport built the trust with BIAL.

Another example that is truly inspiring is that of HDFC Bank, which also faced significant challenges in digital transformation. Due to the pandemic, there was a huge amount of traffic on their digital properties with new customers coming on board. HDFC Bank wanted to make sure that they were able to leverage on the digital platform and deliver a friction-less engagement to their customers.

This is the new world order. Digital transformation in customer experience management has leapfrogged, making it more relevant for businesses now than ever before. If you look at the survey of Fortune 500 CEOs, three-fourth of them believe that COVID-19 will force companies to accelerate their digital transformation and we are experiencing that. We are seeing a lot more companies asking how Adobe can help them. The traditional way of handling digital is no longer valid. Businesses need to create the big picture and we are well positioned to offer that, because at Adobe we have the art, which is content, and the science, which is data, to help customers transform digitally.

What are some of the trends that you have noticed basis some of your engagement with clients? Could you share the trends that you have noticed as businesses pivoted in this digital-first world?

The examples that I cited above definitely hint towards the trend, which is that every business definitely has to be digital now; that’s the new normal. There is a need and urgency to accelerate their adoption of digital solutions. Organisations are seeing a lot of new customers who want to now transact with them digitally. Be it on your website or your app, they are creating some new journeys absolutely unheard of earlier.

At the same time, what is happening is that my existing customers have become less predictable.

Therefore, both of these groups of customers have made the CX proposition even more important than before. I think a company’s ability to deliver great customer experience is no longer just a nice-to-have offering, but it is the difference between sustenance and becoming irrelevant.

I’d like to quote our President, Chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen, who said that “The genie is not going back into the bottle when it comes to the impact and opportunity of digital”. I truly believe this that it is here to stay. Companies, in order to increase their relevance in the next 3-5 years, need to adopt digital at a faster pace. They need to be ready for all the new customers who are coming on board as well as use data and insight to cater to the changing needs of their existing customers.

We will soon be launching Adobe’s Digital Trends report for 2021 and what that talks about is that companies in the APAC have never been more interested in being agile than now, which means that they have to cater to the needs of their consumers much faster than what they had been doing in the pre-COVID-19 period. Organisations have done a lot of soul searching, if I may say so, last year and they have changed the way they communicate ( with more empathy now) and how they engage on social issues and live up to the organisation’s purpose.

Adobe’s Digital Trends 2021 report will also talk about empathy by brands, which will be key comparative differentiator for customer experience. I think analysing and adapting to customers’ emotional journey in the new world will be the next evolution of experience management. But most organisations are still not there and not displaying authentically this digital empathy. One-third, or almost 37 per cent, of the executives in Indian organisations have significant insights into customers’ mindset, but they need to be better.

I think businesses that have been resilient and succeeded in 2020 to be able to occupy the consumer mind share, need to now look at the newfound priorities and ensure that they build on their success. An important area that is critical for any organisation this year, and also going forward, is the close partnership between GMO and CIO. What happens is that the data available in the organisation and the applications that generate that information is under the aegis of a CIO. But how you deliver experiences and what brand empathy and value you create with prospects is the responsibility of the CMO. What this pandemic has done is highlighted the need for the CIO and the CMO to build a holistic experience for their customers, which means bringing or optimising the data and insights and creating personalised experiences at scale.

In order to achieve success in 2021, companies need to understand that convenience on the digital platform is now commoditised, so it’s no longer something that you can talk about as a USP, rather it is an expected norm. To differentiate the experience that you create in the minds of your consumers, you need to think of customers as people and not data sets, and make empathy the future of experience.

Secondly, even as the world returns to normalcy in the new normal, the customer is not slowing down and we have seen that with a lot of our customers who are using our technology that there will be multiple disruptive factors that the businesses will have to tackle.

And lastly, as I said earlier, is the fact that companies that want to provide great customer experience are those whose employees are enthusiastic about their brand and its purpose. 

What is Adobe India’s outlook for 2021?

I’m quite bullish about 2021. If you look at our vision, it is changing the world through digital experiences and that’s so relevant in the times that we have today. Digital is the catalyst for any company’s growth, whether we look at organisations in retail, banking, insurance, or e-commerce. Adobe has proven its leadership in customer experience management, we have demonstrated success and we’ve had multiple customers transform. We are uniquely positioned to offer, what could be called, a playbook that will help customers leverage the power of digital. So, we will make sure that the customers stay ahead of the challenges that they face, adopt technology at a fast pace – what we call as being agile. And since digital has become the core strategy for success, we are going to be the strategic partners for companies across various verticals. We have the ability to provide them industry thought leadership, guide them with a blueprint for being successful digitally. We have ourselves been a digital company, and then we transformed to cloud much earlier, when cloud wasn’t really something that a lot of our peer groups understood.

So, from my perspective, I see 2021 as a great opportunity for us. We are the fastest growing region in the APAC; we are an organisation which is investing heavily on Artificial Intelligence, making sure that we are able to take customer experience to scale. Across various verticals, for instance, e-commerce, we work with the top four out of the five. If you look at the travel & transport sector, there too we work with the top four companies.

Thus, as a company we have always been relentlessly focused on making customers successful in their digital transformation and I’m sure that based on our success, based on what we can do, based on the playbook that we carry for customer experience management, Adobe India will be very successful in 2021 and for many years to come.