“All companies need to see their retail as a single continuous process of engaging consumers within which the consumers can decide to convert at any stage,” says Anurag Sehgal, Founder and CEO of Digital Tranzform Pvt. Ltd., while talking to Retail4Growth, about how companies need to leverage experiential tech across a true omni-channel retail landscape.

Illustrating how Digital Tranzform Pvt. Ltd. works as the turn-key ‘sutradhar’ for digital transformation – strategy till servicing, Anurag adds, “This implies designing the consumer journey, defining the dialogues and ensuring continuity while enabling this plural conversion experience. The conversion experience can fork out from any experience segment. An important part of any transformation effort is to enable this plural journey and leverage it.”

Other consumer funnel stakeholders need to be enabled via experiential tech

“Most B2C brands are rarely consumer-facing, relying heavily on third party stakeholders for customer engagement & conversion,” Anurag adds. “Therefore supporting these stake holders with experiential tech to aid their efforts, while also incentivizing them accurately, ensures the success of the consumer funnel.”

As he points out, the consumer funnel has several supporting stakeholders, like consumer facing employees, gig workers, pre-sales teams, call center agents, online influencers, dealers, offline influencers and shop boys, who form critical elements of the consumer funnel.

The multi-stakeholder consumer funnel is supported by an omnichannel SOPised digital product-stack

Reiterating his point, Anurag adds, “As an example, for our clients in the paints industry, we provided experiential tools to consumer facing stake holders like dealers, painters & contractors to enable consumer conversion. This is further backed by platforms that track their performance and incentivization. These digital products support all stake holders across the seamless cyclical consumer journey of attract, engage, inform, consult, deliver, support, refer, and re-attract. Our digital retail experience of Asian Paints has been rolled out across 4 signature, 10+ AP Homes stores, 600+ Colour Ideas Stores & 2000+ Colour World stores in different scales of the same experiences.”

“SOPisation of the consumer funnel ensures standardization, while SOPisation of tech ensures scalable automation and propagation of those standards across the various stake holders of the eco-system,” he adds further, shedding light on how this is funneled through critical checks and balances that ensure the consumer experience is not compromised by any stake holder.

While summing up his thoughts on how companies can best leverage technology to enhance the consumer experience, Anurag says, “Companies need to see technology as a medium like clay that needs to be crafted and shaped into profitable solutions that support all stake holders of a consumer funnel. They should not see technology like ready-made products or solutions that need to be force-fit or retro-fit or 2 letter abbreviations like AR, VR, MR, XR, AI, or ML.”

Further sharing his views on the upcoming DDX Asia expo - the one-stop exhibition of digital display solutions for retail and out-of-home industries to be held at the Nehru Centre, Worli, Mumbai on December 8-9, 2023, Anurag says, “It’s disrupt or be disrupted for all companies and the tip of their spear is retail transformation that can drive business transformation. Retail helps companies in their customer discovery & validation and that is the modern-day pivot for all companies to transform their business models around – their customers. A platform like DDX Asia helps in exactly this perspective.”