Focusing on enhancing our customer experience: Pinkes Ambvat, CRIF India

In an interview with CIO AXIS, Pinkes Ambvat, CIO & IT Director, CRIF India, discusses CRIF’s digital transformation and outlines cybersecurity sector’s growth potential and hiring trends in the backdrop of the challenges posed by Covid-19.

How are you amplifying customer experience by the use of technology?
It is estimated that businesses that offer better customer experiences earn between 4% and 8% more than their competitors. According to McKinsey, 70% of buying experiences are based on how consumers feel they are being treated. There is no magic button to create an amazing customer experience for organisation. Customers are fickle, always on the move, and looking out for the next best thing. But what we can do today is understand that in our modern environment, a key solution to connecting with customers is a mix of human and digital to bring out the best in each interaction .Using customer analytics for managing customer experience, helps banking and financial services providers in delivering personalized, interactions that assists customers with their daily financial needs. Moreover, customer analytics enables the real-time delivery of product or service offerings at the right time, which enhances the customer experience. Based on past interactions, AI develops a better understanding of customers and their behaviour. This enables banks to customize financial products and services by adding personalized features and intuitive interactions to deliver meaningful customer engagement and build strong relationships with its customers.
Technology continues to provide new possibilities for how businesses can communicate and engage with our clients. Using technology now we are able to understand customer needs better, now we are enhancing the products to suite customer needs. There are specific features being offered as per client’s expectations. Organization can now use predictive analytics to precisely forecast customers’ needs, in some cases even before the individual has made up his or her mind. Technology can even be used to find out what’s behind customers’ behaviour when they’ve not been explicit which helps in enhancing the overall customer experience.

What are your proposals to accelerate the digital transformation of companies and return to a new post-pandemic normal?
Digital transformation is the need of the hour, unfortunately, many organizations that were delaying digital transformation efforts have been caught off guard. It’s now clear that all organizations must prepare for doing business in the digital world. Digital transformation helps in integrating digital solutions to the very core of our business, greatly changing how it operates by creating new business processes, customer experiences, and organizational culture. We have already started our digital transformation journey.
My proposal is that companies should bring clarity to the company’s vision and align digital transformation investments with business objectives. The entire organization needs to collaborate with individual teams and projects to achieve success in digital transformation. It is important for CIOs to work with their teams to clear the organization’s mission and vision. It is important that we make data, the centre of our decision-making. In many organizations, data is fragmented, incomplete, and siloed. Companies should start investing in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to support real-time and predictive analytics, and create a competitive advantage.

Can you please share some of the unique lessons learned from Covid-19?
Below are some lesson we learned during Covid-19 pandemic
• We need to foster a culture of cyber resilience, always go beyond the compliance
• We have to focus on protecting critical capabilities and services
• Enhancing Cyber security – It is very important that we keep enhancing our cyber security as per industry trends & standards
• Heightened device and network security – Device and network security played and important roles in ensuring complete remote working. We need to keep investing on these areas.
• Enterprises are not spending enough on their data security system.
• Securing content wherever it reside – It is critical that we should secure all the data where it resides

What technologies and trends will your organization be focusing on next year?
We are focusing on new cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, AI, RPA big data, OCI as part of our digital strategy. CRIF has a major emphasis on innovation. Through our research and development we have worked on our digital transformation journey. Some of the projects that we worked recently are Machine Learning implementation, Robotic process automation, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure & BigData implementation. We will now focusing on enhancing our customer experience and enrichment of our machine learning model.

“We will now focusing on enhancing our customer experience and enrichment of our machine learning model.”

How will the cybersecurity sector look in a post-COVID-19 world? What do you expect to be different when it comes to cybersecurity and hiring in a post-COVID-19 world?
In this post-COVID-19 world, cybersecurity is emerging as a core technology for companies to secure themselves as millions of employees have started working from home. Organizations has updated their BCPs and remote working policies whilst prioritizing cyber security during post COVID-19 re-strategizing process. We have seen a rise in COVID 19 related phishing and ransomware attacks. There is increased security risk from remote working, but it’s important to remember that Covid-19 is expected to be temporary, with a time horizon measured from months to a year. I expect that organizations will need to move to new operating models, companies will need to reset their security systems to ensure there are no outliers, new cyber risks that appeared during the pandemic must be understood and new advance technology to be deployed. Thus overall I see that cybersecurity will strengthen in nearer future. On hiring during Pandemic, we did saw some impact, but now things are going back to normal and hiring has started again. IT budget has been reprioritized and aligned with business goals.

Source: Publication: CIOAXIS, 13 Jan ,2021