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HARISH LADEGeneral Manager—SystemsAsian PaintsIndustry : Manufacturing

CX Leaders Book 2019

THE LEADING ASIA-PACIFIC PAINT COMPANY IS TRANSFORMING ITSELF FROM JUST BEING A PAINT AND COATING LEADER

Started in 1945, Asian Paints has a long history of coloring the walls and has been a market leader for

over 5 decades. Always innovating in paint products, colour and techniques the company has retained its leadership position by nurturing good relationships with its over 45,000 dealers.

The company continuously reinvents itself by keeping the customer at the center- which until a decade ago was the dealer. However, all that changed when the pre independence era company decided to shift its focus from just making and selling paints to helping customers create beautiful homes.

“It was a big shift that we embarked upon about a decade ago,” said Harish Lade, General Manager - Systems, at

“We created a scheduling app that could be used across lines of different home solution businesses. We adopted a services architecture that allowed us to decouple the front end from backend. By adopting Design Thinking as a methodology, we co-created the experience along with business to help us crack the user experience issue, ensuring that the journey is seamless, so that customer gets a delightful experience.”

different touch points and still has a consistent experience.

Since the customer is not often a repeat customer considering the paint cycles are panned across over three years, helping the customer with good experience during the short decision making window was a challenge. Poor customer data just adds to the challenge. “To begin with the customer doesn’t want to give away a lot of information,” Harish elaborated. “Once they fill up a form, ensuring the journey is seamless as it goes through different players involved is a huge challenge. Is the chat agent adept to handle the queries? Is the color consultant aware of the customer preferences ?”

Asian Paints. “While dealer remains important, the whole shift in looking at what business we are in - viz., helping customers create their dream homes was pivotal in beginning a transformation journey for the company. It meant not only understanding customer color preferences but also getting into home decor segment like kitchen and bath spaces,” Harish added.

The shift brought its own set of challenges for Asian Paints. Since the company was dealing with end customers directly for the first time, it meant the Asian Paints had to reimagine all its customer touch points whether it be the digital channels, physical store fronts or the voice channels on the customer interaction center. And it was important to ensure that the customer gets a consistent experience across channels.

It also meant discovering the customer journey as they went about the phases of Inspiration, Try and Decide and Make it Happen. It also involved conceptualizing, launching and continuously refining various innovative services like colour consultancy, vastu consultancy or premium home decor services.

“The home wall painting category is fairly unorganized and customers have to go through a painful process when they want to get their home painted. Just selling the can of paint is not what gives value to the customer. They are looking for a complete solution -from colour advisory to seamless ontime execution of a painted wall. The customers today expect the right services to be delivered consistently without any hassles,” Harish opined.

To help achieve this, the company leverages digital technology and its dealers. Some of the hardware stores have been converted into paint consulting stores where customers can get recommendations and access to trained contractors and painters who are capable of delivering a hassle free service.

Because business models were being evolved, the IT team had to work closely with the business team in an Agile Fashion. The team had to be willing to experiment and fail fast and move forward rapidly.

One of the key challenges was to have the IT systems and processes that presents a seamless Asian Paints to the customer- ensuring that the customer goes through

CX focus helps build new business lines

“The customer goes through different touch points and still has a consistent experience”

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To crack the problem, the Asian Paint’s IT team created a 360 view of its customer. The data is enriched as the customer goes through different touch points. Using segmentation and targeting algorithms, the team is able to identify the right offers for the right customer.

“Looking at history of past interactions and matching the customer profile data, the teams come up with innovative campaigns For example, if a house was painted with a kid theme 5 years ago, should we offer them a teenager theme this time around?”

This data is supplemented with other data such as the location from where the customer was calling or interacting, what brand of phone she is using to further understand the persona of the customer. Everything put together, Asian Paints was able to create customer involvement in a category of products that is not easily understood and is fairly low involvement.

Harish finishes by saying, “The next big challenge was to make every player in the fulfilment process whether it be the sales associate or the colour consultant or the contractor to work closely together in a synchronized manner to ensure that the job is done on time every time.”