Need For Personalisation Is Much More Deeper In India, Says Flipkart’s CPTO

As ecommerce platforms face tough competition to not only attract new customers but also retain the existing ones, the need for catering to the diverse preferences of the customers at the right time becomes ever so important. In today's world where customers just don't look at products but crave experiences that resonate with them, personalisation transforms the way brands engage with their customers on a day-to-day basis.

As Flipkart gears up for the 11th edition of The Big Billion Days (TBBD) 2024, the company has enhanced their focus on technology-enabled personalisation features by leveraging advanced technologies to create a dynamic and immersive shopping environment tailored to the individual needs of customers and sellers.

Jeyandran Venugopal, the Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Flipkart delved into the different aspects of personalisation and shared insights on the consumer-led engagement that has been helping the company to cater to the specific needs of the customers.

The Core Of Personalisation
While personalisation has different aspects to it and brands, platforms use this to attract customers by understanding what they really want based on a series of factors that are fed into the algorithms, Venugopal shed light on what lies at the core of personalisation.

“Personalisation at its very highest level, you can think of as creating a very tailored experience for individual customers. How we know about the experience a particular customer would value the most is based on us leveraging the data we have about them through various interactions they have had with the platform. Using that to get a deep understanding of their preferences and crafting an experience that delights them the most.”

The Need For Personalisation In India
As India is home to a diverse set of population who have a diverse range of preferences, it becomes crucial for ecommerce platforms to use their insights to understand the nature of searches that a user makes, the buying patterns of users, where they come from, their level of affordability. The CPTO of Flipkart delved into this aspect during a webinar.

“In India, the need for personalisation is much deeper than most other geographies. The country has a vast and diverse landscape. Climate and topography are different, and the festivals in every region are different. The clothing we wear and the food we eat are very different from each other. We have such diverse consumer preferences based on the cultural diversity we all value.”

Engagement-led Personalisation
As generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has taken the world by storm, it has become necessary for brands to leverage that into their framework to cater to consumers in a way that engages with them and creates an experience.

“We have Gen AI-enabled 3D videos. There is a lot of technology that has gone into this to generate not just the videos but the entire script, the avatar that is the talking head that you see, the voice is generated using AI. The 3D model of the object and the animations that are going through is also AI-generated. It is an innovative format to engage with the users,” stated Venugopal.

The Era Of Video Commerce
As the new generation takes over the ecommerce platforms, the trend for having videos to assist them while they make their purchase decision has been gaining a lot of attention and focus from the platforms. Venugopal pointed out this aspect where the company is using videos to drive purchases while assisting the users.

“The younger customer cohort loves videos and wants to get all their information using video content. More and more users are not looking to read long complex product specification pages, so we have taken the video route. Even on the ‘search and browse’ on Flipkart, you will see a lot of autoplay videos so a user is not just looking at a static image while making their purchase decision,” added Venugopal.

Human-led Video Assistance
While the machines and the AI assist the users a lot when it comes to helping them make their purchase decisions, at the end of the day, having a human at the other end to assist you regarding the details of the purchases that you are about to make is becoming popular. Venugopal highlighted the human-led video assistance feature of Flipkart in this regard.

“This is around helping them to make a purchase decision for high sales price vertical selects. If you are buying an appliance or a high-cost electronic item, we do enable them to be able to do human-led video assistance. We have experts, many times from the brands themselves or from various other ways in which we can create a group of very knowledgeable users who can support that interaction.”

The CPTO revealed that the users have been loving these experiences as they see around three times more conversions for users who are on these pages if they engage with the live video support.

Flipkart aims to become a personal shopping assistant for customers by anticipating their needs and curating a personalised feed of products that resonate with their unique tastes.