Tapping into customers’ micro-moments to attract the next billion customers: A Balakrishnan

In terms of customer acquisition and retention, the key is tapping on customers’ micro-moments, said A Balakrishnan, Director, Google Cloud India at Techcircle Finserv Innovation Summit held on Thursday in Mumbai. As Google defined it in one of its blogs, “Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device — increasingly a smartphone — to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something.”

Relating that to a financial services and industry context, Balakrishnan said that these same micro-moments also dictate people’s financial decision-making process. This also means that as a financial service provider, a company would need to ‘embed’ itself in these customer journeys. “And that's where each of you as fintech and as financial institutions have to build for. Each of the organisations has been in legacy, would now have to look for the next billion customers by tapping into these micro-moments,” added Balakrishnan.

Mobile phones have become the primary element of peeking into a customer’s journey. It helps in understanding what drives their next behaviour, their spending, and the next need for them in their journey, he noted. “So, the new-age applications have to be built for scale to cater to the unique journey of every customer, what we call the adaptive journey,” said Balakrishnan. Further adding that the unique journey of the customer is also based on trust; customers would tend to choose the institution in which they place trust, instead of just relying on the brand value.

Extending it to fintech and finance-based organisations, Balakrishnan said that digitalisation here has just penetrated half or less than half of the country’s population. Elaborating further on the scope and challenges of digitalisation in the financial sector, he said, “On one hand, you have all the knowledge for the products you set out to build and you have a great idea about the industry. On the other hand, you have the data, you have the technology, speed, and business knowledge. But you do not have regulatory management. You do not have compliance in the way it is ironclad for those legacy institutions. And that's where the problem happens.”

Answering a question about challenges related to hyper-personalisation, Balakrishnan said that monolithic business applications need to be broken into microservices and institutes would need to focus on ensuring quality of data.