Evolving Systems Has Solutions to ‘Seismic Shifts’ in Customer Loyalty

 


No one knows that commerce is global more than Evolving Systems’ Adhish Kulkarni, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of their Digital Engagement and Loyalty Solutions.

Not only has Kulkarni implemented consumer engagement programs on various platforms worldwide for various brands — including many in the telco industry — but he has also found himself living in over a dozen countries around the world as part of his education and career.

“I’m a bit of a nomad,” says Kulkarni, who attended college at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., and earned his MBA in France. His professional career has taken him to stays in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, the U.K., and almost all parts in between.

“It’s a varied background, but it works really well within the context of Evolving because our footprint is in 60-plus countries,” he says of the company’s work, where they specialize in helping brands achieve a more intimate and cost-effective customer experience while better understand their customer needs and preferences on a truly personalized, individual level.

Managing the ‘Seismic Shifts’ in Customer Loyalty
Those global perspectives are useful because Kulkarni says we are in the “middle of a seismic shift” in terms of what companies and brands are doing currently with customer loyalty. He says the worldwide pandemic has created a “digital disruption” that is causing brands to think differently about how they connect and engage with their customers.

“The pandemic has taken those trends and accelerated them significantly,” Kulkarni says. “More consumers are moving online, and they have entirely different personas in some sense. They have many new channels which they're engaging with brands, and suddenly there's a whole world of influencers that play a huge role in driving consumer interest and brand advocacy.”

The challenge has been a fragmentation of channels for brands to communicate, which often leads to what Kulkarni says is a “disloyal” consumer who can now go online either on their computer or personal device and explore what other brands have to offer.

That is where Evolving Systems has been specializing with its clients: helping them to activate customers and build a trust that allows the consumer to feel safe in sharing their pertinent information and data with the brand.

The Democracy of Customer loyalty
“Suddenly, it's become a lot harder for brands to engage and hold on to their customers unless they're very savvy about these new digital opportunities,” Kulkarni says. “Customer loyalty is changing and becoming much more democratic in the way that it's more available. The fact that brands are now engaging online — as well as offline — means there are new opportunities for disruptors to come in. We're in an age of disruption right now, and I think that's both a challenge and an opportunity in redefining those relationships.”

In fact, Evolving Systems has been on an increased focus and determination to help brands capitalize on customers’ trust. Data intimacy, which Kulkarni says is yet to be won, can untap many different plays, from digital I.D. to optimized operations.

More importantly, he says Evolving Systems’ efforts are focused on making sure a brand’s data is centralized and easily accessible so it can use to make decisions around contextual marketing, around relevance, and around engaging customers in the right way on the right channel.

“One part is bringing all of that data into a place they can use it, and then the other part is orchestrating across all of these fragmented channels,” Kulkarni says. “Being able to talk to talk to someone when they are on a bus or when they drive a car — or when they are in front of their television or laptop — each of those opportunities is a different touchpoint which requires a different set of decisions.”

Consumers’ Rich App Experiences
Having that global expertise is what makes Evolving Systems effective in meeting those challenges for its clients. Running a program in the Asia Pacific region has different requirements than ones in the U.K. or the U.S., Kulkarni says. A lot of those decisions have to do with internet penetration and the ability for consumers to have rich app experiences.

“When we think about engaging with a customer in Malaysia, for example, we need to really think through the different customer journeys that it involves and the fact that they'll be using different devices, different screens, and different times of day,” he says. “Those devices may have the capabilities to have a rich digital experience, and in some cases, they won't. So if we're just applying one-size-fits-all, there's a great chance that we miss out in terms of really addressing people in the right way.”

Gamification has been extremely useful for telco clients, Kulkarni says, because they have been able to inject freshness into the programs, something Evolving Systems calls “extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.”

“It’s the joy of competing,” he says. “It’s seeing yourself progress and the satisfaction of achieving something, or just the excitement of being surprised.”

But Evolving Systems realizes that to make gamification work, it has to be built hand-in-hand with the customer journey.

“We take a customer journey and build it out for a particular kind of customer, and then we look at the opportunities where we might lose them or where we might see a drop in the level of engagement,” Kulkarni says. “We try and build gamification mechanics into that part of the journey so that we keep it fresh, and we keep the engagement levels high. For us, gamification is really a tool and an overlay that gets on top of the customer journey that we're building, the customer experience that we're designing, and it becomes very powerful if used in the right way.”

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