Interview with Bhaskar Madapura ,Country Marketing Manager TNT Express, India
PW: As a marketer what are your current priorities?
BM: At TNT we have started taking baby steps in the social media and digital space. Naturally, we want to grow this in the coming years. We are already doing a lot in the customer management areas and will be using more of analytics and CRM systems to improve and manage our relationships with our customers, as that is our differentiator today. My priority is to ensure that we are engaged with customers and prospects and they perceive us as the partner of choice specifically for their express logistics and supply chain needs. This is driven through specific customer loyalty programs and new customer acquisition campaigns.
PW: In your organization how has technology played a role in customer acquisition or retention?
BM: To put it simply Marketing Analytics is helping us identify lost and down trading customers and customizing campaigns/promotions to win back business. One of our key differentiator is our focus on relationship building with our customer to go the extra mile and demonstrate our “Sure we can” ethos. In the express supply chain business customers are sensitive to timeliness and safety for their precious consignments be it one shipment a month to over a 100 a day. In this area our strength has always been in building a strong bond with our users and keeping them updated real time. This also has to be articulated in our communication with them. Some time back we used all the information and data we had about our customers and their trading behavior to design and deliver tailor-made communication to them. Analytics helped us to identify these behavior patterns and technology was leveraged to communicate with carefully chosen 10000+ direct customers. This effort grew our connection with our customers and helped build loyalty for the brand. Such a marketing initiative involving personalization is not scalable without technology.
PW: How has technology played a role in new product development, market expansion or other areas?
BM: Technology is enabling us to provide real time visibility. The availability of multiple communication channels today is helping us build new products/offerings to customers and customizing our communication with them.