Interview with Zensar Technologies – Ajay Bhandari – Chief Corporate Development Officer and Shaonlee Bose – Head Marketing Innovation
PW: How important is technology for the success of the modern marketer?
Zensar: Today, marketing mechanisms are all going online. Technology plays an important part of not only identifying and reaching out to prospects but also to manage and engage with them.
For us at Zensar, Web marketing and other technology led marketing is 25% of our IT Budget and growing.
Moreover, we have been using systems to manage our leadgen programs for over 2-3 years and track the lifecycle of each lead until closure. This is not possible without the appropriate technology
PW: What are your current marketing priorities & how does that translate to technology?
Zensar: We already have a highly experiential website that connects the company with the customers and helps them to communicate seamlessly with us. We want to grow the adoption of this website and double it.
Another focus area is running 7 sided campaigns for the large base of identified prospects using unique ways to customize the communication to them by using blogs, digital etc. Target Based Marketing is a key driver for our business and we will enhance it using various media and technology.
We also want to revamp our website so that we are sharper in our communication through it. We want to leverage our internal avenues to increase productivity and use live interaction to influence every level where our customers experience Zensar. Increasing the stickiness of our website through a virtual view of Zensar right from services to CSR is the priority.
We want to make our website a tool for better collaboration – almost like an intelligence tool that will reveal to us our customer’s expectations – the value they are deriving and what they want. It will be an internal enabler for marketing and make more accessible the pattern of information usage. Based on this we can customize our plans for our prospects to experience Zensar. This is important strategic information for us to plan our marketing and business.
PW: In your organization how has technology played a role in customer acquisition or retention?
Zensar: As already mentioned, lead generation, tracking a lead right upto when it is converted into a customer is all part of our business plan. Apart from web marketing, which is our core marketing program, we have used social media, linkedin to drive traffic onto the website and to our campaigns. For this afcourse we ensure that we have content rich website for all our four key verticals so that once someone comes in contact with our website they get what they are looking for and more.
We also get an insight into customer behavior from the visits on our website and to our campaigns so that we are able to build our communication and content around that.
As an IT services organization we have been very active in the event space. While that is off-line marketing – we have used online extensively and with great effectiveness to generate interest for these events. Much before and event we activate the ecosystem that will make the activities at the event more meaningful for our target audience.
PW: How has technology played a role in new product development, market expansion or other areas?
Our best results from a technology led marketing initiative has been our very recent Global Partnership Weekend. This is an offline annual event at Zensar and a real success year after year. However, this year we have enhanced the customer experience multifold by using a variety of technology to make it more interactive and interesting. Use of mobility, social media and an interactive website has always been appreciated. But this time the use of nearfield sharing through NFC, QR codes, ability to exchange information and enhance collaboration added to the excitement and the adoption was at a high of 85%- 90%
5. Would you say the level of collaboration between the CMO and CIO in your organization was:
Marketing budget has a separate IT component which is delivered through IT. Naturally, at first all collaboration faces some challenges but at Zensar the marriage of CMO and CIO is quite stable!
This is also because being an IT services firm many of us in Marketing are quite Tech Savvy and understand technology.
