Paul Writer launches SAP Think Tank , 
Video interview series with Head of Sales highlighting best practices
Darshana Shah
Senior Vice President- Marketing and Visual Merchandising
Hypercity Retail (India) Ltd.
On your organization’s approach from ‘selling to customers’ to ‘helping customers buy’…
When it comes to the hypercity we were never into a selling mode as a hypermarket is not a place to sell. We were always trying to provide our customers the best of experience and the product and range. We always keep the customer first in mind, from that era, and customer centralism remains. What we are also doing now is using CRM a lot and looking at customers insights through behavior analysis. We use our loyalty database and access the member’s behavior, getting ourselves into predictive analytics and from there we understand what the customers buying behavior has been. That’s one part where we use analytics as a tool. The other thing we are doing is customer research within various geographies and catchments about how a customer has really moved. Today, when the customers from the old days of buying in ‘kirana stores’ have moved into modern retail they seek a different level of experience in modern retail. Hence, looking at the entire customer journey, his/her insights and customer research works nowadays. Also now when we bring in new products we involve our customers by creating customer panels, show them the product and range and talk to them about what kind of pricing, is it interesting and will it serve their day-to-day needs. By taking in all these data points and understanding needs we procure our buying team so that’s where they go and buy a product eventually of course aiding the customer to buy in the store. So in store the complete experience whether it is the aisles, the cash tills, product, brand staff, cheese from around the world- explanations on how to consume the different cheeses and what goes along with it, so that is what we are into. Again I would say facilitating the customer buying from entering to exiting the store is what the role is, and not really selling.
“ oday, when the customers from the old days of buying in ‘kirana stores’ have moved into modern retail they seek a different level of experience in modern retail.”
