Digital Transformation Is Happening at a Rapid Pace: Aakrit Vaish The co-founder and CEO of Haptik believes that for businesses it becomes very critical to know about the customer experience and what does that experience looks like

With the advent of COVID-19, most of the companies have seen an upheaval in the digital transformation and digitization, Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and CEO, Haptik, discussed all about the new scenario at BIZ Experiences India's Tech and Innovation Summit 2021.

Vaish said that in the US, in the first quarter of 2020 e-commerce had grown as much in the three months as it had grown in the past 10 years which means that the digital spending in 90 days grew as much as the past 10 years.

This statistics shows that the costumers today are on digital platforms and mediums and are able to interact and transact with the brands, and all of this has made customer experience real.

For businesses it becomes very critical to know about the customer experience and what does that experience looks like. He explained this very situation with the help of an example, he told that 60 per cent of the customers did not complete the purchase because of the poor customer experience they had; and another thing was that 83 per cent of the shoppers wanted help from the company and when that didn't happen they end up dropping off the conversion fund.

The companies who make efforts in making the customer experience and service experience right can really win big; as they have the potential to do so. This proves the fact that 60 per cent of the customers will pay more or are willing to pay more if they get the right customer experience when they are doing online shopping.

One being asked what do brands need to do to operate and succeed in this new normal, he said the first thing is conversational AI which means chatbots and voice-driven AI. Now as we are living in the digital first world, customers also want their experience to be digitally first. Second, WhatsApp commerce which is the most important thing in this digitally first world as this WhatsApp commerce will enable the customer to communicate and to transact via WhatsApp, and this service is now being used by every emerging business in countries like India, Brazil, Southeast Asia and Africa. Now, with the help of WhatsApp channels, customers are now directly able to interact with the business. Third being, Voice Assistants, as using Voice Assistants is a lot more convenient and vernacular as now these Voice Assistants are available in regional language and that is what makes it a lot more convenient to communicate with the businesses. Moreover, accessibility, convenience and human touch are the three things which are provide by the Voice Assistants

"It is like 1913 and we are building cars," said Vaish. As 1913 was the year when Ford put out the assembly line and even after 100 years we can see the impact it had on the Automobile industry similarly with the advent of COVID and digitization, the AI driven customer experience is going to be extremely real for the coming 100 years.

Talking about the sectors which has made the best use of the AI, are the new-age companies as these companies end up being the early stage adopters of this AI driven technology and these companies have their customers right at the digital touch point and these companies have better organized systems. Apart from this traditional companies like Fintech and Financial Services are also catching up to it.