JAGANNATHN CHELLIAH
Director Marketing, Western Digital
Customer centricity is kind of becoming the core of everybody's strategic outlook. So be it product, service and the digital experience you provide to the customer, you will need to actually do a design thinking type modelling with everything that you approach with. With that in context, it is really important that you have your partners aligned to what you are doing in this space. A customer can actually unlock value for you if he is happy. A customer can actually bring in additional references right he has got great experience with your brand. Now, in most of the businesses in India, the partner interaction with a customer is a moment of truth for a brand. So effectively, your partner is your brand representative there, which clearly means that your customer centricity strategies are at the hands of your partner. Now, if your partner is transformed with the way the brand thinks, if he is aligned with the way the brand is trying to defi ne its go to market story, it is trying to defi ne its value proposition to the customer, then clearly, you have a winning strategy out there. Partner effectively is your execution arm to ensure that your customer centricity strategy translates into winning outcome. Partner transformation is super critical in the current context for the customer centric approach.
RAHUL SINGH
VP & Head of Marketing, SAP India
In our business especially which is which is B2B enterprise software, especially in a large diverse market like India companies rely heavily on the partner ecosystem to bring in, in my opinion, three things - geographical reach, customer relationships and technical competency - it could be in a specifi c technology could be in a specifi c industry or area. Our true north is always customer success or the value that you deliver to the customer. We are a product provider and the rubber really hits the road when the partner comes in because he is the real interface, especially in our case in the mid-market all of the businesses are done through our partners and they are the service delivery partners as well. Customer success is actually dependent on the sum total of great products that we bring to the table, but it is completed with partner capability to deliver a great experience on top of that product. So absolutely it goes hand in hand.
ARPITA SENGUPTA
Director & Head of Marketing,
Red Hat India Having the opportunity to actually work through our customer centricity, go to market strategies, along with our partner ecosystem and actually winning it together, it has been anything but an accelerated learning especially post the pandemic. While customer centricity has always been the core for our success, it has become the center of everything and more so where technology has become the core of all solutions alike, even more post pandemic so I thought I really wanted to share that aspect because I think all our learnings, especially in marketing, has sort of fast forwarded by a decade or so. I like to call it digital 2.0 or digital marketing 2.0, where we have clearly fast forwarded by a decade, but our customers as well had to really pick pace. The world has never been here before. So they also had to accelerate their learnings and what better way to do it is through our esteemed partners and that ecosystem who is out there to be able to take our solutions to them.
KAUSTUBH PATKI
Marketing Head, Micro Focus India
One of the key things for any businesses today is that the approach is no more product centric, but it is customer centric. It has its own benefi ts because a happy customer is what is going to get you more business and more references. But one of the key thing if you look from an India market perspective, we are that distributed computing marketing where the feet on street today are the partners so it is very important that while an organization is customer centric, they also need to ensure that they need to support the partner ecosystem in terms of transmission because they are the ones where the last mile they're the ones who are managing the relationship with the customer. And if they are not enabled with the latest offering, then that will be a point where business will not really fl ourish. So I think these two things go hand in hand and are very important for any business to be successful.
RAMESH NATARAJAN
CEO, Redington India
Customer centricity looks towards what a customer is going through, his problem and what solution will enable him to have a seamless business execution. An employee's experience is equal to a customer's experience. If you do not get your employees well transformed in all the technologies concerned, they are not going to probably bring in a great customer experience. I feel that a partner transformation actually leads to customer simplicity, and it depends on what partners should do to equip themselves with tools and others to solve a customer's problem. Everybody says it is an IT partner because an IT partner is more than an external CIO or an external CTO, who helps the customer and whole of his IP infrastructure in identifying business problems and trying to bring in solutions towards problems.
VAISHALI B SHIVSHANKAR
Head of Marketing, Rackspace Technology
Both partner transformation and customer centricity go hand in hand, but partners now, if we look at the current trend with the pandemic, they have already moved beyond the single capability roles, which used to play, now they play across the value chain. Why this has happened is when we look back, they used to say okay we will transform, partners will go the legacy partners but now, the customers are already shifting the focus from buying the products and services to buying business outcomes and they want everything to be accelerated. So the partner ecosystem is also getting into this and they are increasingly complementing the providers, driving data driven insights, also customer focused, enriching the customer interactions, while they are collaborating throughout the customer journey. I would just like to quote one example on how the partner ecosystem is adding value. Google Cloud is partnering with Cisco and they are providing the customers a well-integrated platform that will enable them to accelerate on premise app or modernization of app, integrated security. So there is an integrated transformation from the partner ecosystem that has happened keeping the customer centricity in mind. From the product centric mode be it the providers or the partners, all of us are looking at the customer centricity. So I think with this approach, yes, they go hand in hand. And also now I see the providers are more or less focusing on the partners because now all the partner community ecosystems are going for a strong sales and marketing team.
NAVED CHAUDHARY
Head of Marketing, Ingram Micro India
If you have a consumer centric approach that obviously keeps the consumers enthusiastic about your brand. Second, if you consider the brands and have that kind of approach of consumer centricity, you know their preferences and insights then you can make your marketing plans accordingly with better ROIs. So if you have a consumer centric approach, keeping your customers enthusiastic, parallelly you are developing your plans in a way that they have better ROIs and you are making much better plans, and you know how the future builds and you can amend your plans accordingly. Transformation of partners is very important, reason being they need to cope up with the market, the changing environment, and they need to plan it accordingly. So it goes hand in hand. If you have that kind of approach and the partners also follow it, reaching out to the market with consumer centricity as an approach to having effective marketing plans helps a lot. So that is a strategy we have been following as well and keep on doing that. That is the approach which is going to work in the near future.
