Mahindra Group is not planning a super app to digitise customer experience; instead, it plans to synergise the holistic backend view of customers’ profiles across its businesses, using financial services as the connecting solution, a senior company executive said.
“We see our approach to be customer-centric. The simplest is to plonk all business offerings into one app and say you must need it. We do not see it that way,” Mahindra Group CTO Mohit Kapoor told ET.
Rather, the group sees finance as a glue to connect customers across its various business offerings, he said.
With Mahindra Finance being one of its core businesses apart from automobiles and agricultural solutions, the group is looking to offer a seamless experience to customers by offering them financial channels across core solutions and growing businesses like logistics, holidays, real estate, automobile reselling, and solar energy.
“For all this, finance must be a partner and must be in the primary customer journey, not in a super app,” Kapoor said. “The question, probably to ask is, how well do you know the customer and the preferences of the customer, and how the data is making it more powerful?”
The group is also investing heavily to offer a similar experience across its employee base with investments in digital solutions, he said.
Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services (Mahindra Finance), part of Mahindra Group, would leverage an automated decisioning platform StrategyOne to integrate its customer acquisition channels across multiple retail asset product lines, Kapoor said.
For instance, Mahindra Finance recently partnered with CRIF Solutions to offer a seamless onboarding experience for customers seeking loans.
The group has already implemented a backend view of the customers’ journey across various companies, he said. The system gives a 360-degree centralised view of customer preferences starting from onboarding, transactions, loyalty, and engagement with each brand.
The group is also working with the top hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to streamline the customer experience management journey across B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) channels.
“All three hyperscalers have a role to play,” Kapoor said. “It’s not exclusive, but it’s topical. Cloud-connected cars are more with AWS, the customer analytics is more with Google, the enterprise apps are more with Azure. So, all three hyperscalers are meaningful for the group,” he added.
Mahindra is also implementing a similar experience management solution for employees across group companies on an SAP platform.
While the group is not hung up on acquiring 5G spectrum, it does see a strong use case for its technology driven ambitions using 5G in logistics and finance, Kapoor said.
“If you can own the spectrum then it can be more secure, and faster, cheaper, and better,” he said. “But I’m sure the VPN sliced 5G from the telecom vendors will be equally good.”
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