Published on October 31, 2017
TNF India - East organised Customer Centricity Meet at the Tata Centre, Kolkata, in October 2017, which witnessed a participation of 35 executives from 14 Tata companies in eastern India. The event generated a lot of discussion and was appreciated by all.
After a brief welcome by Peeyush Gupta, VP - Marketing & Sales, Tata Steel, the participants were addressed by Harish Bhat, Brand Custodian, Tata Sons, through video conferencing. Mr Bhat spoke about building a customer-centric culture and explained the two pillars of customer centricity, i.e., to develop a unique and deep understanding of the customer and create a unique strong connect with customer. He left the audience with four themes for a customer-centric organisation — let the customer inspire you, and you’ll understand their needs better; there is a customer in every person you meet, even the one in the corner office who owns the customer; celebrate your customers.
Following Mr Bhat’s address, Mr Gupta briefly apprised the participants about the B2B subgroup, its objectives and the pillars. The next session was by Rajshree Bakshi from Taj Hotels, who shared the initiatives undertaken towards customer centricity, along with the challenges and benefits. She spoke about the basic principle of atithi devo bhava, changes taking place in the market place and mega trends in the hospitality industry, and how the brand architecture was reversed in consideration of the same. In addition, Ms Bakshi threw light on enablers for customer centricity: investment in cognitive analytics, website transformation and Taj live command centre.
Next up, Manish Jaiswal from Tata Steel took the participants through the company’s customer value management — which runs over 12 weeks in five phases — its elements and the five distinct categories, including database development, idea generation, idea evaluation & prioritisation, implantation planning, and tracking & review.
The day ended with a brief discussion around the next steps. Abhijit Mitra, Advisor, TBExG, urged all the participants to build and improve their Customer Promise road map and embedding the learnings from the day. He also spoke about capitalising on the avenues of capability development available within the group viz., Deep Dives run by TBExG, webinars and training programmes run by Tata Management Training Centre.