पत्रिका जगत Positive Journalism
January, 22 January 2019: Reach out to the customers directly at their comfort zone. In a nutshell, this was indeed the key take away of the 13th India Digital Summit presenting its discussions on ‘Mission 2022- The New Pillars of Digitization. While day 1 of the summit celebrated the upcoming sparkles of 5G spectrum and OTT platforms, day 2 went about finding the right mix of digital initiatives to attract loyal customers.
It was Mr. Abhiraj Bhal, Co-founder of UrbanClap setting the mood for the entire schedule in offering. Talking about the journey of his platform, Abhiraj said that the aim of internet platform as goods and services market is to unlock the access of end-providers to consumers directly, bypassing the need and hassles of middlemen. This is termed as full stack technology market places. According to him, the people actually providing the goods and services often get exploited and online platforms thus protect them from that. Expanding the already existing market or re-imagining the industry is the basic principle of running these markets.
The same point of making the end providers reaching the end-users was echoed in the session by Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder and CEO, PolicyBazaar. Discussing the market of insurances, he said that digital platforms offering insurances are doing the same thing by making the users avoid the hassle of agents. In India, 62% of medical treatment is estimated to go out of people’s pockets in absence of health covers while the same makes 2/3 share of personal borrowings. Dahiya sounds hopeful of the digital market as 30% of the life covers and 15% of the health insurances issued so far, have been through digital platform.
As pointed out by the panel discussion on ‘E commerce: Changing the future of job market’, this field too is reaping the benefits of the direct exchange between the customers and providers. More the life of consumers is getting engulfed with online markets, more is the inclusion of mundane service providers in the job market leading to expansion of employment. On the other hand, people skilled with entrepreneurship, data analysis, marketing on internet, machine learning and search engine optimizations are finding better job opportunities along with non-monetary benefits in the e-commerce industry. Buying and selling at these markets are boosting ancillary industries too.
With the digital market on the roll, there’s absolutely no doubt that budding entrepreneurs will enter here with the start-up businesses. Panel discussion on this talked about the choices of building a company to last and building a company to sell. According to the speakers, the young prefer the latter as they are more into risk-taking adventures. But all of them insisted the starters to think well before making a choice, about what you are trying to create and how long will it last.
Rightly pointed out by Hari TN, Head-HR, BigBasket, the feature of voice search has contributed in increasing the customer base of digital market platforms. The excitement over sessions on Indian Alexa, the real-time voice conversation feature of Amazon in both the days of this summit was indeed a proof of that!
