CIOIN

Interview Questions

Full Interview with Sam Ghosh

Sam Ghosh:

We firmly believe that the India growth story is still intact. Though macro-economic numbers are short of expectations, things are likely to look up. India will post over six percent growth in GDP and the domestic demand in semi-urban and rural areas still continues to be strong. However, businesses are likely to face some short-term challenges. Growth and demand will slow and businesses will have to work harder to achieve the targets they are setting for themselves.
IT will play a critical role in helping businesses achieve their growth targets in this challenging year. Companies will have to embrace new channels to reach out to customers, offer innovative products, and more importantly, reform their processes and systems to keep their costs under tight control.

Sam Ghosh:

 Profitability and growth, while ensuring steady customer retention, will be the key challenge in the next few quarters. Customers continue to be cautious about their investment decisions after witnessing unprecedented volatility in 2011.
As a company, we are increasing our focus on customer service and have identified the need to reach out to customers through multiple channels using IT. Various technological initiatives like an accelerated adoption of mobiles, Internet-based services, workforce collaboration, and virtualization have helped us take a lead in this direction.

Sam Ghosh:

The key lesson we learnt from the last slowdown was that—especially for IT—we need to take a variable-cost approach. Over the last few years, we have reviewed all our IT systems and projects and tried to shrink our fixed cost base and make it more flexible. In the last two-three years, we have rationalized our IT systems and the number of servers we have. During the slowdown of 2008, we tried to do more with less and focused on business intelligence and CRM projects, which helped us evaluate our customers and gain insights into what they want.

We are doing the same this time around. We are also using analytics and forecasts to drive new data-driven program initiatives in the field.  

Another big learning was the need to improve business processes, drive increased productivity through IT initiatives such as portals and business process management to cut costs. And that will be our mantra in the coming months as well.

Sam Ghosh:

Customer centricity and the use of enabling technologies will be the main driving theme to help businesses perform better. Go online is our change mantra today. Online channels provide an excellent platform for extending reach and engagement with our customers.

If you look at our mutual funds, about 10 percent of the business comes from the online medium. Our large following on Facebook (for Reliance Mutual Fund) will helps us get information from our customers directly, resolve issues faster, and fine tune our processes and products in line with customer needs. The general insurance business mobilizes almost 40 percent of its volume, directly and indirectly through online channels. 

The life insurance business also is gearing up by formulating several new products that will be launched for this medium.

Customer self-service is the big focus of the online medium and all businesses are pushing forward in this direction.

Sam Ghosh:

From an IT perspective, we are trying to move—more and more—to a variable-cost scenario. As of now, 40 percent of our IT cost is variable. But variable cost should not simply be an opex stream, it needs to be linked to the top-line and ensure that sales and costs move in tandem.

Second, we have to make our distributors and customers use our systems to provide transaction fulfillment at the point of customer contact. We are also devising a mechanism for customers to download transaction receipts, certificates, statements and other documents themselves. This reduces the cost of paper processing.

Sam Ghosh:

Virtualization is a big play for us. We have already deployed server and storage virtualization. We are now looking at thin clients or desktop virtualization. We are already private cloud enabled and are also piloting the public cloud to make IT
costs variable.

We’ll also look at mobility as a game changer. We are empowering our employees, customers, and distributors with these end-point devices. Our commercial finance business has used award-winning mobility initiatives to achieve superior outcomes for recoveries by field collectors.

The third part of our strategy will be analytics; gaining customer insights and increasing the persistency of customers. For example, customers in our life insurance business sometimes tend to delay premium payments. We need to ensure they pay it on time to derive maximum benefits. BI helps us predict which customers are likely to default and helps us focus our efforts on this smaller population.

Collaboration is another big priority. We are deploying a single platform that combines instant messaging, multi-video-conferencing, web-casting, e-learning, Intranets, and social media to boost collaboration between employees, senior management, distributors and customers. Connecting the feet-on-street workforce to decision-making to risk management to the delivery of product and quality services will be a key enabler.

Sam Ghosh:

IT innovation is absolutely critical for us. It helps improve productivity, shrink our cost base, improve access to end customers, and extend better service to them. We are doing new projects selectively. For example, we are looking at moving our mobile employees to tablets. This is going to be an added cost but we believe it needs to be done to survive the next cycle and grow. Employees should be able to complete an interaction with customers whether they are in the office or not.

Sam Ghosh:

 We have to be in the top three in all our businesses but most importantly we have to be ROE (return on equity) focused. And to do that, IT has been made strategically important in our larger scheme of things. IT helps us address our business goals in a challenging environment more effectively.

Also, I feel that IT is extremely critical to an organization like ours with a retail focus and hence it becomes an intrinsic component of product and service delivery.