The COVID19 pandemic had resulted in organisations accelerating their digital transformation journey much earlier than planned.
In the 2020 EY-Parthenon Digital Investment Index study, nearly two-thirds of executives agreed that organisations must radically transform their operations over the next two years.
Companies are expected to commit significant investments in automation and digital collaboration tools to help them manage the disruption while finding innovative ways to deliver products and services to customers.
W.Media spoke to Mona Srivastava, Chief Manager, BPCL in order to understand the challenges that the organisaton faced and how they overcame them.
“I would say that by now we have overcome most of the challenges and our efforts with the IVR have gone a long way in helping us achieve this feat. In the past, customers were attached to a distributor, and each of them had a passbook or a diary and a local phone number. With our investments in IVR, we were able to change that dramatically,” said Srivastava.
She further explained that Bharat Gas came up with a single all-India number on which the customer could call. So with the common number, customers now don’t need to remember who is their distributor, hence, the distributor has become nameless and faceless.
In a country like India, IVR cannot be successful unless you support multiple languages as a result of which BPCL built in the language capabilities, and as of today, the IVR is supporting 13 languages.
BPCL also further added the capability that the IVR will register your preferred language against the registered mobile number. So people will only have to exercise their language choice once. This IVR, in turn, speaks to the LPG Next platform that helps identify the customer and their preferred choices.
In addition to cash, there are other options for a customer to use digital payments for doorstep delivery. The most obvious and popular is the use of QR codes. So, the delivery boy carries the QR code on his employment ID, and the customer just scans it and makes the payment.
Then the last mile delivery app, which is an extension of the LPG Next, can make the spot booking, do delivery, and generate a payment link that is sent to the registered mobile number of the customer.
It can also be sent to someone else’s number if the person whose number is registered is not at home.
Currently, 10 per cent of LPG bookings at Bharat Gas make use of the QR code option for payment at the time of cylinder delivery.
“And then we also have our app called Hello BPCL. Customers can download and do all the transactions like booking payments, applying for a new connection, and applying for an address change, among other options,” pointed out Srivastava.
Secure booking
For booking, no OTP authentication is required as BPCL has made a secure system. This is due to the fact that Bharat Gas verifies the customer’s phone number that is tied to the database.
“We allow the customer to call the IVR only from the registered mobile number. In addition, the delivery is only made to the registered address. So, it’s a kind of a closed-loop. So, yes, so as far as booking is concerned, we are taking care of it,” Srivastava said.
In terms of digital payments, BPCL will start with voice-based digital payments. The RBI has announced the UPI 123 pay, and BPCL has been working over the past months with multiple digital payment partners, including Airtel, to actualise this.
“Specifically, we are integrating the voice-based digital onto the Airtel IVR platform. So, when a customer comes now for the booking, he will have two options: you can either pay and book, or you can only book. This is for the first time that something like this is happening in India. Of course, we were lucky to have cracked this. To share more specifics, Ultracash is the name of the partner that has tied up with NPCI, and hence we also partnered with them,” added Srivastava.
She further pointed out that 10 per cent of current LPG bookings at Bharat Gas are happening via the digital pay and book option. The end goal is to integrate all of this with IVR since Airtel is an important partner for BPCL and the orgnisation does not want to build separate entities or systems.
This approach makes sense because the customer is adapted to the system, and the number is already there, so there is no need to popularise it. So for this transition, they will continue to call the same number, but now it will also have an added feature of payments.
Impact on the Business model due to digital payments
In April 2019, BPCL’s digital payments were only 3 per cent of the total transactions in a month. Today, that number has crossed 30 per cent and BPCL associated themselves with multiple channels where the customer would find them.
“Today, you can go on Amazon, on Paytm, on PhonePay, we are there. We are there on all banking apps like SBI Yono, among others. We are also there on the Government of India’s promoted Umang app.
To share an example, we have tied up with Amazon to allow customers to book and pay via Alexa and Amazon Pay. This has helped connect with the more urban audience where Amazon Alexa devices are being increasingly seen,” said Srivastava.
Bharat Gas uses Data and Data analytics to improve customer experience
Data and analytics are critical to BPCL and essentially all efforts are underpinned by some or other measurable metrics.
While this is a large field within BPCL, and it will be impossible to cover all aspects Srivastava explained with the help of the example how BPCL uses it to help customers better prepare for cylinder availability.
“Using data, we at Bharat Gas have been able to work out the approximate number of days in which a customer orders a new cylinder. So, using those patterns, we have now launched an outbound call facility in partnership with Airtel. Again, our IVR is central to this facility and has helped ensure our customers don’t have to face outages with their gas cylinders. his is particularly helpful for those who don’t have access to the passbook in which cylinder delivery is registered,” Srivastava concluded.