Educating, Handholding, Digitizing
Motilal Oswal Financial Services has 3600 strategy to tackle covid challenges:
Motilal Oswal Financial Services, while being a leading player in the financial services realm using cutting-edge technology, does not operate in the extremes of manual or digital. Rather it believes that best of both is needed by any client. In its business, advice is an important pillar and it matters even more in current times. According to the company’s senior group vice president for Online Business & Product Development, Broking and Distribution Arun Chaudhry, the company’s digital strategy works on the phygital model wherein it combines the best of human touch and technology to optimize the client experience. “A human touch always helps in dire times. This is where our model fits the best and the client gets best experience. We have used technology to the fullest and made sure our business is not only maintained but also scaled up,” says he.
EDUCATING CLIENTS
As clients have more time at hand now in the midst of the pandemic, the company has used this opportunity to educate its clients and prospects about its offerings and the markets in general. “This is being done by organizing interactive webinars on a daily basis. Not only this, we make sure we send literature in the form of videos, easy to understand documents on our products so that clients become more comfortable with the digital aspects of equity markets and adopt it whole heartedly,” says Chaudhry.
All its advisors are well connected through terminals and telephone lines mapped to their mobile phones and interaction with clients have increased and Chaudhry says this has helped the clients immensely in terms of support needed to manage the portfolios.
FROM PUSH TO PULL
The company is also very aggressive in terms of launching new products and constantly upgrading its systems to make sure the clients have the best possible experience irrespective of the means through which they transact. “If we speak about a stark change that is seen in the post lockdown phase,” says Chaudhry, “we see that the clients contributing to the `pull factor’ in digital transactions. This earlier was a `push factor’ for using the digital offerings. This has given us an opportunity to make sure a larger set of clients has a flavour of our platforms and products and experience the same and get used to on a longer term basis.”
Google Playstore has at least 13 mobile apps of the company. Their rating ranged from 2.9 to 4.8, with the number of downloads ranging from 500+ to 500K+. Its most popular app on the basis of downloads is MO Investor, with a rating of 3.9.
EMPOWERING DISTRIBUTION
All the new initiatives in the company are taken up keeping partners and their requirements in mind. Team empowerment comes first to the company and hence it has made sure that all its distributors / business partners / independent financial advisors (IFA) and internal teams are able to fully pitch its offerings and even subscribe to its services on the clients’ behalf using secure means. On the sales front, it has enabled all its business partners and direct sales teams with 100% online acquisition means.
Says Chaudhry: “We are fully aware of the capabilities and needs of our partners across the country and each partner is given the same technology to onboard and service the customers in a 100% digital format. Our IFA channel also operates in completely digital mode and can run their entire profit and loss from one place with all data points, product literature and business review numbers digitally. Our `Saathi’ and `UpperMOSt’ applications are available over mobile, tabs and the web to open accounts and post that to monitor the business dynamics like clients traded, revenue, crosssell opportunities etc. We have grown our sales numbers to all-time highs in March 2020 and this trend continues as we have moved into the new financial year.”
The company’s mobile applications have seen a nearly 50% jump in downloads in the post lockdown months with a similar trend seen in the digital transactions as well.
“When we acquire customers,” says Chaudhry, “we also make sure that we start capturing data points on their behaviour and their engagement means with us. This forms the basis of using data driven insights in designing our client engagement campaigns.”
AI DRIVEN MO GENIE
The company considers responding to customer queries quite important, especially during the volatile period. Chaudhry says the volume of customer queries has increased drastically now and the company’s AI driven chat engine `MO Genie’ has been more than active now. “We have seen a nearly 60% jump in queries handled through this medium in the past 2 months. This shows that customer interaction has been unhampered and our service continues to deliver,” he says, fully confident that the company plans to zoom ahead in spite of the current challenges.