Girish Mathrubootham On How Tech Can Help D2C Brands Bring Offline Experience For Online Store

Freshworks’ CEO Girish Mathrubootham, during The D2C Summit 3.0 stated that a gamut of technology including customer engagement, chatbot marketing and personalised shopping experience can bring the offline experience to D2C online stores as well. 

He started with a problem statement, where a customer comes to the website, looks at the product and its description, chooses a size, and even adds it to the cart, but does not buy the product. He suggested that brands can target such customers personally on Instagram, or send a WhatsApp marketing message with a link back to the product to personalise.

“That is the gold standard, right?” pointed Mathrubootham. “And for that, your technology should be able to help you to make it more offline store-like marketing or give users the corner store experience.”

With technology, D2C brands bring that level of personalisation for an online buyer similar to a small offline business owner. “You give them that experience by saying – ‘I know who you are. I know what you want. I know what your choices are, and I will take care of you, Mr Customer,” he concluded.

The session threw light on personalised cross-channel marketing and even talked about certain drawbacks such as brands spamming customers, or data privacy concerns. 

To this, Freshworks’ CEO stated that brands (and consumers) need to look at it from the conversational engagement point-of-view, giving brands more knowledge about what the consumer wants, rather than becoming a spam machine. 

“From a product discovery standpoint, if the brand knows my likes and preferences, size, past shopping experiences, which products I’m likely to buy, they can actually provide a personal discovery experience for me, by showing me products that are more relevant and hence be able to close a sale more,” he said.

Mathrubootham’s 12-year-old NASDAQ-listed company Freshworks is one of the global SaaS companies within the customer management segment. It offers chatbots, messaging platforms for customer support and other data and CRM-based solutions to companies across sectors.

As brand marketers realise how social media and CRMs can successfully help them build their brands, the D2C ecosystem is on the precipice of building a new customer engagement experience by compensating for the lack of personalisation in an online store.

Catch more of The D2C Summit 3.0 speakers talk about how D2C brands can navigate the pressures of big ecommerce players, build great customer relationships on experiences and become profitable ecommerce businesses.