As Flipkart’s Big Billion Days celebrations reaches a fever pitch, ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes to make your shopping dreams come true? In this Q&A, Hemant Badri, Senior Vice President, Group Head of Supply Chain, Customer Experience & ReCommerce Business at Flipkart Group, unveils the magic that makes Big Billion Days 2023 the biggest and most customer-centric yet. Get ready to experience e-commerce like never before, where innovation, trust, and inclusion pave the way for an unforgettable shopping extravaganza!
As we celebrate Flipkart’s 10th Big Billion Days with pride, nostalgia, and excitement, our commitment to innovate keeping our customers at the heart of everything remains stronger than ever. Our supply chain continues to evolve and transform – strengthening our reach and speed across the country, bringing the benefits of e-commerce to every Indian. Our Customer Experience processes and constructs are focused on understanding customers’ pain points to ensure a seamless experience. And behind a decade of innovations during BBD are the consistent efforts of the incredible people who make up our workforce.
In this Q&A, Hemant Badri, Senior Vice President, Group Head of Supply Chain, Customer Experience & ReCommerce Business at Flipkart Group, reveals behind-the-scenes preparations for the 10 BBD festival.
This year, Flipkart has focused on developing multiple new constructs to ensure customer delight and trust. Could you give us some insight into these constructs?
I think ‘experience’ is key during the festive season. To ensure a top-of-the-line experience for our customers during the Big Billion Days, we have made it our priority to see to it that the end-to-end (E2E) orchestration works seamlessly. The E2E orchestration has been revamped so that we provide a consistent experience across many features working with address intelligence. This goes a long way in helping us enable new customers in tier 2 & 3 to engage with e-commerce and become new members of Digital India.
This year, to take this customer experience to another level, we are also ensuring that more customers receive same-day deliveries of their favorite products. Our supply chain expansion in the run-up to the festive season further strengthens our commitment to deliver millions of orders seamlessly. We are keenly focused on speed when it comes to delivering customers’ orders. Our scaling efforts this year enable us to achieve this target. We have introduced increased protection and speed delivery for orders and this will lead to a positive experience.
Trust is perhaps one of the most important facets of Customer Experience. With Open Box Delivery, we will continue to build that trust. We have also learned that Product Returns is a key area in Customer Experience where our efforts to ensure that it’s seamless, help us build trust with our customers. And so we have further tightened up our returns process.
Could you tell us more about supply chain enhancements to fulfill Flipkart’s customer-first promise across India?
We have vigorously expanded our supply chain over the year to ensure that we can fulfill our customer promise to a customer base of almost 500 million. Our new facilities in Haryana, Punjab, and Telangana are just a few but key examples. We now have the capacity to fulfill 10 million deliveries a day. That’s a big leap forward.
To support millions of shipments during the festive season and beyond, and to support our workforce at our facilities, we have introduced various automation technology constructs, especially at Uluberia (West Bengal), Delhi in-city, and Yakubpur (Uttar Pradesh). Another example is our new sortation center that we introduced in Delhi which has a built-up area of 2 lakh square feet and is equipped with technology constructs to help sort lakhs of orders during the BBD 2023. Today, our supply chain network is at its strongest and has the deepest penetration ever in India. We will be able to bring the benefits of e-commerce to Indians nationwide.
In terms of readiness, how are Flipkart’s Customer Support and Customer Experience teams preparing this year?
In terms of Customer Experience, we are doing a few things differently this year. We have gone live with the entire telephony which is a one-touch resolution, and revamped our call management infrastructure for our Customer Support operations to improve resolution rates. This is a big quality upgrade worked on by our product team.
We also want to elevate the customer experience by addressing pain points for new-to-e-commerce customers that can result in a lack of trust and satisfaction. This year, we have worked on single contact point resolution helping customers get resolution for their product-related queries on quality, returns, delivery, etc. In the run-up to BBD, we scaled this up rapidly. So in terms of readiness, our Customer Support and Customer Experience teams are well-prepped to aid our customers through their shopping journey.
How does Flipkart continue to promote inclusion in the supply chain?
Inclusion has always been a key tenet of our work culture and we give it great importance in our supply chain. We have people from all walks of life forming the backbone of our supply chain. Women employees and people with disabilities have found a sense of belonging in our supply chain and we have various policies to support their integration and create a safe environment where they can thrive. They are able to work with dignity and improve their livelihoods.
The supply chain industry being a male-dominated bastion is history. Today our all-women facilities, facilities run entirely by PWDs, diverse team leaders, and female wishmasters are rewriting the story and inspiring countless others.
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