Submit your questions for the #BIG10Innovation tweetchat on Customer-inspired Innovation with Ram Papatla - Vice President, Product Management at Flipkart and Ranjith Boyanapalli - Vice President of Product at Flipkart, on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. The 3 best questions and the 3 best answers win Flipkart vouchers.
Customers have always been at the center of Flipkart’s path-breaking journey. But how have they inspired Flipkart to drive innovation? Join the @FlipkartStories #BIG10Innovation Tweetchat with Ram Papatla and Ranjith Boyanapalli, from 2.30 PM to 3.30 PM on June 20, 2017 for a conversation on ‘Customer-inspired Innovation’.
View the archive of the tweetchat and watch this space for the announcement of the winners of the prizes for best questions and best answers!
What is ‘Customer-inspired innovation’?
What makes an innovation successful, and more than anything else, meaningful? The answer lies in the problem that the innovation aims to solve and the individuals for whom this problem is being solved. In Flipkart’s context, these become the challenges of customers who shop online.
“Innovation is about authenticity in our customer thinking, we are not afraid to fail till we get it right. We strive to build a symbiotic relationship with our customers,” is Ram Papatla’s (Vice President of Product Management at Flipkart) take on the subject. An example of this is our recently launched customer finding method called Mira. Rather than offer traditional search results, we converse with our user to help shortlist their shopping interests. For example, customers searching for washing machines on Flipkart are now able to define their unique needs — such as family size, power consumption or type of washing machine. The understanding that customers have a conversation with the sales representative in an offline store has helped Flipkart reinvent a similar mechanism for online interactions. An insight that enabled Flipkart to introduce the novel means of payment for customers — a first-of-its-kind in the country.
Ranjith Boyanapalli, has a different view on the topic of ‘Customer-inspired innovation’. “While it is important to understand the problem, finding an implementable solution is a different ball game,” says the VP of Product at Flipkart. Integrating these innovations into an existing platform like that of Flipkart requires detailed planning and complex engineering to ensure that the solution serves the customer’s need in a seamless way. A reflection of this can be seen in 2016 when Flipkart launched Product Exchange for customers. This meant that a lot of back-end process flow needed to change so that customers can have a seamless experience at the front-end.
Hear more about the challenges straight from Ram Papatla and Ranjith Boyanapalli during the #BIG10Innovation Tweetchat on June 20, 2017. The chat begins at 2:30 PM IST.
Questions for this tweetchat are closed. Follow the live Twitter #BIG10Innovation chat at 2:30 PM IST on June 20, 2017.
About Ram Papatla
Ram Papatla is the Vice President of Product Management at Flipkart leading Search, Catalog and Personalisation Experiences for India’s leading ecommerce company, Flipkart. He heads the Consumer Product Team which includes several growth initiatives, consumer apps, core search, catalog and personalisation. Ram also drives several AI initiatives to help uplift seller experience and consumer decision making for Flipkart.
Ram tweets at @rampapatla
About Ranjith Boyanapalli
Ranjith is the Vice President of Product Management at Flipkart, and is responsible for Transact, Payments, Returns and Customer Experience at Flipkart.com. In addition, Ranjith also heads Affordability constructs like Prexo, Assured Buy Back etc and Fintech at Flipkart. Prior to Flipkart, Ranjith was the founder of an e-commerce venture buytheprice.com, which raised multiple rounds of funding and was eventually acquired in 2013. An alumni of CEG and IIM Indore, Ranjith has 10+ years of experience in the eCommerce domain across Product and Business functions.
Ranjith tweets at @ranjithboyan
How to participate in the #BIG10Innovation Tweetchat
In order to maintain a smooth and free-flowing conversation, only pre-selected questions will be answered during the chat. The 3 best audience questions will be selected to win Flipkart electronic gift vouchers of ₹500 each.
Ram Papatla will ask three questions to the audience during the #BIG10Innovation tweetchat. The 3 best answers tweeted in during the tweetchat will win Flipkart electronic gift vouchers of ₹500 each.
FAQ
- To participate in the #BIG10Innovation tweetchat, or just listen in, log into your Twitter account and follow the hashtag #BIG10Innovation. If you are already logged into Twitter, you can participate in the chat from the Twitter chat window right here at the top of this page, or from a desktop or mobile device.
- The #BIG10Innovation tweetchat with Ram Papatla and Ranjith Boyanapalli begins at 2.30 pm IST on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. The chat takes place in real-time.
- Pre-selected audience questions will be posted by the @FlipkartStories Twitter account and tagged with your Twitter ID during the live tweetchat.
- Panelists Ram Papatla (@rampapatla) and Ranjith Boyanapalli (@ranjithboyan) will answer the selected questions.
- The best 3 audience questions selected by the panelists will be awarded ₹500 each in Flipkart Electronic Gift Vouchers (EGVs). The decision of the panelist and @FlipkartStories is final in this regard.
- Only pre-selected questions are eligible to receive a Flipkart EGV giveaway.
- You may also ask questions during the live tweetchat. Live questions may or may not be answered at the discretion of the panelist.
- During the tweetchat, Ram and Ranjith will ask 3 live audience questions from the @FlipkartStories account. To respond to a question, please reply to the tweet with the prefix A(x) and the hashtag #BIG10Innovation.
- E.g. To question Q1, please prefix your reply with #BIG10Innovation A1, followed by your answer.
- The best 3 audience answers will be selected by @FlipkartStories to be awarded Flipkart Electronic Gift Vouchers (EGVs) worth ₹500 each. The decision of the panelist and @FlipkartStories is final in this regard.
- Visit this page at 2.30 pm on June 20, 2017 to participate live in the tweetchat.
- You may also participate by logging into your Twitter account on your desktop or mobile device and searching for hashtag #BIG10Innovation.
- The best 3 audience questions and the best 3 audience answers will be announced on this page and on the @FlipkartStories Twitter account within 120 minutes of the closure of the tweetchat.
- Winners will be contacted over email and/or Twitter by the Flipkart Stories team and their identities shall be verified before prizes are awarded.
This is the third of the #BIG10Innovation Tweetchat series in Flipkart’s Month of Innovation. If you missed the first two, click here to view the archives.
