NTT Communications emphasises on importance of digital and marketing analytics

In a chat with VARINDIA, Prasenjit Roy, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer – Netmagic (An NTT Communications Company) discusses about the success mantra on major achievements, transformation of organizations by gaining market share and acquisition of new geographies -

Please share the success mantra on the major achievements in the year 2016-17.
With the growing number of tools available to aid marketers in understanding consumer behaviour at a faster rate and a deeper granularity, the digital space is constantly evolving. Due to this evolution, marketers across multiple industries are still not in the same wavelength when it comes to understanding the potency of digital technology and the changes it can engender.

Marketing’s immersive understanding of these changing dynamics has led the marketing function to be the primary driver for aligning the organization’s thinking, policies, strategy and efforts. With technology becoming so pervasive and with customers becoming more globally connected, marketers today wear multiple hats: supporting employee engagement, advocating for the customer experience and driving the growth.

We place significant emphasis on the importance of digital and marketing analytics that will help us to shape, execute and support the growth agenda while delivering on our customer promise. Our digital marketing strategy drives a successful lead-generation tactic that is targeted to meet several criteria. Our actionable leads are primarily generated through – search engine marketing (SEM), Social media advertising, email marketing, direct email, events or trade shows, and so on.  Few of the key ones are – 

•    Reaching a specific audience of our target customers;

•    Generating and tracking a large numbers of marketing qualified leads for the company;

•    Creating funnel of sales qualified leads
•    Measuring the costs and ROI.


Moreover, companies are increasingly deepening their customer relationship by leveraging what they know about a given customer to personalize offerings. We engage them vide customer round tables, surveys, and promotion through media and analyst reports. We organize our customized customer forums or events to learn more about their requirement and accordingly feedback to our Sales and the Product Development team. They consistently refine and modify their efforts to increase their capabilities and improve the overall customer experience. Also, we believe that it is critical to align with business partners across the company to better understand their product and service strategies and evolve marketing efforts to support changing business needs. 

How have you transformed your organisation, by gaining market share and sustaining the leadership in the market? 
We are at the tipping point of leveraging the mobility and disruptive technologies to enable clients to implement truly Digital IT. And the industry witnesses the upsurge of adaptive, scalable and responsive IT infrastructure solutions leading to the steady demand of data centers along with the Cloud technology. And, in this competitive market, there is the need of creating your unique space in a market cluttered by hyperscalers and Indian players.

We have our unique identity, position play and specialization in Hybrid IT – the management of complex IT environments including multi-cloud scenarios by a single solution provider. Through our Hybrid IT offering, businesses can – 

•    Protect their legacy IT investment in captive data centers and core applications through Colocation
•    Run business applications on our Simplicloud or 3rd party Public Cloud 
•    Maintain compliance and reduce CAPEX spend through our Private Cloud based on customer specifications 
•    Monitor workloads across multiple cloud service providers through a single window pane
•    Migrate workloads across infrastructures
•    Outsource the management of their entire IT infrastructure through our Managed Services offering 

We are the only end-to-end infrastructure Solution Provider who can act as a one-stop shop for needs pertaining to Multi- Clouds, Dedicated Hosting and Managed Services.

CMOs take a greater role by actively driving the disruptive growth agenda and generating new value for the business. Such initiatives include developing ecosystems with non-traditional players, launching platforms that elevate current products into expanded service models for customers, and increasing revenue through next-generation connected data monetization—all of which CMOs are well positioned to do.

Digital transformation is a complicated process for many enterprises. What is your take on it?
India is at the cusp of a huge transition enabled by digitization, and we have been quick to spot the opportunity. We have been growing at a CAGR of over 35 percent for the last 5 years. We are confident to sustain this momentum going forward. We embarked on digital transformation of its business with an aim to remove / reduce multiple manual data entry efforts, ensure a seamless interaction between multiple business tools and give users — customers and internal employees - a self-service functionality, which is unmatched by our competitors. This has boosted our internal productivity and enhanced customer experience by few notches.

Keeping these objective in mind Sugar CRM was introduced as the front end Customer Management system, a whole new instance of ERP was deployed, this time albeit using PeopleSoft instead of SAP to bring the systems at par with the NTT Communications ERP worldwide and a full functional ITSM tool was developed from the grounds up which also included a fulfilment tool. 

From an Enterprise Architect’s point of view a seamless integration of processes and data was the given objective and applied to the Digital Transformation project. The overall transformation included the upgrade / introduction of the following applications / tools 

•    a fully self-service enabled portal for customers 
•    Centralized view of all the customers, their contacts, services availed, assets, tickets for the operations team
•    Centralized view of customers services and contacts to the Account Managers, Solutions Engineers, Order management Team, Customer Relationship Teams   
•    HRMS Systems for all employees at all locations 
•    System for seamless control over assets during its lifecycle within Netmagic 
•    Visitor Management System for controlled entry and access of visitors into Netmagic’s various offices 
•    Ensuring all authentication of employees for login to various systems is centralized thru AD server, which in turn is updated thru a seamless connect with the HRMS system, thus avoiding security / stale ID issues.
•    Integration of Netmagic’s Sugar CRM with Sales Force of (parent company-NTT Communications) for single point reference of customers, leads and opportunities.