How to create a digital future with tech, talent, and culture: Chit-chat with the Co-Founder
The role of Digital transformation in building business resilience is way too critical. Emerging technologies can help transform this new era of innovations and pave the way for the success of the companies and to pivot for growth.
Throw some light on Evolving Viability of the Indian environment for the startup ecosystem post the pandemic?
The Indian startup ecosystem has undoubtedly accelerated in the past 2 years. Since technology got infused into our ecosystem, we all have become smart users. The recent startups have amazingly transformed the way people see a brand. It has changed the market trends, the strategies for companies, the way people shop, and what not. These startups brought in a lot of product and design talent along with them which enabled us to be mature and make our game stronger.
Since we all are working remotely now, it becomes easy to connect and establish your organization’s connections worldwide. This will help bring in talents from all over the world.
This change that the pandemic brought helped us in selling globally at the comfort of the customer’s home. Thus, all of this has landed us upon an ecosystem that is self-sustained and full of mature talent, changing our life phenomenally!
How did Lenskart overcome the challenge of collaborating tech talent and culture?
The startups which have been established over a decade are trying to solve complex problems which are already there, but now these problems and visions are driven by technology.
In our case, since we are an omnichannel platform, our responsibilities include a boatload of operations — including from the diagnostic point of view to manufacturing and delivering the eyewear the customer has chosen.
Unlike other retailers, we have to manufacture the product after the customer has placed the order, we don’t have ready-made products available due to the varying vision eye power. Thus, it has been an interesting challenge to solve and cater to.
One of the challenges has been — finding people with the same vision or motive that Lenskart has. Our vision is to provide Vision to every person who needs power correction and to transform their lives and experience of the world. Thus, finding tech talent with the same vision that we have is one such cumbersome task, but with eventual development, we have a great and hardworking team as of now.
Thus, in Lenskart’s case, we have been able to find and identify the problems, prioritize those problems, and hire the right talent to solve them.
What are the critical success factors for a digitally native company when we talk about data, how do companies leverage data effectively to gain that comparative advantage?
Let’s divide the data journey into 3 easy steps:
- Capturing the right data: Chasing the right data and capturing it at the right time is a critical step one should take. At Lenskart, this step has been interesting because we have customers walking in our offline stores as well. Thus, registering our customer’s data is one such thing we still follow at our retail stores. For the same, we have evolved mechanisms to shift this offline funnel to an online mode. This also includes tracking the meaningful data about what the user is browsing at the Lenskart application.
- Establishing Identities: This simply means establishing and assigning the right responsibilities to the right team. Know your team strengths, and use that to empower your game. Work on the weakness and you will score in that area too!
- Using that data to Personalize the customer’s experience: Whenever a customer enters the store, our staff is able to identify who the customer is and is able to connect well with them. We know our customer’s preferences, buying history, demands and make recommendations based on the same even in our store.
How Lenskart is building and developing the Leaders of tomorrow — as the company is scaling and growing?
As soon as a startup enters the scaling phase, we believe that there should be leaders just like the founders, with all different and unique kinds of hat, everyone should be able to leverage all kinds of levers available to them. Be it technology, marketing, or operational excellence. Everything under the sun, be in terms of business, the key to success or any endeavor they are driving, they should work and excel in it. Thus, at Lenskart we are trying to uplift our team internally, and build talent by giving them exposure to different areas and aspects. This will help us build — Single-threaded leaders which will take charge of their area and drive it towards growth.
Metrics to define business growth?
Customer satisfaction and experience is the appropriate metric that we think is best to monitor the company’s growth. If our customer is happy, we too feel happy.
