Technology plays a critical role in market expansion, especially in businesses that operate in the online space. For example, Amazon. There are some organizations that do a great job of leveraging the online space as well as the traditional channels.
I believe there are a lot of things you can do online, and technology can play a significant role in it. For example, in Vodafone, we have increased our percentage share of online revenue by four times in the last two years. We have been working a lot to leverage this channel. It is all web-enabled. We conceive products and service and make them available online.
Thanks to technology, you can be extremely creative is the online space. You can partner, promote, sell, do customer care, servicing etc. The benefits are that it costs less and you can do things very fast. Secondly, you can reach out to a large number of customers faster than the traditional channels. Our focus on online is strategic.
Technology is playing pivotal role in enabling our retail network. We have a lot of systems and technology that we now deploy in retail stores to enable the sales executives to sell Vodafone products and services.
With the Internet, wherever you have a mobile device or a web enabled laptop or desktop, you can actually sell products and services. You don't need a fancy store. We have web-enabled most of our applications, such as new activation or recharge apps. Since technology is such a big enabler that is why we invest significantly in technology.
As far as social media is concerned, a lot of companies that are tech savvy have started taking it a lot more seriously than countries in the western world. I think it is something that you cannot ignore.
I do not think that most organizations are too aware or know how to leverage social media, although everybody knows it is a powerful tool. However, over a period of time, people will become creative and innovative about how they can leverage social media to reach a huge number of customers which they otherwise can't reach.
For example, when we think of any promotion or a new campaign, we make it a point to put most of our advertisements on YouTube. We have a very active Facebook page where a lot of our customers get information and we get in touch with them.
The other area where social network is quite useful is customer care and servicing. You would be surprised as to how many customers of ours are also Facebook members. If they have a problem, we can reach out to them on Facebook.
IT works closely with the marketing team in Vodafone. In today's scenario, there is hardly anything that marketing can do without technology enablement. Marketing teams conceive products and services and IT enables them to reach out to the market. Many a times we jointly develop products and services and go to market together. The effective use of technology has helped Vodafone in market expansion and better customer service.
