Flipkart Business Challenges & its Solution
The whole case study (article) is based on online data and a few assumptions to solve the business problem and get ideas to develop a solution.
Business Challenges of Flipkart:
- Service professionals get many phone calls they are only sometimes able to answer right away. Thus, customers are experiencing delays and need responses back on service issues.
- A few customers added that they needed to be heard correctly. (Swiggy users register the same issue)
- Most of the users had their orders cancelled.
Indians have been accelerating and waiting for festive sales to purchase their favourite products from e-commerce websites such as Amazon, Flipkart, AJIO, and more. Flipkart, in particular, has been a pain for consumers due to a number of issues.
It is the largest e-commerce marketplace in India, launched in 2007 aims to provide customers with the most trusted products at the best price and services to support user experience on their online shopping journeys.
Flipkart shows the best revenue data in its search performance, with customers who searched for a specific, desired product on the website finding exactly what they needed. But there was room for growth in its category performance metrics and service side.
A Product Manager, along with the Engineering team, needs to fix the solution in a way that validates future success as well. The best way is to first understand the problem statement by:
- Evaluating the need
- Validating the need
- Set a goal for the feature
- Decision making for the solution
So, customers often felt that they were not getting the recommendations right and didn’t hear back for the queries. The service department that assists by learning more about the customer and recommending a relevant product may need help to fulfil customers’ needs and get the right solution.
As a Product Manager, I will first focus on solving the problems that customers are facing and complaining about. The role of the PM is to identify the situation in the early stage, where communicating with customers is the key. To hear customers out and understand their queries is critical to offer the best solution, keep customers loyal, and retain them as soon as possible, providing them with the best digital experience.
What I understand is that customers are coming to get the best deal in less time and effort. So, as a Product Manager, I will keep the vision and mission in mind as it will help gain the outcome of solving all the queries.
Here are some questions I have considered to solve the problem statement:
- How do I validate that the problem exists?
- How do I validate the solution?
- What is the solution?
- How to make multiple prototypes for the Solution?
- How do I bring the solution to market?
- How do I measure success?
- How do I monetize this solution?
Solution:
To tackle this challenge, Flipkart may have used tools like Bloomreach Search, kissmetrics, and Google Analytics to optimise the issue and get the metrics of on-site visitors learning and what stage users are facing problems.
-> Another way to optimise and validate the problem is to constantly be in touch with your customers through direct calls/emails, sales teams, pre-sales demos, and more on the support side of the product.
Flipkart started using MachineLearning to solve customers’ queries by identifying the process flow and how to optimise it quickly.
1. As a Product Manager, I focus on Flipkart’s customer support screen to identify the source of the problem. Ticket resolution is key when support staff is flooded with multiple tickets.
To automate the tickets to reach the right person, a tickets category is to be added to identify the priority of the assigned tickets, and employees load on tickets based on automation.
2. And a solution here is that the Flipkart support and delivery team should start to work with field executives and supervisors to collect and validate data sets and then start to label these addresses.
3. Flipkart can scale up its order integration stage and strengthen safety measures to meet the consumer’s demand-facing the failed order. The right thing to do is to solve the bug from the order page and make it more lively by reducing the load from other unprioritized JS code when the festival session starts.
These wins have led to increased 11% revenue for Flipkart solving customer issues and adding more happy customers to achieve their digital experience goals.
Final Takeaways
In the digital era, product managers, engineers and designers need to develop — moving from a reactive to a regenerative function. Many of the challenges faced by businesses today like a lack of adequate technology, which remains a top barrier hindering companies from delivering growth outcomes; or the lack of a systemised process for capturing valuable consumer data and insights can be solved by a more proactive, end-to-endless customer service function.
I believe that eCommerce success relies on efficiencies in last-mile logistics. And to understand this logistics, leaders and management have to dig deeper to offer the best digital experience.
On top of organisational challenges cast by external forces, consumers’ behaviours and purchasing decisions are rapidly changing, and companies will have to evolve just as quickly if they want to stay relevant.
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Thanks for reading! Please let me know your thoughts on how to solve customer issues in the comments. Reach out to me on my social media platform linked below and we can talk about anything product. :)
