About This Episode
Udayan Walvekar is the Product Marketing Manager at Razorpay – one of the leading payment solutions in India. He has over 10 years of experience in growth marketing and has worked across various industries including pharmaceutical, advertising, healthcare, SaaS and Fin-Tech. Udayan has been an advisor to multiple startups in the Silicon Valley on their growth strategy.
In this episode…
i. Why customer feedback is important while designing an extraordinary product?
ii. How collaboration among the Tech, Customer Service and Marketing teams lead to better growth marketing?
iii. What is the north star metric that really matters in product marketing and how to find it?
Here are our top 3 picks from this episode:
1. Trust and Privacy as the foundation of a successful FinTech business
Ashana: Payment being a sensitive space, there is a risk involving data security regarding the payment data as well as the customer data. Are there any built-in cues during sign-ups or while using the product which assures the customer that their data is safe with Razorpay?
Udayan: Sure. Trust is one of the major concerns when it comes to money and India lacks the trust factor in the market. So there are two factors, one is privacy and the other one is trust. At Razorpay, privacy is paramount; right from customer onboarding till the end we take it really seriously. We have something called PCI audits which is the highest audit that you can have quarterly because the amount of data that we are processing including the customer data (credit/debit cards), it’s paramount that these data do not leak. We do have a large security team that focusses solely on taking care of this data. Coming to the merchant side, I am delighted to let you know that Razorpay is the only company in the FinTech space that provides 24×7 customer service with real people, not talking about chatbots. So the merchants can enquire anytime with regards to payment disputes, refunds, etc.
Ashana: Perfect! Having a viable customer support is extremely important to give the safety feel to the users. I agree with you.
2. The critical elements retention at Razorpay and how to handle churn
Ashana: I think no business can boast about having a 100% retention rate in terms of their users, companies face churns on a daily basis. What are some critical elements of your retention strategy?
Udayan: Retention is a long term gain as soon as you accept it’s good for you as a business. Once you accept this you will start looking at retention differently, you will keep track of everything that happens at your consumer end and you will ensure the feedbacks are received on time. We at Razorpay have feedback mechanisms across the funnel, it starts with onboarding. We identify which users are happy with us, who are unhappy, and what can we do to improve their experience. This is done in an automated way. We combine this data with qualitative user research. Not just the marketing or support team but the tech, product, and design team also take part in understanding this data and we have a one-on-one call with the merchants. At Razorpay, we have an interesting concept in a form of support day where other teams gather and understand the issues faced by the merchants on a day-to-day basis. We want to make sure that we are not discounting ourselves on the customer experience. This is one of the key strategies which we use here to reduce churn.
Ashana: So do you think retention comes easy in the fin-tech space?
Udayan: I wish it was. My boss would be really happy but unfortunately, it doesn’t. You have to keep at it to see good results.
3. Optimizing the conversion rate through the statistical significance of testing
Ashana: How important is testing while optimizing the conversion rate? How do you guys validate a new strategy?
Udayan: Testing is everything. I keep saying this often. People, most of the times go with their gut feelings, they don’t test at all. Then there are marketers who say they are testing but they are not doing it right, they are not looking at data correctly or I might say statistical significance. In the most simplistic manner, statistical significance is something that tells you whether variation A was actually better than variation B. Coming back to the question of testing if you are doing so many customer calls, you are looking at tons of data points, you surely have some insight. You are launching something, you do not know what impact it had, are you validating it? It can only be validated with testing. At Razorpay, the way we do it is that we have a long process of analysis qualitative as well as quantitative data. We create a hypothesis based on that insight and we launch for a very small percentage of the audience which will, of course, have a statistical significance. We look at that and we see if something has improved; we ask the consumer why a specific version is better than the rest. That’s how we validate it. So in my opinion, testing is extremely important, you should do it as frequently and as scientifically as possible.
Ashana: Right. It would be a risky step to not test before you publish the final changes.
Closing notes
Udayan has helped us to understand various aspects of customer data insights, data privacy, how customer support is lending a crucial hand at Razorpay, the importance of testing and optimizing the conversion rate.
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