Bhavesh Shah: The Positioning Wizard
For an organisation, the public perception could make or break a deal. Not many have the capability or expertise to perfectly position their business in a favourable light. But that is precisely what Bhavesh Shah, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Program Manager at Tech Mahindra, does without a second thought.
Over the years, as a positioning pioneer, he has navigated the company towards highlighting its most impactful actions. He achieved this mainly through two avenues. First, his role at Mahindra Advocacy, where employees could promote all the good work that Tech Mahindra had undertaken via social media and other platforms. Secondly, through his consistent efforts towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives at Sharda Centre in Pune.
We sat down to understand Bhavesh’s positioning efforts and how it goes to the grassroots level of how ex-employees perceive the company. He scours through Glassdoor and Twitter to find negative reviews and gets in touch with them to understand their story while presenting Tech Mahindra’s side of things.
The Client Makeover
Bhavesh’s skills are suited to better position his customers in the market. His client, one of the biggest telecoms in Europe, was struggling to move from legacy to digital systems. They had been using the same systems for the past 15 years and had gotten used to the structure. But to grant customers the best service possible in current times, you need to evolve. Their website itself was facing serious issues.
He was able to come up with the analysis that if, for example, a hundred customers were logging in, only 20 were submitting their order. Bhavesh and his team went back and analysed every step to discover that there was a submit button click after which the site would start buffering.
The delay came out to be 1 minute and 20 seconds, completely fracturing the customer retention rate. In an age where every customer wants quick service, a makeover was definitely needed. And that is when Bhavesh stepped in.
Structuring the Differentiating Framework
Bhavesh decided to implement the SRE framework. Unlike the prevailing culture, where different teams focus on specific roles like application support, testing, ops, development and more, this framework combined them into a single team. As a result, an employee was able to capture a consolidated view of the process instead of putting together fragmented pieces.
The operations were divided into multiple vendors. In other words, there were multiple decision makers involved. Everybody had their own way of working over there. The aim was to consolidate everything into one: one decision maker, one framework in place, and one policy that guides the program in the right direction.
This framework allowed Bhavesh to track the orders end-to-end, which wasn’t possible before. Instead of having three separate vendors doing multiple roles and coordinating through the process, which was time-consuming, Bhavesh could get complete control on his own and quickly rectify any mistakes that would happen in the ordering process.
Changing the Course of Customer Experience
With the proper framework now at hand, Bhavesh could suggest and implement the right performance changes to the client’s site, which finally showed incredible growth. The 1 minute and 20 seconds buffer time after clicking the ‘Submit’ button came down to an impressive 23 seconds. On the customer acquisition front, as per an internal assessment under which for example, if earlier 100 customers engaged with the website, only 20 could place an order. But with Bhavesh’s framework, the number shot up by 22%.
And with new recommendation engines in the pipelines, which will only show the end-users the products they genuinely want to buy, the numbers are expected to further go up by 18% in the future.
Bhavesh successfully managed to change the positioning of his customer to a fast and user-friendly telecom provider. And the industry rewarded them for the same.
Future of IT and Advice for Techies
Bhavesh believes that the IT industry is going to get saturated in about ten years, all thanks to rampant automation and implementation of AI, and so suggests constant evolution to stay ahead of the curve.
Moreover, he recommends budding techies to pursue self-evaluation every single month rather than waiting an entire year to reflect on their mistakes.
“You will realise that you are failing in some areas while doing good in others. Your interest will show itself in certain areas, and accordingly, you will progress. Because frankly, if you can visualise or say what you feel, you will get whatever you want.”