At We will get to explaining how folks here have been able to do it, but before that here’s what the focus is at the moment – catering to the needs of India’s new home owners. Basically, teams are relentlessly working so that you can get an entire solution which is mixed and matched in a way that it suits your budget and blends into your life perfectly.
“We are offering a pretty comprehensive solution for people who are moving into their new houses. A lot of the work has been around that lately,”
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“We were flooded with such requests, and so we started digging into this from implementation point of view to see how we could offer this service differently compared to other online and offline interior designers, architects and branded players. In the last six months, we have invested in making his whole solution extremely customer-centric,” Srivatsa said.
He explained how – “We went back to the physical product to see how all of this could be packaged together if we wanted to provide customized room solutions to customers.”
Teams came together to work on the physical product– in terms of the design and material to make sure products delivered could be in line with what the customer needed.
“Let’s say, if I have to deliver furniture for the room, it should go with the colour scheme of the wardrobe. We never had to worry about these things earlier because we were selling single pieces of furniture, but now the entire product range had to be really coherent and we worked real hard to get that right,” Srivatsa said.
So much about the product fine-tuning. They also had to ensure their service was quick and extremely personalized for a delightful experience.
Srivatsa said – “We automated and productized different areas for this. For example, between the times you would register on our site and we would come to your house earlier, we had a few processes in place to get more information about you. But mostly, we would ask you several questions during the visit, and then try to give you options on-the-spot as per your requirements. Often, it wouldn’t convert into orders as it was not a very personalized experience as we thought it to be.”
So folks here came up with a fresh idea. They now gather more details about customers before making a home visit. What’s interesting is when you register on their website; you may find yourself answering questions around your lifestyle – "How many people are there in your family, what kind of house do you have, what are the styles you like". It is to determine your likings and disliking, basis which they expect to make more accurate recommendations.
Srivatsa elaborated - “Our design consultants are better equipped to help you get what you want when they make a home visit, because they have pre-cooked options as per your preferences. It’s a better and more personalized way than when they would try to figure out choices for you on-the-spot.”
He also said that by bringing in technology, Urban Ladder is also focused at making things more process oriented - something rivals in the online furniture segment are still struggling with.
“Others will come to your house, get your details in writing or feed it into a laptop, go back and respond with options they have in two-three days’ time. Earlier the response time was the same for us, but now we send options to you within two-three hours of the home visit for say, wardrobes. The proposal we send has details like cost, material details, how it will look etc. If customers book large product range, they get the whole set in less than a month. Therefore, the turnaround and customer satisfaction is much better than earlier for our products and service,” said Srivatsa.
What has come as good news for this company is the overall customer satisfaction.
For the kitchen and wardrobe business, when it was in its infancy, customer satisfaction levels were less than the overall business, Rajiv informed us, as he added - “Because we have invested a heavy amount of energy into refining, finetuning and automating processes, materials and manufacturing, customer satisfaction has risen and is more than the core business of this segment. It’s a good thing because it helps build strong word of mouth.”
Aware that Urban Ladder products have earned itself good reputation among customers, when we asked the co-founder what they were doing to ensure high customer satisfaction levels for their single piece furniture, Srivatsa said, “We have implemented a huge backend system to automate the entire management system. Work is being done on automation, tech, product and processes all the time, but what you will see in the next six to twelve months is that we will be fine-tuning most of them. Having said that, today it is far better than it was six months ago. So, we are constantly evolving in our endeavour.”
Today, for a wardrobe, you will get a proposal by Urban Ladder almost immediately after home visit because the process is fully automated. Two months’ back, it would take at least two to three days’ for the company to respond with options. Similarly, for kitchen, it takes a day or two right now, but once the processes in this domain are automated, pre-proposals would reach customers almost immediately.
Srivatsa said – “Urban Ladder’s first Wardrobe App was introduced one year back, the process improvements in it were done three months back, we started quick pre-proposals two months back, and the automatic proposal after your visit was implemented merely three-four weeks back. Like I said, we are continuously evolving, and we will do a lot more automation in the days to come to make the customer experience delightful.”
What others need to learn from Urban Ladder’s goals:
Urban Ladder Founders are still looking to grow to 2.7X times this year, provided some of their costs are lesser than last year.
The long-term focus at Urban Ladder is largely on making business efficient towards sustainability - “We think we can drive business to a point where its profitable on its own in one or two years. We avoid going the discount way because we want to make our business sustainable, and sustainability has a lot more than just providing discounts to customers. It is about very intelligent pricing and understanding what customers are willing to pay for a product, when does it become too expensive or cheap for them. We have got the pricing game very right,” said Srivatsa.
Planning for the inventory from the suppliers – The company is in touch with a strong consulting firm to make sure it can do inventory planning in a very strong way so that it does not hold too much or too little of products.
Reducing costs –How it can optimize entire supply chain to route materials in a way where it is reaching customers faster, but at the same time not being transported more times than actually required. Srivatsa said - “We are also trying to see if we can we optimize marketing so that it becomes a low two-digit figure. We want to work on bringing these costs while keeping our fixed costs the same.”