Saurabh Kulshrestha Of Proxima 360: How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More
An Interview With Orlando Zayas
Product availability is vital. Having a large assortment is great. Your customers aren’t happy when they find the style and color they’re looking for but not the right size. As retailers, focus on the size distribution of the assortment in the store. Customers tend to go to a store if they find the right size even when the store’s assortment is not large.
As a part of my series about the “How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Saurabh Kulshrestha.
Saurabh Kulshrestha, Managing Director and Country Head India at Proxima360.
Saurabh Hulshrestha is the retail delivery leader for Proxima360. His specialities include enterprise applications, and master data management. Kulshrestha has seventeen years of experience in retail IT, supply chain, omni channel initiatives, ERP system integration and analytics. He also has a proven track record to deliver a quality product on time and on budget with a global team. His strengths lie in developing scalable and complex solutions for customers. He has the expertise to think outside the box to implement complex business solutions.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I studied Engineering and was privileged to graduate from one of the most prestigious colleges in India. After graduation, I was hired by a consulting company in India and was assigned to collaborate on a project with a US-based specialty retailer. At that point, I got my first lessons in retail.
Retail is an industry that is constantly transitioning to keep pace with changing customer expectations, shopping methods, and retail trends. Working in retail is a journey that challenges you to get better every day. I settled on this career path because I want to be a part of a group that continues to improve with every decision. Every solution delivered has a direct or indirect impact on customers.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
At the end of the 3rd quarter of 2019, we started discussing an offshore delivery center. Since I love to take on new challenges, I jumped at the opportunity. I was confident I could successfully set up the offshore center, but I had so many questions. Where should I locate the center? How should I find the right talent? How should I begin to set up infrastructure? How should I incorporate Proxima360’s brand?
I have to give credit to Proxima360’s leadership team. It is a strong group and has just the right mix of talented people. The journey to set up our offshore office has been incredibly smooth. We returned to India in October 2019 and selected Hyderabad as our base. After that, we finalized the office space and started hiring. Everything went as planned and Proxima360 began to take shape in India. By the 1st quarter of 2020, our branch in India was fully functional and started seeing benefits.
Like companies around the world, we were hit by the pandemic. Our India team started brainstorming ideas to ensure job stability, change work culture, and plan for expansion. Though our leadership team was confident about the company’s future, we knew we had a responsibility to keep the team in India motivated and focused during this new and unforeseen situation. Our team came together and started working on a strategy to address the concerns we were facing. After multiple discussions, we finalized the strategy and implemented it. We transformed the pandemic’s challenges into an opportunity to develop into a stronger team.
By the 3rd quarter of 2020, business improved and we resumed our India expansion plan. I learned so many valuable lessons from collaborating on the offshore center initiative, and I feel privileged to be part of it.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or take away you learned from that?
At the beginning of my career in 2004, I was given a business task. I was new to retail and did not understand the objective of the changes I was being asked to make. Hoping to impress my lead at that time, I quickly made the changes and delivered them to my manager well ahead of the due date. I was on cloud nine.
This was the first time my work would be reviewed by upper management. I confidently assumed If I could code fast, the review would be a formality. The comments I received during that review weren’t what I had expected. I realized my manager had taken much more time in reviewing and reworking my changes than I had ever put into the original work.
From that incident, I learned the importance of understanding an outcome clearly, before making changes. This approach may slow you down at first, but a clear understanding of your goals will always save time in the end.
Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
Currently, we are working with a sports retailer to optimize in-store product assortment. It is crucial for retailers to have the right inventory at the right place and at the right time. As part of this project, we are implementing a complex algorithm to derive successful decisions about the store’s size profile, sales history, and sales forecast. Determining the right product strategy will improve gross profit by reducing unwanted markdown and by increasing sales.
We have been working on the next phase of the project which involves optimizing shipment, improving the productivity in the warehouse and store, and reducing the time needed to get products on the sale floor.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
We are in a constantly changing world. Never stop learning! Continue to grow because what works today may not work tomorrow.
Always strive for new challenges and focus on finding solutions that will get the job done. Keep your approach toward decisions and solutions simple.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
There are quite a few people I could name here. I learn something from everyone I meet. HYPERLINK “https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniljacobv/"Anil Varghese, the CEO of Proxima360, and HYPERLINK “https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendrahorne/"Kendra Horne of JCPenney helped me to achieve my professional goals through their ongoing coaching and mentoring. In my early days, I was a hardcore developer. As a developer, you know what is expected of you, your work is well defined and you’re faced with very few surprises. When I moved up in my career and took on the role of a decided leader, I had a challenging time at first. Suddenly, my work was undefined, unknown, and full of surprises. Anil and Kendra help me immensely with that transition.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I believe in sharing. I have built many teams from scratch. Every time I build a team, I invest a lot of my time to teach them the technology and approach they will need to handle the situations ahead. Many of the teams I train go on to be incredibly successful. It brings me joy to see the people I trained having a positive impact on their workplaces and communities.
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the pandemic?
Before the Pandemic, many retailers focused on only one aspect of their business. Even though many of them had an online and store presence, they missed opportunities for synergy between those 2 channels. After the pandemic, it’s clear online retail is taking a bigger piece of the pie. Retailers should be optimizing inventory usage between online and in-store channels, modernizing supply chain and customer care systems, and reviewing internal processes to reduce the number of steps needed to fulfill the customer order and post-delivery customer service. We should also be adding other sales modes such as partner stores and 3PL warehouses to fulfill customer orders. These alternate sales modes reduce shipping costs and the time required to fulfill the orders.
In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?
Going to a physical store is an experience. In a store, customers can touch and feel products before buying them. In my opinion, physical stores will continue to exist. Online commerce platforms have their own pros and cons. The delivery cycle of these online commerce platforms has been reduced to 1 day, and I am confident it will get even shorter soon. However, sometimes buying certain items can be confusing to the customer as there are too many options and there are limited tools to pick the best option.
The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?
Retail is always changing. Continuous improvement and understanding your customer are the keys to being successful. In my opinion, Lululemon is a successful company because of its innovation. They have implemented tons of key initiatives to optimize their supply chain or adopt RFID.
Retailers like Kroger, Costco are successful because they understand the customer. If you go to the store, you will find their products at the right price point.
Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New HYPERLINK “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer"Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?
As I said, the keys to being successful in the retail world are understanding your customer base and continuous improvement. It is not always the price which drives the customer’s decision to buy an item. Price certainly is a part of it, but there are other factors that influence the decision such as branding, quality, and customer service.
Every company is strong in one or more of these areas, but not in all of them. As retailers, we need to find the areas which are most influential to our customer base.
Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.
Product availability is vital. Having a large assortment is great. Your customers aren’t happy when they find the style and color they’re looking for but not the right size. As retailers, focus on the size distribution of the assortment in the store. Customers tend to go to a store if they find the right size even when the store’s assortment is not large.
In-store services are also key. Availability of shopping carts, restrooms, proper signage, and checkout stations are just a few of the touches that can improve a customer’s in-store experience. Helpful and knowledgeable staff motivate customers to shop more.
It’s important to be able to find products easily. As a customer, I should be able to find the right product quickly and continue shopping. If it’s not easy to find a product, chances are, retailers will lose the sale.
Customer data is huge! To motivate further shopping, retailers need to capture customer data concerning shopping habits, shopping trends, average basket size, important dates and personal details including size and brand preference. This data can be used by management to influence decisions and help staff to better serve customers.
Finally, put thought into customer service. To retain customers. Retailers need to make sure the customers’ post-purchase experience is excellent. A top-notch customer service team that can address and resolve customer concerns helps retailers to get customers back into the store.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
We all have a lot going on in our lives right now. Remember, when you share your happiness, it’s doubled. When you share your worries, they are cut in half. Always stay connected to your friends and family. The pandemic has been a challenging time for all of us, but this too shall pass.
How can our readers further follow your work?
You can find out more about me and my work at HYPERLINK “https://proxima360.com/"Proxima360.com or listen in on our retail podcast, “Retail Corner” at HYPERLINK “https://retailcorner.proxima360.com/"retailcorner.proxima360.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
