From Left; Vasanthi Hariprakash – the moderator, Sridhar B, Hari Kumar, Abhishek Sinha, Prasanth Tandon and Kankana Baruah
The Indian Gift Card industry has seen the quickest adoption in the Corporate and B2B world. This is expected as the Gift Card is an incredibly powerful reward and loyalty tool for the corporate world. Take the case where Abhishek Sinha, National Sales Development Manager,Britannnia was faced with a massive and a highly heterogenous network of distributors and wholesalers spread across the country. To have a system that would accommodate the requirements and choices of each one in that vast network definitely gives an edge for the business and the loyalty the brand strives for. A parallel situation was experienced when Kotak Mahindra Bank wanted to gratify their diverse set of customers whenever they opened a savings account. Prasanth Tandon, SVP, Kotak Mahindra Bank, credited Qwikcilver and the Woohoo E-Gift Card for enabling instant customer gratification and permanent customer satisfaction. Though similar in size and number, the distributor network which has been critical for the success of a brand like USL-Diageo, has not had its fair share of rewards. The problem stemmed from the low penetration of technology amongst the largely ignored last mile of distribution. B Sridhar, who is the Chief Digital Marketing Office at Diageo-USL, employed solutions from Qwikcilver to effectively tackle the problem and in the process has earned the loyalty of his last mile distributors. Closer to the corporate world, employees and their happiness is what keeps Kankana Baruah, Chief People Officer, Tally on her toes. A happy workforce requires much motivation and employee rewards form a crucial part. From the days of “Cash gifts” to physical gift items which quickly get tagged as repetitive, low quality, useless etc.; organizations across are trying to find the smarter way of rewarding their employees. Thee gift card is the start of the solution to this problem and in one stroke addresses multiple issues that arises in employee rewards – inventory management, quality assurance, packaging and operational issues and most important of them all the employee satisfaction. For large organizations like Flipkart the immediate tangible benefit of completely avoiding the inventory management hassles and reducing the cost of the same is a huge factor in going the Woohoo way. Hari Kumar who heads Retail : Electronic Devices, Gaming and Gift cards at Flipkart also adds that the power of choice with the Gift Card in hand is not lost upon the end beneficiary who appreciates the reward that much more. With such benefits backing it, it is no wonder that Gift Card Technology platforms have been adopted the fastest by corporate, enterprises and institutions.