Customer experience has become the differentiating factor among the top brands. Every business is realising the importance of better customer experience. In India, brands have now joined the bandwagon of providing great customer experience.

OneDirect, a leading customer experience management platform, organised the second edition of Quest, India’s largest customer experience management summit, to address the emergence and importance of CEM. Quest 2016’s versatile format encouraged discussion on how businesses can take advantage of new technologies and other tools to better customer service. The event promoted the exchange of ideas around customer experience and also laid foundation for a continuous communication among brands in the future.

Held on April 26, 2016, at Radisson Blu Plaza, New Delhi, Quest brought together more than 200 CXOs, senior marketers and customer service professionals from various sectors and leading brands. Supporting a fresh approach to guarantee superlative levels of customer satisfaction, Quest 2016 was a confluence of ideas, thought leadership and insights on the evolution of CEM.

Ankur Singla, founder of OneDirect and Helpchat, gave the opening remarks. It was followed by the first panel discussion, moderated by Ankur Warikoo, co-founder of Nearbuy. The topic for the discussion was How to manage customer experience across channels and leverage customer data? Panellists included Laxmi Rajan, Head – Customer Experience and Operations, Vodafone; Manish Dureja, ‎Managing Director, ‎JetPrivilege; Ankit Tandon, ‎VP-Operations, OYO Rooms;  Arvinder Gujral, Director-Business Development, Twitter; and Ravinesh Kumar, Executive Director Public Grievance, Indian Railways. The session’s highlight was Ravinesh Kumar’s chronicling of how the Indian Railways’ Twitter handle works to help passengers with their travails. Gujral talked about how Twitter has been used by customers as well as brands to enhance the levels of customer experience.

It was followed by an innovative roundtable discussion where all the attendees got to participate and deliberate on topics like What will customer service look like in 2020?, Best customer experiences are unique and not repeatable, Creating customer journey map to improve experience, and Creating customer-centric culture throughout an organization.

Customer experience as a differentiator was the topic for the second panel discussion that followed soon after. Moderated by Harminder Sahni, founder and MD of Wazir Advisors, the discussion had panellists like Prabhjeet Singh, Head – Strategy and Planning, Uber; Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer, OLX India; Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel; and Arvind Vohra, Country CEO and MD, Gionee. Mehta’s remark on how he learnt from his daughter’s feedback on the bedtime stories he told her was highly appreciated. Vohra and Singh talked about how prioritising customer grievances and engagement has helped their respective companies grow.

Later in the evening, Quest Customer Experience Awards 2016, one of the most important events in the calendar for CX professionals across the nation were given to deserving winners. Judged by Dharamarajan K., Ravi Bhaskaran, Deepak Rai, the winners were selected through a rigorous process. More than 100 nominations were received from 60+ brands. Out of that, 10 winners were selected across four categories.

Here are the winners

Customer Experience Innovator of the Year – Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel

Best Omni-channel Customer Experience Brand – Bookmyshow

Best Use of Social Media for CX Improvement – Oyo Rooms

LG, HDFC, Jet Airways, Uber, Vodafone, Dominos and Indian Railways were recognised as the Best Overall Customer Experience brands in their respective sectors.

“Providing great customer experience is a tough job. While organizations across all industries are working tirelessly to provide the ‘WOW’ customer experience to their customers, we wish to celebrate the passion for building meaningful and lasting relationships with customers by recognizing our fellow customer experience, customer service and marketing professionals with Quest Customer Experience Awards 2016,” said Ankur Singla.

The event promoted solutions to the challenges faced in this multi-channel world along with the use of big data and AI for the betterment of user engagement through various channels. The discussions also focused on the use of automation and customer journey mapping to improve CEM.

OneDirect is paving the way ahead for the CEM industry in India and also recognises important achievements in this field. Apart from uncovering new understandings, Quest also helped raise the benchmark for customer experience in the country at large.