In-car consumption would be next frontier to conquer for all digital companies: Mirchi

Mirchi has been undergoing changes for some time. It has also been on Android Auto and Apple Car play since the beginning. Udit Tyagi, CDO, ENIL (Mirchi) has been at the forefront of developing Mirchi’s first-ever mobile application and will be happy to share key insights regarding the app, the tech deployed, and the challenges faced, and the future of Mirchi as a digital-first company. In an interview he tells more. Excerpts:

DQ: Share key insights regarding the app. How the tech was deployed, and what were the challenges faced. 

Udit Tyagi: About a year ago, we decided to work on our own platform – Mirchi Plus. Mirchi Plus Android and iOS apps are completely native - Kotlin and Swift-based. Our mweb site is a PWA (Progressive web app) and both our desktop and mweb sites are based on React. From day one, we are on Android Auto and Apple Car play. We understand the importance of in-car consumption and strongly feel that it would be the next frontier to conquer for all digital companies.

Being a media and entertainment company, the major challenge for us was to develop a tech product completely in-house. We overcame this challenge and successfully built the Mirchi Plus app wherein complete tech was deployed on in-house infrastructure. Each piece of code written for our platforms has been curated by Mirchi’s in-house tech team.

DQ: How are you keeping up with the ever-increasing demands for transformation? 

Udit Tyagi: Mirchi took the challenge head on. Taking cognizance of the significant shift in consumers’ behavior to digital over the past two years, our goal was to be present on every digital avenue/ platform. Hence, our digital transformation journey which started about two years ago was more of a self-initiated move rather than so much of an external push. 

The idea was not just to transform for the present, but to also be prepared for the future. Keeping that in mind our foremost focus while making Mirchi a digital-first brand was to make it platform agnostic. We know platforms keep on changing, however, to support it you should be digital first. We converted all our assets into digital entities post which transformation, movement, support to and from any platform and becoming future ready became very easy.

DQ: How are you integrating customer experience into IT deliverables? How is it helping in advanced customer experience? 

Udit Tyagi: Analytics and machine learning are being heavily used to not just gauge user journey, but also to gauge content consumption for different cohorts. These data points are the basis on which user experience and content decisions are being taken. The eventual objective is to drive personalized experiences for different user segments.

We have early gratification and gauging drop-offs at every second are the key to improve customer experience. For both audio and video content we gauge content relevancy by tracking the drop off and engagement at every word and at every second. A simple upward or downward spike is an indicator for our content teams to build or track content in that direction. 

Cohort level user journey mapping, tracking re-engagement, exits and recommendation-based consumptions are the basis for defining all product flows. 

DQ: How do you see the future of Mirchi as a digital-first company?

Udit Tyagi: We are optimistic about Mirchi’s future as a digital first company. We believe digital first is no longer the future, but the present as well.  Digital would keep on changing forms. The current world is on apps and PWA’s, moving to NFTs & the future would be metaverse and beyond. As I mentioned before, keeping all this in mind Mirchi is fully digitized and platform agnostic. Mirchi in all forms is prepared to adapt and evolve as we move forward in this digital first journey. 

We are confident that major growth for Mirchi will come from its digital initiatives in the coming years.  We expect our digital platforms to contribute 25% to our total revenues in the next few years.