Ritesh Saxena
Senior Vice President & Head of Customer Experience
Varthana Finance
India
As a part of India's largest specialised education finance company, Ritesh Saxena has spent the past two years establishing a superior, scalable and sustainable customer experience programme within Varthana – transforming the company’s CX image throughout a period in India in which education was the industry most impacted by the pandemic.
When Ritesh first joined Varthana, the level of customer experience being provided by the company was not up to scratch due to a number of reasons; including no dedicated team for customer servicing, a lack of omni-channel CX, and an antiquated manual customer feedback mechanism.
To remedy these issues and usher in his updated CX vision, Ritesh oversaw and initiated a customer support and engagement project named ‘VCare’.
This programme allowed both employees and customers to address a multitude of issues and pain points that were impacting the existing CX model, and encompassed an impressive list of initiatives that have been introduced during Ritesh’s tenure.
These initiatives included the introduction of a new CRM for lead management and customer servicing that allowed management to produce customisable reports, as well as being integrated within the company website so as to access all sales enquiries.
Dedicated inbound and outbound contact numbers, email addresses, and an SMS service were also introduced, alongside the implementation of set query-handling processes and specific CX-related training throughout the company.
The impact of the ‘VCare’ project and associated initiatives has been substantial, with the proof very much in the pudding. NPS scores have drastically improved, with a 72% increase for school loan customers and a 66% increase for student loan customers.
However, it is in the customer service and complaint-handling department that Ritesh’s changes have really been felt. Since the introduction of ‘VCare’, not a single phone call has been missed, with any calls received during non-working hours returned the same/next working day.
Ritesh’s achievements have garnered him recognition across the Indian CX space, having been listed within both the "Top 10 CX Professionals Of The Year" and the "Top 100 BFSI Leaders in India".
Despite such adverse conditions in the market, the VCare initiative did really well in terms of increasing customer engagement, improving CX, and also adding incremental value to top-line sales.
