It is not the channel but the customer that is omni and start-ups should focus on the latter, Lenskart founder and CEO Peyush Bansal said on Thursday.
Bansal said that omnichannel is a wrong term as it is the same product that one sells either online or offline.
"Start-ups try to make their organisation omnichannel and not the customer. Omnichannel is wrong term, it should be omni customer," he said.
He added that omnichannel is important because there are 1.4 billion people in India, of which online shopper are 200 million to 400 million. Rest of them are using phones but buying in between channels. New startups should focus on customers to make their omnichannel strategy a success, Bansal advised.
He was speaking at the session 'The D2C revolution: Navigating the new landscape and predicting future trend' at the Startup Mahakumbh in New Delhi.
Advising the new start-ups, Bansal said that they should prioritise retaining customers through their products and after sales service than spending more and more time on selling to new customers.
"When you have to sell the product, you employ the top executives of the company but when it comes to servicing, it is given to a junior employee. So the cost of customer acquisition will only increase," ha said, adding that this system should be reversed so that founders can focus on service and customer retention while junior employees can focus on selling the product.
"The only way to reduce the cost of new customer acquisition in my view is that you focus on your existing customers and get to know their experience," Bansal added.
When asked about the upcoming fields of innovation in which he, as an investor, would be interested, Bansal said that India has a lot of potential to solve the world's problems in the medical sector.
He said there is a lot of opportunity in that space as the importance of life in India needs to get higher.
"In medical sector, with AI and India's manufacturing (capability), we can solve many problems of the world which have not been solved yet," Bansal added.
