Latest Chai Talk IBM: Walmart Global Tech, Google Cloud, Amazon Echo share their experiences with collaborative storytelling

 13th July 2022    PR News 
 Paarul Chand

The pandemic has ushered in a new way of looking at how brands will compete in the future. As the customer increasingly focuses on a brand's values as much as the value of a product or service they offer, companies are evolving to deal with this new reality.

Speakers from Amazon's Echo devices, Walmart Global Tech India, Google Cloud and Puravankara got together along with IBM to discuss whether Covid-19 has flattened hierarchies and ushered in greater collaborative storytelling for corporate communicators. 

Mehak Chawla, communications manager, critical Incidents, Google Cloud shared her experience saying, "The entire ecosystem in terms of internal collaboration really came together with respect to like I have never seen before. I switched organisations during the pandemic. And in both organizations' I've never sort of received so many business emails and calls about wanting to work with the comms team to convey a message that is business critical, either to clients or to employees or to partners. So I think this was really like communications came really in the spotlight and the internal collaboration sort of really increased during the pandemic."

Agreeing with Chawla, Mrunmaiy Abroal, PR Head for Amazon Alexa & Echo Devices and president of Amazon PWD affinity group in India said that voice has emerged as a strong channel of storytelling and customer engagement post-Covid-19. As Covid drove digital engagement Abroal said that Amazon saw a lot of health-related queries coming on devices. As well as insights on increasing interaction around children being at home more.

She adds, "So these were just the insights into what's happening around customers. And this forced us to think about how can we make the service even more useful for customers. So that's where the internal and external partnerships came into play. So for example, we partnered with MyChart, which is an Indian portal, which gives information about health-related questions in Hindi. And we partnered with companies like MapmyIndia, which has one of the best location-based information. So people could get questions like where are the vaccination centres?  I think it was a great example of how our brands have realised that Alexa can also be a medium for them to engage with customers."

Syncing messages globally-internal partnerships 

Commenting on how key messages were synced internally Sunita Venugopal, senior director of corporate affairs and CSR, Walmart GlobalTech shared, "In India every year we do a brand perception audit, which actually measures where we are in terms of our competitors. And this year, just during the pandemic, we did the exercise together to understand hey, what's working well, for us globally as a message narrative, and what is working well for us, here in India, and we are actually working together to kind of make sure that the recommendations, the way forward is, is actually looked at it very much from a global lens."

Customer experience as a driver for storytelling

Real estate firm Puravankara is bullish on using tech for customer experience and engagement. 

Minol Ajekar, group head (VP) - customer experience & loyalty, Puravankara stated that customers want to be engaged online. 

Sharing her experience with that Ajekar said, "We had curated a little a customer experience event. It was a small intimate event and we had an art professor curate a couple of pieces and talk about the art. And I saw this young man hold his six-month-old daughter to a painting and talk to her about it. And he was describing the painting to his daughter. Fortunately, we captured that moment. And you know, we shared it with him post the event. And that's it. Now we've made him a part of our story. And he's a part of our brand. And that partnership will go a long way and will drive loyalty."

To see the full discussion watch here:

Chai Talk is curated by PRmoment in partnership with Weber Shandwick India