Rakesh Wadhwa:

For marketing and sales professionals, there's a paradigm shift, especially the ones who were relying on face to face interaction, building relationships, meetings, and so on and so forth. How do you think things are the pan for them, given that the social distancing traveling less will be the norm.

 

Rajshree R:

What I've discovered at least in the last three months is that there is going to be a 360 degree, change in the way we interact with our customers. We relied heavily on physical events, at least we at TCS. We sponsor the New York marathon. We sponsor the Mumbai marathon. So we have all of these extreme physical events. You cannot get an event more physically than a marathon. So we've obviously had to recalibrate. Again, We've probably not reached our end state, but I use the word engagement. So all these platforms that we had or all these marketing events we do, it's all about engagement with our customers and engagement with our stakeholders. Now, the question is how do we replicate that same engagement levels in a digital format? Again, what's been very interesting for us is we went with this entire philosophy that, don't take something which is physical and,   replicated into a digital format. So when we, for example, did our first press conference, as our results are very heavily awaited in India, we had to do it in a completely remote fashion. So we had to recalibrate that event. What happens? Who speaks first? What platforms do we use? How do we still provide the interaction that the journalists seek as part of that process?

We conducted our first global innovation forum online. Earlier, It used to be like a mega event where, we have New York, Chicago, and all of that stuff, and we did it completely in a virtual fashion. So how do you still insure, same production quality, for example, you don't want to see a person sitting the way I'm sitting right now with,  a phone. You still want to see a stage. You want to see the drama, you want to see the music, and you want to interact, right? You call all these great customers and then, you can't even talk to them. So we are constantly trying to rediscover these experiences. And how do we maintain the engagement level with our stakeholders and with our customers.

Like workplace, sales and marketing profession would also undergo a huge transformation. And I see a huge opportunity of improvement.