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Shop more and wait less, thanks to HSC Tesco

By Ojas Sharma | Thursday, 10 December 2009, 01:48 Hrs | 2 Comments

Shop more and wait less, thanks to HSC Tesco

In India there are huge challenges regarding customer focus. Retail Industry in India is very weak on customer orientation. Customer friendliness in India has to go to next level. It's the mindset which needs to change. Also the number of tills retailers open in India is unbelievable.

SI: What are your hiring plans? Is it easy to get an experienced retail professional in India?
SD: We generally try to recruit people with good technology background, processing skills or good analytics skills and then we try to make a retailer out of him. So that is something which is going to take some time. We have spent lot of money to make sure people travel to UK more often. We have invested in the Telepresence units. We have two Telepresence units and by next month we will have two more. So we spend lot of money in increasing the interaction.

We started this year with 3100 people and we are now at 3800 or so. Probably by the end of year we will have slightly above 4000 people and around 30 percent year on year growth. That's what our prediction for this year is.

SI: What edge has HSC been able to provide to Tesco as a retailer against its competitors?
SD: We are the only outfit at this scale for any retailer. The range of activities that we cover is huge. Our focus is on creating a business impact and not just headcount growth. We have been running a very big innovation drive over here. Planogram was one, which defines what product is placed in which area of a shelving unit and with which quantity. Then being able to predict when product goes off the shelves, there was a model built around that. There were some models built around our e-commerce business on how to prompt the customer for additional things he may want to buy and he is actually buying something else. So these are some of those things that we have worked on.

In a nutshell we have constantly helped Tesco become more efficient as a retailer. Due to recession HSC has grown faster that it did last year. The need for HSC to help Tesco become more efficient has increased.

SI: What is the next thing that you are going to concentrate on in HSC?
SD: Tesco bank is going to be an initiative we focus on. We have started to do some work with our commercial services team and over the next few years we will definitely be as significant to them as we are for retailing today. However, banking is strongly regulated activity, so some of the things we do for the bank may be done differently, and some we may not be able to do from here.

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Reader's comments(2)

1: TESCO is one of the few organisations in India where-in professional way employies r updated and groomed time to time. Keep it up.Best luck.

Posted by:HH Patel - 16 Dec, 2009

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2: Tesco has found a gold mine in HSC. They were the courageous one to take that risk to open up development centre in India and that risk has paid of beautifully for them.

Posted by:Tushar - 10 Dec, 2009

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