Healthcare is one industry that is flooding with fake products and given the seriousness of the segment, it becomes important to fight out the counterfeit. Aiming to provide authentic products in the health and fitness domain is HealthKart, aiming to be one-stop shop for all health and fitness related products. “We sell fitness products that consumers need. Healthkart operates by leveraging data heavily into determining user behaviours and driving business strategy”, says Akhil Gupta, CTO and head of Products & Analytics, HealthKart.
Sameer Maheshwari, along with the founding team started the company in 2011 with an urge to do something in the healthcare and e-commerce space. With a vision to make HealthKart the fitness destination of the country, the team is striving to help customers achieve their fitness goals—be it muscle building, weight loss or general immunity.
How does analytics come into picture?
For a healthcare startup that is aiming to transform the way fitness is usually perceived, analytics may seem not so obvious. But Analytics finds itself in the core of Healthkart’s business. “All our business teams are enabled to make well informed decisions which are supported with data, trends and patterns emerging out of them”, Akhil says.
“From new product launch strategies, customer churn predictions to our supply chain operations analytics is integrated in all its essence and used extensively throughout organisation. We continuously monitor customer retention and engagement, this helps us in personalised targeting based on user profiles”, he adds.
Analytics had always been in the genes of HealthKart, since the inception, each strategy has been based upon strong analytics both in terms of consumer as well as industry behaviour. “Benefits of analytics in our business cannot be just counted. We can see we have great customer retention in spite being a specific segment player, this says everything about our focus on understanding our customers”, he adds.
Analytics tools and use cases central to HealthKart
Ankit Gupta, Sr. Manager Analytics, HealthKart adds that at the company they have a huge focus on analytics for strategic as well as operational decisions, keeping them constantly on toes to innovate both in terms of skills sets, mindset and tools. “This year we have shifted to QlikSense for business intelligence and consumption across the departments. It is a self serve tool in which all business teams are trained to use it for standard as well as ad hoc analysis. We have also moved from free source to Redshift as data warehouse so that reporting is all the more stable and we are able to scale as our business and data needs grow”, he adds. They also use Clickstream and google analytics for web analytics. Realising the need to do predictive data science, they have started leveraging Python and R for data science algorithms.
Adopting analytics has been of significant value at HealthKart. Explaining an use case, he says that with the implementation of QlikSense they have enabled all their business teams with a self serve tool, that has helped them in making informed business decisions. “This has reduced the dependency on one person or team and simultaneously has empowered all”, Ankit shares.
As the scale of company’s business is growing day by day, with the increased volumes of transactions on their website, continuous upgradation in technology is a must for their business. Keeping in line with this, they keep adding newer technological advances into their day to day working. Detailing on one such adoption, this year they have migrated their complete server infrastructure to Amazon Cloud.
“With this move most of our technology systems – order taking & processing, manufacturing, marketing, analytics and financial applications – will be hosted on Amazon, which is going to be lot more scalable and economical in the long run. Strategically, we would be able to leverage Amazon ecosystem for multiple services w.r.t marketing, analytics and technology”, Akhil adds.
Roadmap for analytics
Being a lean organisation with a focus on enabling functions through technology and automations, they have been able to build a strong Analytics team to help business teams in every need. The essence of the team is the zeal towards analytics and predictions. “Though everybody is already equipped with great qualifications and industry experience, we are proud to say that we learn most when we are on the job”, Ankit says.
With this zeal and enthusiasm, the HealthKart team leverages customer feedback & hypothesis driven A/B experimentation to introduce new user features. Analytics Marketing & Products teams work collaboratively at Healthkart to drive user features and roadmaps. For example to cater to user assistance trend (advocated by Google recently), they introduced voice enabled search recently to see any user shift towards it.
“Other than that we are continuously looking into opportunities of integrating latest technologies such as AI and machine learning in daily business walks”, he shared.
On a concluding note
“Healthkart belongs to a very dynamic industry. This requires the intensity and focus to be strongly on analytics, and we always have to be on our toes to facilitate strategies”, says Akhil. With an expansion in business toward the Omni-channel space, he believes that this has increased the complexity around customer data and patterns. “Decrypting this data and creating a learning out of it will not only give us more insights about our customers but will also help us predict the future behaviour, he said while signing off.
