Kotak Mahindra Bank appoints chief for customer experience with 2k-strong team

Mumbai, Kotak Mahindra Bank on Thursday appointed Amazon veteran Bhavnish Lathia as its chief of customer experience, a newly-created role at the private sector lender. The bank's Joint Managing Director Dipak Gupta said it wants to take a diametrically different approach to a customer's needs, which led it to create the role.

At present, the bank's efforts are focused on ensuring that a product or service gets sold easily, while under the new set up, the emphasis will be on the experience which a customer enjoys during the process, he said.

With this, a product or service may or may not get sold but the experience will be joyful, Gupta added.

The bank will be assessing performance of the newly-created role both on new business acquisitions and stickiness of customers, he said, adding that millennial consumers need better user experience.

The lender is moving a host of existing executives to the team to be headed by Lathia. This will include 1,500 call centre executives, about 400 people in the technology vertical and others in the experience domain, making it a 2,000-strong team.

Lathia will be reporting to both the head of consumer banking and also to its vice chairman Uday Kotak directly, Gupta said.