“Interact with the best in Indian Internet Industry”, says Tony Navin, VP, Snapdeal.com on INET conference

 Tony Navin is the Vice President - Business Development at Snapdeal.com - undoubtedly India’s most popular deal site. Prior to joining Snapdeal in leadership role, Tony was an entrepreneur himself. In this conversation with YourStory.in, Tony talks about his background, his role at Snapdeal, his thoughts on the ecommerce ecosystem in India and INET conference where he is one of the speakers.Edited Excerpts:

What does your role entail as VP, Business Development at India’s most popular deal site, Snapdeal?

40% of my time is primarily spent talking to some of the national brands (like Cafe Coffee Day, Shoppers Shop, etc.) that we work with. I take care of operations of cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. Another 40 - 50% of my time goes into talking to individual regional managers, looking at the performance of individual cities, overall performance of the country, ensuring that we are moving ahead in the right direction, and also taking care of systems and processes in terms of technology that we follow.

Can you tell us a bit about your educational background and work experience prior to joining Snapdeal?

I am from Chennai, I did my engineering from Anna University. I worked for a couple of years with Infosys in Bangalore. After which I did my post-graduation in Business Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. After passing out from XLRI in 2007, I worked with KPMG as a management consultant for about 2 years. In 2009, I started my own company called grabbon with my friends. In July, we got acquired by Snapdeal, and since then we have been a part of the Snapdeal family.

You have been a successful entrepreneur yourself with an acquisition story, can you please tell us what has worked right for Snapdeal’s success?I think our core strength at Snapdeal has always been execution, we do plan, but we don’t spend too much time thinking about whether we need to do something or not. Execution has been our core strength, and that is why we have been so successful in such a short span of time. Also, we have a solid team. The people that we have are the best people in their respective fields. We have been able to execute whatever we want to - right on time. That has been our biggest strength.

What do you expect from the INET conference?

I have seen the kind of speakers who have been listed, it looks like a great list of people who have achieved a lot of things! I look forward to interacting with the speakers, and learning from them and understanding how they see the future of internet in India.

What do you have to say about the ecommerce and deals space in India? What do you have to say about ensuring customer satisfaction in online ventures?

I guess not only in ecommerce and deals space, most retail businesses in India need to work on improving customer satisfaction. However, ecommerce in India is still a nascent industry in terms of the number of people who have broadband connection and the number of people who are ecommerce savvy. In fact people are still getting used to buying online, getting comfortable with using their credit cards and debit cards to buy online. Lot of the processes like - ensuring that deliveries reach on time, and the deal promised on the site is delivered as is - are still evolving. As of today, the industry has not reached a stage where all these processes have matured. We have a long way to go before we are confident enough that these processes have evolved. This is the case with all the industries though.

But, at Snapdeal we are striving hard to achieve 100% customer confidence. At Snapdeal, from day one, we are focussed on customer satisfaction. Our team is focussed on ensuring that customers do not go unsatisfied. We have an operations team in place that ensures that customers receive exactly what is promised on the site. I would say that customer satisfaction levels on Ssnapdeal are very high, but if we are talking about ecommerce and deals space as a whole, I would say there is still a lot of scope for improvement in India.

Do Register to Attend the INET Conference, 4th November, Bangalore, to catch up with Tony Navin, and learn from him about what it is like to be at the helm of Snapdeal.