Mobile ethnography delivers last mile insights

Flipkart

Challenge

An India-owned, India-grown tech success, Flipkart was a leader in e-commerce. Flipkart needed a differentiating EVP to support recruitment of top engineering and business talent in the cutthroat Bangalore employment market. They also needed to appeal to a mobile workforce of prospective warehouse and delivery workers across the country.

But how to gather rich data from employees distributed across the Indian subcontinent without a fixed workplace, a fixed break time, a computer or access to a 4G mobile network?

Flipkart turned to Evviva. We developed a digitally-enabled mobile ethnography project to help Flipkart understand the incredibly varied lives of workers across India.

 

Process

After conducting on the ground research at Flipkart’s headquarters in Bangalore, we took our ethnography online to gather day-in-the-life insights from the mobile workforce who bring Flipkart directly to people’s doorsteps – sometimes without the benefit of pavement or street addresses.

We created a simple, client-branded platform that was mobile-enabled and accessible on the widely available 3G network.

Participants were pros at texting and posted rich responses to questions replete with photos and videos, and responded quickly to our follow-ups.

Our dashboard combined this data into a rich mosaic of insight on the lives of Flipkart’s talent and the importance of their client touchpoints.

Solution

We were able to demonstrate how important it was that Flipkart paid off the EVP promise in tangible, easy-to-see ways. And we were able to show Flipkart leadership just how much pride last-mile employees took in being the face of an Indian company that operates at such a vast scale, serves customers from all walks of life with remarkable agility and grace. Placing these insights into the context of their brand and operations, we found a world-leading “last-mile” experience that has put Flipkart (literally and figuratively) streets ahead of the competition.