Interview with Gaurav Bhatia, Chief Digital Officer at NewDay USA

In this interview, https://www.thedigitalenterprise.com/interviews/interview-with-gaurav-bhatia-chief-digital-officer-at-newday-usa/, Chief Digital Officer at NewDay USA explains their motivation to go ‘digital’ owing to changing customer preferences and the steps involved in this. He also suggests how understanding the customer journey is the key to identifying gaps and developing processes while leveraging martech and adtech platforms. Gaurav has over 15 years’ proven experience in using technology and data for marketing across banking, finance, and travel industries. In his senior leadership roles at Capital One, Sabre Holdings, NIIT Technologies and most recently, at AARP Services, Gaurav has helped integrate digital marketing with traditional marketing, while expanding digital capabilities in various functions for these companies. A speaker/moderator at digital tech industry conferences, Gaurav has also been a guest speaker on Digital Marketing and Innovation at Northwestern University. 

Question : Thank you so much for taking our questions! Tell us a little about your business and your specific role?

Answer From Gaurav Bhatia : NewDay USA is a nationwide VA mortgage lender focused on helping active military personnel, veterans and their families achieve their financial and housing goals. It is headquartered in Fulton, Maryland, 25 miles from Washington DC. The company employs best practices in mortgage lending and career growth for mortgage professionals. Consistent with its mission, NewDay USA is a philanthropic partner of numerous organizations focused on assisting military veterans and their families in need.

I am the Chief Digital Officer for the company helping grow the digital capability of the organization, create new digital experience for our prospective and existing customers

Question : When did you first realize that you had an issue that needed a digital solution? What was the nature of the problem you set out to solve?

Answer From Gaurav Bhatia : Typically, our customers are veterans that are over the age of 55. They have interacted with our brand through television advertising and direct mail. We have seen a shift in behavior and expectation and, our customers are finding us digitally and interacting with us through those channels as well. We need to be able to meet our customer expectations, and as a result we have been expanding our reach through digital channels.

We continue to invest in TV and Direct Mail and now are enhancing those with digital, email and social media. Digital allows us to serve our customers where and how they choose to interact with us. It also allows us to service them outside the traditional working hours.

Question : What were the challenges you faced at the time as you began the process of evaluating solutions?

Answer From Gaurav Bhatia : We first defined use cases and customer journeys, so that we have a full view of how the customers choose to interact with us. We then evaluated the processes, technology and the organizational capability that we had currently. We wanted to ensure we take a strategic view of the business and execute our marketing program based on our customer needs. We developed the capability in the marketing channels that needed to grow and used the marketing technology that would help us leverage the data to develop a program that would be a win-win for the customer and the business.

We had to run the business on a day to day basis, so we continued to enhance our existing program while we built the new capability and enhanced the existing channels. It was a partnership with our agencies, internal teams to make sure we are creating a futuristic program that was leveraging our core business and the foundation we had for the past two decades.

As we put together the program, we realized that we had to look at all the possible internal and external marketing and technology solutions, data, legal and compliance requests to create something that would help us achieve the business objectives. It was more of taking a 360-degree view of the customer. We had to be agile, since we did not have all the details, and as we procured more information we made decisions. It was not perfect, but we need to continue the momentum and move forward.

Read the full interview of Gaurav Bhatia, Chief Digital Officer at NewDay USA on The Digital Enterprise.