I often hear my peers in the field of supply chain and user experience say ‘technology is disrupting their work.’ When companies go through radical digital transformations, non-tech teams get a little paranoid about keeping up. But, at Meesho, we are completely dispelling these fears and claims.

It is our users that are driving digital transformations, because the only way to keep up with their rising demands is to look at our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) pillar of being tech-first, as our north star. This became irrefutably evident when Meesho was able to fulfill rising and changing customer needs within record time multiple times during the lockdown throughout 2020 and 2021.

Our Fulfillment & Experience (F&E) team is uniquely positioned to be the eyes and ears of the users. At the core of what we are doing is understanding user needs, be it suppliers, entrepreneurs or end customers. Our job is to ensure that our product and services are easily accessible to them, and that their experience on our platform is seamless.

This means to be closely aware of how the users’’ decision journey and preferences are evolving over time. It is pertinent to understand customer needs and insights, and keep it at the core of everything we do. By users, I mean all our stakeholders — including suppliers, entrepreneurs, and our end customers. It is one thing for our users to call us and request our support, but a whole other thing for us to ask for their opinion, and use those data and insights to create tools, products, and make iterations that would make their experience better.

An unmatched customer experience is our priority, which is why at F&E we are pioneers of integrating digital technology in all the different areas of our business, especially for driving fundamental changes.

Tech is the backbone of everything that we do at F&E. While we are responsible for problem discovery and coming up with solutions to each of those problems, the tech team is focused on enacting them in record time, and using their own creativity to optimise our findings. Be it providing changes to the product or building new ones altogether, the tech team at Meesho is truly efficient at ensuring customer satisfaction.

Solving lockdown glitches

During the lockdown, the F&E team faced unprecedented challenges that could have stopped us from scaling up were it not for the support that the tech team provided. The ongoing variation of the lockdown, especially, is uniquely challenging as compared to the initial country-wide lockdown. We now have places across India that have allowed delivery of essential products, and there are other zones that are containment zones.

Our users are scattered all over India, and so are our suppliers. It was important for us to identify and come up with an infrastructure wherein we could identify areas which were under lockdown, or pin codes of locations that were identified as containment zones. In the wake of this new predicament, the tech team built us an infrastructure within mere weeks, using which we could take zone-wise restrictions into account and identify the serviceability of various locations based on pin codes.

Using this infrastructure, we are able to temporarily deactivate certain suppliers who are in containment zones and would not be able to deliver during a particular period of time. Meanwhile, we ensure that a realistic timeline is projected to the users and let them know about any delays due to the lockdown. This much-needed and appreciated feature has truly helped us manage our deliveries despite all lockdown restrictions without compromising on our customers’ or sellers’ experiences.

In data we trust

Data science too, is a huge part of our success at the F&E team at Meesho. We recently solved a huge crisis that e-commerce platforms that offer free delivery services encounter, which are fraudulent orders and supplies.

The team in charge broke down this complicated issue to a very granular level by tapping into first principles thinking, an approach Meeshoites love to take, which is to break down any complicated problem into its basic elements and then reassembling them from ground up.

We collected as much data as possible, looked at it long and hard, and created data science models to detect fraud before it happens, on any side of our operations, be it supplier or customer.

Scaling up in every way

Thanks to our tech team’s support, F&E has been able to perform optimally, which means that customers have loved working with us. Our suppliers and users know that we are trustworthy, and that we are willing to go the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction. And that has reflected in our performance too.

Over the last couple of years, our number of orders have been increasing day on day, week on week. The old infrastructure that we employed for support and payments did not have the bandwidth to process our increasing requirements. And, so we needed an upgrade. ASAP. And, Meesho’s tech team made it happen overnight!

We now have a spanking new infrastructure to operate on a scale that Meesho is currently on business-wise.

So yes, tech-first is not just as an EVP pillar at Meesho, this is our reality. We are a tech company first and all our functions are intertwined with that. For any company to be successful in the current startup ecosystem, betting on a talented and highly efficient tech team is of utmost importance. At Meesho, we sure do!

Dipti Tejwani works as Manager IV — Strategy and Program Development in Meesho’s Fulfillment & Experience team.

Aayush Sultania on manning the operations bridge connecting F&E

Engineers, we are hiring! Come work for Meesho’s incredible tech team