Pothys Swarna Mahal, the jewellery business of retail major Pothys, is launching its e-commerce channel soon as the larger Pothys group eyes a public market listing.

Having already partnered with global firm Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platforms, Pothys Swarna Mahal is also building a hybrid e-commerce system on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The portal, where customers can discover jewellery designs and complete purchases, is expected to be live in around two months time. This way, 20 per cent of its sales is likely to be through digital channels by FY30.

“In the jewellery industry, today more people want to check out the collections online before they come and buy in store. While majority of large ticket purchases will continue to happen at the store level, we need to have a portal where customers can check out our catalogue and make small ticket buys digitally,” Ashok Pothy, Founder- Director - Pothys Swarna Mahal, told businessline. While Pothys’ textile business already sells via the online channel, the jewellery arm has not gone the e-commerce route yet.

Responding to a query on whether the digital transformation indicates bigger plans, Pothys said that “there may be a plan for an IPO in the near future.” However, he did not elaborate.

E-commerce channel
Pothys Swarna Mahal also expects the e-commerce channel to boost their chit/gold savings plan business. “In the chit segment we have a lot of customers who have joined from other states. For these people once a chit reaches maturity they can even complete the purchase in the online route,” Pothy added.

The jewellery company has five stores across South India (4 in Tamil Nadu and 1 in Kerala). It is also on track to launch five more stores by next year. The Pothys group on a consolidated basis recorded revenue of around ₹5,200 crore in FY24 with industry analysts pegging the share of jewellery business at over 20 per cent.

The jewellery retailer has been using Salesforce’s customer service and marketing platforms-Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud- for some time now. The company generally receives roughly 20,000 queries per month via WhatsApp, and while opening tickets at any point of time used to be 5,000-6,000 before implementing Salesforce CRM, it now counts just about 500-600 open queries. Pothys is also evaluating the use of Salesforce products for the overall group.

Mankiran Chowhan, Vice President, Financial Services and Consumer Industries, Salesforce India, said that Salesforce’s Agentic AI tool Agentforce provides specialised support to users and the sector is at a stage where human and digital agents will soon work together to solve queries. “Imagine calling a call centre and not facing a hold time or getting a personalised response. Agentforce, being grounded in customer data, is able to respond to customer queries faster and better,” she said.

Courtesy : The Hindu Business Line