Anand is a seasoned marketing professional and a veteran across Automobile & Telecom industries, specializing in the fields of Customer Value Management, Product Management & Loyalty. Deeply passionate about consumer behaviour and analytical driven actions, he & his team go by the mantra of “Data is both king & queen”. He strives to keep his mind & body fresh & ready for any new challenge, with his hobbies of avid reading & marathon running.
His name (Anand) literally translates to ‘happiness’ in Indian languages, which coincidentally is the name of the program that he leads- the Smiles program. The Smiles program started as a loyalty program for e& UAE and now evolving into a homegrown super-app that offers a wide variety of services to the UAE customer base.
Smiles started in 2017 as a deals & rewards platform, evolved into an OTT App (open to everyone in the UAE) by 2019, added its own food order & delivery service by 2021, and thereafter added more services via inorganic moves- including the launch of grocery services (via elGrocer acquisition) in 2022 and the launch of home services (via ServiceMarket acquisition) in 2023. Smiles now offers 55+ services, with over 6500 partner brands, true to its customer promise of “Reward your Everyday”
Smiles also has a unique blockchain powered rewards exchange, which allows customers to exchange points from one program to another – including major programs like ADNOC, Bounz, Gems, Emirates Islamic, Share, and Shukran. Since an average customer is part of 7 programs and allows >50% of their points to expire, such a one-stop shop allows customers to consolidate their points into any program of their liking.
Such a wide variety of services can also be a con, as it sometimes can be overwhelming for an average consumer to see so much of choice. However, the key differentiator for Smiles is the ability to ‘hyper-personalize’ by leveraging the depth of customer data, working with 100’s of AI models and the latest Marketing Tech – all to simply personalize the offerings to each & every customer at a “segment of one” level.
Another success factor of Smiles is the ‘Smiles Tribe’ itself, which is our name for the teams that work on Smiles across various functions, unified by one purpose – to simply make Smiles ‘1% better every day’ by tirelessly improving the product.
What’s more – Smiles is now partnering with Tencent technologies (the company that powers WeChat App that has over a billion users) to transform Smiles into a ‘super-mall’ that can house a wider variety of curated content. With this new tech, any partner brand can now simply create a mini-app in a matter of weeks (without having to sweat about major commitments on IT integrations), and go-live on Smiles in quick time, leveraging the expansive target base & sniper-shot targeting that it offers.
