Piush Kothari joins Croma as chief customer experience officer

MUMBAI: Croma, the Tata-backed consumer electronics chain, appointed Piush Kothari as its chief customer experience officer, the company announced this month. Kothari, who most recently served as executive vice-president and head of subscriptions and media at JioHotstar, joins with a mandate to put customers at the centre of everything Croma does, from the moment they walk into a store, physical or digital, through the entirety of the ownership experience.

“Croma has been a trusted name in consumer electronics for millions of Indians,” Kothari said on joining. “I’m looking forward to working with Shibashish and the incredible team at Croma where we want to keep raising the bar by keeping customers at the centre of what we do.”

It is a significant hire. Kothari brings nearly two decades of cross-industry experience spanning strategy, digital, and P&L roles at some of India’s most consequential organisations. At JioHotstar, where he spent a year and five months, he oversaw SVOD revenues, subscribers, and the media centre of excellence. Before that, at The Walt Disney Company, where he spent five years and seven months, he led product, growth, partnerships and international expansion for Disney+ Hotstar, scaling its subscription business across India and running standalone operations in Singapore, Canada and the United Kingdom. He also served as a nominee director on the board of Mashal Sports, the entity behind Pro Kabaddi League, where he helped clinch a five-year broadcasting and streaming media rights deal and steered the league through its post-Covid comeback season.

His earlier career is equally eclectic. At Aditya Birla Group, Kothari straddled the chairman’s office and the payments bank, where he helped launch the bank’s UPI consumer app and drove the acquisition of over a million customers in four months at industry-leading cost. Monthly UPI transaction processing crossed Rs 1 billion in just the second month of launch, a remarkable feat in 2018. Before that, stints at Accenture Strategy, Shell and Welspun rounded out a career that has taken him from oil and gas boardrooms to fintech war rooms.

Educated at IIM Calcutta and St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Kothari is the kind of executive who has seen enough corporate theatre to know what actually moves the needle.

At Croma, the needle he needs to move is customer experience, and if his track record is anything to go by, it is in very capable hands.