Sir Richard just called to say he loves the Indian consumer…
By Ankur Sharma | March 6, 2008
England’s favorite son, Sir Richard Branson is at it again - cracking a different kind of nut, proverbially of course! Sir Branson recently announced the launch of Virgin Mobile, in the not-so-virgin Telco domain in collaboration with Tata Teleservices. Under the agreement, Tata Teleservices will sell mobile services specifically for the youth, which is understandable knowing the very youthful attitude of its owner.
We are not aware of how Sir Branson fared in his Marketing 101 class, but he gets a perfect score from me. His recent announcement to venture into the Indian domain had major Telco providers sweating on a cool Sunday morning. However, his decision of NOT entering the Indian space as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) made them heave a sigh of relief, although the task cut out for them has not become any less formidable.
Branson has announced that for every 60 second call received, a subscriber would get 10 paise. Now I may be wrong, but I think Telemarketers are going to have a field day on this one. After they got the stick from the government regarding DNC, this announcement may just load the dice in their favor. After all, who hates making 10 paise by just speaking to a rep for 60 seconds. Just imagine, if you get enough incoming calls, you may not have to buy any credit at all! Now I could get used to that kind of world for sure. No phone bills to worry about, if I am running low on credit, just pick up my office phone and make a call to my handset, and Voila! Atleast I didn’t waste 2 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back doing nothing - I actually made some money which I can use telling my new best friend about the girl I met last night at the movies! (Well that’s again a waste of time but then life’s a vicious cycle, ain’t it?)
So now Telemarketers atleast get to tell the prospect about a product - nothing to lose for both parties. Do I hear applause ???
Apprently, Virgin has launched 10 different “telecom industry firsts” - Apt promotional phrase for a company that is called VIRGIN, maybe they could use Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” as their theme song too, although it would do more damage than good me thinks - which they claim could significantly boost their presence, like one touch VAS (which is NOT an industry first), etc. The details of the plans can be found here .
Branson has done his homework right. He says, “The estimated population in India of people between 15 and 30 years is 400 million, almost six times the whole of the UK population; and these numbers promise to be a lot of fun,” so subscriber base is not an issue. Infact it only gets better from here. According to Mr Jamie Heywood, Deputy CEO, Virgin Mobile India, said there were 215 million Indians aged 14-25 and over the next three years there would be 50 million additionally. In all, revenues from this segment then would be over Rs 35,000 crore. Now these are astonishing numbers, and it vindicates Sir Branson’s decision to enter an industry plagues by Telco wars, and spectrum allocation hullabaloo.
If he plays his cards right, he’s looking at a great opportunity for Virgin to make some serious moolah. Although, whether his decision to go with marketing schemes propel the already healthy Virgin Corp to unattainable heights remains to be seen. But then everything Sir Branson touches turns to gold anyway.
So don’t ignore the next call you get. And keep a tab on the time - let them credits add up, so you can tell you galpal about the latest number you purchased from Ebony. Happy calling…
Resources:
Topics: Industry News, Telcos | No Comments »
Making a Great Product - What it takes (Part 1 - Requirements)?
By Sachin Bhatia | February 17, 2008
For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about writing something on Drishti’s Blog. After brooding on a few thoughts, I zeroed in onto “What it takes to deliver a great product?”
Drishti has offered an amazing opportunity to me, in terms of getting a nice exposure to “Thinking Products” and more importantly “Delivering Products”. In a short span of 3 years, Drishti has established itself as a leader in Contact Center space in India and Philippines. The following has been derived from my experiences at Drishti.
In the first part I will try to cover Requirement definition. This perhaps is the most critical step in making a successful product.
RFPs (Request for Proposal)?
After writing this heading I looked at the word RFP carefully. India has been a services power house and we have excelled at the software development process. Most of the great products across the world have significant contributions from Indians. Through this has greatly impacted our economy and created employment, one area where it has pushed us back is, we today deliver based on well defined functional requirements. Assumption here is that Customer can think clearly what he needs from the product now and in future. This might not be entirely true. Many times customers think of a immediate need and look for a fitting solution. Building a product design around that would limit products’ extensibility.
Follow the Competition?
The other well accepted method is to collect feature documents from competitions’ manuals (if one is in crowded space) and make a product plan out of it. I believe it is important to understand what the competition is doing, but it should be done to probably fine-tune your plan and do a validation check on “Whether our design can cater to such requirements?” The basic flaw in following a competition is that you always will follow which, as a product company, is fatal. One needs to build differentiators otherwise its doomsday.
So … What should one do?
The following summarizes effective way to define customer needs:
To learn what your customer really needs, you must watch them and talk with them. You must be sure you understand their concerns and overall business issues. Only by thoroughly understanding the broad environment your customer lives in on a day-to-day basis, as well as their specific and detailed issues and concerns, can you apply the creative efforts necessary to design a compelling solution that will be successful.
So go out there, spend time with the user. Remember its the user who finally will have the verdict. Technology is just an enabler, the first step to a good product is “Get the Requirements right.”
Wishing all Product Teams … “Happy Thinking”
Sachin
Resources:
1. Why Great Technologies Don’t Make Great Products
2. Think You Know How To Meet Customer Needs?
Topics: About Drishti, Entreprenuership, Making Great Products | No Comments »
How to make your Outbound Campaigns better? (Part 1)
By Ankur Sharma | February 13, 2008
So a lot of Call Center folks (more specifically Operations) have constantly been trying to solve the profitability puzzle. I found out from many of them that as few as one sale per agent is made in 4 days, more so for domestic call centers!!! I mean if that doesn’t tell you what “rock-bottom” means, then I wonder what will.
The trouble is that even if you have the right processes and personnel in place, your technology distinguishes between the bad and the average, the average and the good, and the good and the greatest (Best-in-class as it is fondly called by some) when it comes to conversion rates.
Let’s say you have a great outbound process for an Airtel Campaign, in which your aim is to sell a prepaid connection that provides the best local calling rates, 100 odd SMSs free, but very high roaming and long-distance rates. Let’s throw in nominal GPRS and MMS services in there too.
Ad-hoc calling will not get you anywhere. But if you factor in the demographic data, and best time to call, you could inject some serious adrenaline in your campaign. Now it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that your best prospects would be either college going graduates, or retired folks (maybe) – more specifically, gossiping grandmothers, and college going girls (Let’s just face it, women talk a lot more than men. If you don’t believe me, look at the statistics). Also, you could target folks who are dating, but that’s not easy data to find. Professional people with desk jobs could also figure but then it’s hard to find job-profile related data. Field engineers, managers, executives, sales & Marketing, and support people are least likely to go with the kind of plan you are offering, ain’t that right? You could probably take more data into account but we’ll keep things simple here.
So you have created your targeted campaign from your lead list, if you are lucky enough to find the age group of people in there as well. So you put your 20 best salesmen in a nice little room with headsets and PC, a coffee machine in great condition, and get your dialer to start calling.
Assuming you have the right technology, you put a filter in place where 80% of the people you call are in the age bracket of 18-23 (Don’t forget that 50% of population in the India belongs in the “under 25” bracket). You allot 15% of the remaining for people between 55 & 63 and the rest for people over 63 You also create a filter in which 80% of people you call are women, and rest constitutes men (we just established that women talk more than men!). So this is what you essentially have.
· 64% - Women between 18-23 years of age
· 16% - Men between 18-23 years of age
· 12% - Women (retired/housewives) between 55 & 63
· 3% - Men (retired) between 55 & 63
· 4% - Women over 63
· 1% - Men over 63
To make it even more impactful, you also figure out that best times to call college folks is afternoon/evening times, let’s say 2 through 6 p.m, because they have classes in the morning (I am not going to factor in bunking). They would be more likely to actually hear your proposition when they are free – which boosts your conversion rates. For old folks, any time except early morning would be okay, afternoon and evenings may be best times.
So you have all this amazing intel, and it’s going to definitely boost your conversion rates. Now all you need is a dialer which enables you to do all this. In CC Technology lingo, we can call it “Rule-based Dialing”. It essentially denotes calling based on specific business rules instead of just ad-hoc predictive dialing.
Not too many dialers out there can actually do that. If you expect the Vicidial-based dialers to do this, you can snap back to reality just about now. What you need is a next generation technology which gives you the capability to translate all that well spent money on people, resources and infrastructure into generous profits. And of course convert your campaigns from good to great.
So instead of going for cheap, low-cost dialers with limited functionality, practically no scalability, extensibility or flexibility, spend a little more on technology because that’s what’s going to distinguish your call center from average and BIC. You may be able to save some dough initially, but then only a great technology can essentially make your operations efficient. And you’d be surprised to know how soon you can actually get your complete return-on-investment within as little as one month (break even), and get ready to expand.
Thinking about it already? Watch out this space…
Topics: Call Center Operations, Dialer, Outbound Campaigns, Technology | No Comments »
BPO think local…
By Ankur Sharma | February 1, 2008
According to a recent article in the Times of India “BPOs talk local for expansion”, Indian BPOs are looking inwards for expansion. Perhaps it is the ailing US economy, or the falling dollar rate, but their interest is primarily fueled by a robust 9% growth, and an unforeseen boom in the traditional sectors – telecom, technology, BFSI.
IDC claims that the ITeS market in India was worth a mammoth Rs. 6650 crores (About USD 1700 Million) in 2006 and will cross the 12000 crores milestone (About USD 4000 million) by 2007. It also predicts that the IT/ITeS sector will register a growth of about 19.7% while the export revenue growth will be about 17.4% during the same time. This difference could be attributed to the growth in the domestic segment in the country. Big centers like vCustomer, Wipro, TCS, HCL, Spanco, are also chalking out plans to expand base in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. With multi-million dollar deals in their kitty, every player is looking to ramp up operations to cope with the rising demand while ensuring competitive edge. As a matter of figures, vCustomer earned nearly 80 crores from the domestic market thanks to clients such as Airtel, Idea and SBI. This figure accounts for nearly 4.5% of their revenues.
Spanco is also waking up to the need of catering to domestic market. It has announced two centers, in Gurgaon and Mumbai to provide services to domestic clients. Similarly, Sparsh is also planning aggressively to attack this market.
Drishti is also now planning to have specific products that will provide unbeatable price-performance proposition to the domestic call centers that are looking at cost effective solutions which are easy to manage, operate and own. With some new cutting-edge offerings in the offing, Drishti intends to be a leader in this segment. After extensive homework, Drishti’s BI group has gathered key requirements of the BPOs catering to the domestic market, and the new offering will be incorporating the solutions that address the pain points of domestic call centers - especially increasing profitability. Watch out this space for more updates…
Topics: Call Center Operations, Call Centers, Domestic Market | No Comments »
HeadStart: Bangalore, India (18-20 Jan, 2008)
By Ankur Sharma | January 30, 2008
In this intensely competitive world of simultaneous rat-races, getting a bit of headstart is always a boon. With this philosophy, few guys got together to organize one of the two platforms (the other being proto, which was held the same day) for innovators to get together, and show the industry stalwarts and a very impressed audience what they are upto. As a speaker, I felt intimidated, yet excited to showcase Drishti’s new brainchild, to a visionary audience. Intimidating because many of these folks have started a bit of a revolution themselves, and excited because it is a privilege to be sharing our “baby that we have nurtured so well over the past two years” with those who swear by innovation, and technology renaissance. If the quality of the content was anything to go by, any Indian company would have been proud to see the kind of work their peers around are doing.
The event commenced with the demos that fell under “Consumer Services”. Some interesting work was shown by 90 degrees, alabot, proficio, sneakcast, and mobisolv in this segment. This was followed by the “Enterprise Applications and tools” which showcased some cutting edge stuff from Infosys, Symantec, Thoughtworks, and Pramati. Drishti’s latest offering - DACX Ameyo - was demo’d for the first time as well. Infosys talked about GRADient, Symantec about fault tolerant, highly available DMS, and Thoughtworks about a collaborative testing tool.
Second day was all about the “Mobility & Communications” segment, where some really neat stuff was showcased to a very interested audience. Most notably, Sloka and Tring-me had a very interesting live demo ( I won’t tell you about what they actually demo’d, you have to check it out on your own!). I had to skip the Semicon segment so I will skip that one here.
The best part about such events is that they really do stick to their philosophy of providing a great platform to people to share great ideas, network, explore alliance opportunities and last but not the least, get the dough to make an idea a reality, which are so very important for any enterprise - start-up, SMB, Large Enterprise - to collaborate, grow, and beat competition. As a participant, I learnt a great deal and my faith in the capabilities of my fellow countrymen in constantly coming up with pathbreaking innovations is reinforced [I know I shouldn't bring patriotism in this, but I simple can't help feeling proud 
] Also, one doesn’t need to fear getting lost in the crowd even if (s)he has a great idea that should see the light of the day.
The organizers, sponsors and participants put the best foot forward, and I couldn’t find a better audience, who raised some really good questions that folks needs to address. Kudos to them!
My advice - if you have an idea, take a chance, work on it, make it a reality, and let events like Headstart, Proto give it a thrust. The momentum may just carry and we may be looking at future “Google”s based out of India. Only we may just call it “Fundoogle” or “Rapchik”
Topics: Call Center Operations, Call Centers, Dialer, Events & Conferences | No Comments »
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