Tag Archives: Drishti
Long live Telemarketing
Good morning sir, I am xyz calling from abc to sell you 123…….tell me one person who has not been through this regular annoyance which does not seems to die out anytime sooner.
It has been over a few years since the pan India National Do N
ot Call (DNC) registry went into effect. From the time of its inception till today, there are over 15 crore numbers on the list, with more being added every month. Of all the listed phone numbers, more than 30 percent are now covered under the list in India and growing at a steady rate.
Brainy pundits have duly suggested and equated this trend to writing a final obituary for telemarketing which of course has changed the industry dynamics. But has the industry really died……hmmm not yet, at least not in the eyes of telemarketing professionals who have taken this legislation in a healthier context. With ill-practices getting weeded out the time is highly opportune for doing ideal telemarketing culminating to an ideal sell.
Industry trends have shown that businesses doing telemarketing have comprehensively added to their revenues over the years consistently. For standalone telemarketing this number would not be that significant, but there is no question about the enormous impact the medium has had on the business ecosystem.
Using and executing effectively, telemarketing has allowed businesses having the direct marketing concept, to emulate as closely as possible the one-to-one sales advantage bringing them closer to customers. But this has its own pros and cons.
Telemarketing efficiency depends purely on the immensely large number of contacts reached via an outbound campaign which has become difficult to sustain in the present regulatory scenario in an industry which is also being marred by existing high turnover. There are about 1300 entities (outsourced / in-house) identifying themselves as telemarketing services provider to the sector as per TRAI (nodal regulatory agency in India). These service providers deliver more than an estimated 100 crore outbound calling hours per year for business operations.
While some telemarketing processes are aggressive reach campaigns, others are more mature and controlled form of establishing customer contact with both falling into business-to-business and business-to-consumer categories.
Indian firms invest an estimated INR 10,000 crore in outbound telemarketing generating INR 60,000 crore in annualized business value. This again is a downfall from the prime time of telemarketing in the mid 2000’s, when single businesses were recording double digit growths in customer acquisition.
Another roadblock to the growth of telemarketing industry has been the introduction of Do-not-Call registry and the subsequent regulations. Post this, the business has shrunk further, even though the regulations are not that stringent as of now and businesses have been given enough time to adjust. In fact, DNC regulations do not take the blame entirely, the affected business is the result of both regulatory and market forces. The DNC lists, as well as the revised telemarketing sales rules, have forced businesses to restrict calling activity. Firms who were heavy users of outbound telemarketing until a few years back have significantly mellowed down to prevent legal logjams.
The regulations related to Unsolicited Commercial Calls or UCC prevention has forced the telemarketing companies to employ a more focused outbound strategy rather than blind dialing on a mass scale. Also there has been significant shift of marketing spends from vanilla telemarketing to a more robust, sustainable and composite strategy of going the multi-channel way of customer reach-out which has the potential to drive the prospects to inbound call centers.
Even though deliberations are still ongoing on the effectiveness of regulations on outbound telemarketing and its upcoming demise, businesses have adopted innovative strategies to meet their ROI goals. These include – transferring customer sales calls to a sales call center for cross-selling, Internet and e-mail marketing to generate immediate leads and also by only calling those who are not on the DNC lists.
To conclude, even though it’s a highly hated term, the fact remains that telemarketing is here to stay and that too as a very effective marketing channel for businesses. The idea is to understand that its profitability does not come with the power and ability to “push” not-needed products, but from the ability to offer the right products and services to the right customer at the right time.
An Evening in Singapore
It’s a beautiful evening in one of the most fabulous and extravagant hotels of SINGAPORE “Raffles”. Seating on table no. 15, I was praying all the while with my fingers crossed “Please GOD this award has to be for us”. “BEST VENDOR CATEGORY @ 1st As
ia Communication Awards”.
This all began around 2 months back, when I joined Drishti-Soft Solutions as Business Manager APAC. I was responsible for establishing Business as well as good brand name for Drishti. And then our marketing team comes up with this info on “1st Asia Communications Awards” happening in Singapore and our whole team was like “Yes” it’s a good platform to show the world that “Drishti” has arrived with the bang.
Our marketing team worked hard on filing a promising nomination and finally we were there “Finalist in Best Vendor Category Award” competing with some of the Industry leaders. We were bit skeptical about winning this award considering the competition, but as they always unless you compete you won’t win. So we were on with it and I got this honor of representing Drishti at the Gala Dinner Award Night @ Raffles Hotel, Singapore.
22nd of June 2011, it is here. I dressed up myself in my best Black pin-striped suite all set reach there. Ah!!! What a fabulous setting for the evening. I registered myself and got to table no. 15 and the feeling was simply superb sharing this stage with all the Telco giants and ISV’s. Joined by representatives from big Telco companies of Sri Lanka and Qatar our table was all set.
“LET THE SHOW BEGIN”
It all started with the Dinner, a classy one with welcome drink (Wine) and 3 course meal ( I must say food was terrible, I had to eat MC D’s burger later that night to curb my hunger). So, here the award ceremony begins. Everyone glued to the stage with their finger crossed hoping to bag one. Few guys got lucky this time and went with 3 awards and I was like next will be me on that stage with the beautiful trophy. Then the Voice Echoed
“This Award is for the Best Vendor Category – and the nominations are Drishti & Huawei. And I was all tensed and nervous looking at the stage “plz plz say Drishti” but then my hopes came crashing down “It was Huawei” and I was like “Damn!!”
We had come so close. Everyone consoled me with – “Better luck next time and all…”And I was carrying that fake smile, and then I talked to myself “DUDE! It took Huawei more than 2 decades of hard work to get this award.” Directly competing with them in itself is a big honor and recognition for Drishti!! And these awards are not going to define our success, But still next time I will be on that stage posing with that beautiful trophy.
This Experience is one of the most memorable one, to carry the baton of Drishti’s Success among the TOP Telco’s and ISV’s was simple priceless.
And our message is clear “We have arrived & we’re gonna Rock for sure” See you next time.
CHEERS
Puneet Sharma aka KC
Judging Product Anusandhan Pratiyogitya
I would like to share my first experience as a “Judge”. The opportunity came by as our RnD team was preparing an intra-department competition they call – Product Anusandhan Pratiyogitya.
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing
ng>: A quick picture develops in my mind of a technical gyan session which can never be of interest to a marketing & communications person like me! But yet again I got a proof of imagination running wild with the actual event being a total opposite of what I had expected. It was really fun!
Now the concept of the Pratiyogita – as explained to me by Prince Singh (Sr. Team lead -L2, Drishti) was about giving the RnD team an opportunity to glance back at their learnings and achievements and sharing the knowledge gathered while working on Ameyo and related applications.
For this, the battleground had three participant teams and a consultant group. Each team was given a topic related to a definite field of application development in ICT. They were required to prepare a 15 minute presentation on the need and evolution of each domain, the current markets, major players of the domain and Drishti’s direct competitors, their application offerings and Ameyo’s readiness and scope to hit the target market need.
Teams and their topics:
- PRI – Hosted Contact Center
- SIP – Workforce Management
- RTP – Unified Communications
Three days before the final ‘Pratiyogita’, Prince comes to my seat and says –“Please accept to co-judge the competition with Sachin Bhatia.”
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing: Apprehension would be the most undertone word to describe what I felt at that moment. I was to co-judge the event with Sachin Bhatia – He is one of the co-founders of Drishti, VP, Business Development in designation, a thought leader and product expert. I am and will always be absolutely naïve in product knowledge in comparison to him!
I was certain it’s a prank! But a shocked Kshiti was told it is a soon to happen fact! This is how I was on-board to co-judge Product Anusandhan Pratiyogita.
About the actual event –
We all saw a new found unrest among the RnD wing. We saw participants glued to their computer screens or holding extended team brainstorming sessions.
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing: None of them actually thought of doing some match fixing with the judges (much to my dismay… 
sic!). I would have been easily pleased with some gifts!
Finally the D-day arrived and we all gathered in the board room for the presentation. The scene was a mix of brilliant young engineers fumbling their way while publicly presenting their hard work.
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing: It’s kind of amusing to see how we always fight for attention and when we have attention from a group, we go all nervous and blank!
We began with the PRI team talking about Hosted Call Centers. Then we had the RTP team presenting Unified Communications followed by SIP team discussing about WFM. Besides having interesting topics to talk about, much credit goes to all three teams on the coverage, content quality, team participation and overall presentation for making the event a ‘learning & fun’ experience.
Sachin took the responsibility for checking the preparedness of the teams with his questions and I concentrated more on the participation and content of each team.
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing: I was equally nervous at the beginning of the presentations thinking what intelligent questions could a marketing person ask product developers? But again I surprised myself when I got to know that I was also fairly knowledgeable about the topics covered with a few questions to ask too! (That calls for a toast!)
After collating the individual scores, we had a clear winner – The PRI team (Hosted Contact Center). Their coverage of the evolution of HCC and Ameyo’s competitors was impressive. They had some good points on ‘Why Hosted?’ is the next big thing for ICT industry. Their confident & prompt answers in the Q & A round worked in their favor.
Well this doesn’t undermine efforts of the other two teams.
Kshiti’s thoughts pro-ceasing: If only they could have thought of some gifts for me, we would have had people sharing the winning trophy! I hope the RnD team calls me on-board for further such events! After all – one should always hope for a better future! 
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- The participation stage!
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- Can we really hide the nervousness behind casual standing poses?
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- The WINNERS!!
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- Raising a pizza to the efforts!
NASSCOM Fridays 2.0 sessions….
Last Friday, Bishal asked me to attend this session on online social media at NASSCOM office. Reached there with team mate Vijay… Well now a gist of the session.
Since, we reached there much ahead of time (actually we were the first ones to reach,) we had plenty time to ‘Network’ with industry people over tea before the session actually started. Now give me an opportunity to talk and I would never let it go unexplored…lol…tried talking to these ‘serious’ people. Okay let me not get wandered away…
Let’s focus on the core event…
It was the 55th Fridays 2.0 session. It started with a key note from Ankur Lal, CEO Infozech.
Ankur introduced the format to the audience that every attendee first introduced themselves, a brief about the company they are representing and their sole reason of being there for the session.
Okay one thing I’m missing here is the audience strength. As Ankur and Avinash, NASSCOM pointed out, as opposed to the expected crowd of around 30-35 people, the session had an audience of over 50. I would prefer to give the credit to the hot topic of the session – leveraging social media as a tool for online marketing.
The presenter for the session was Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 20-20 Social. Gaurav is more popularly known for his blog gauravonomics. He’s in his own words a thought leader and a major promoter of social media and social media analytics.
Gaurav’s presentation focused on Indian product start-ups. He began with defining a quadrant of target users on x-axis and type of innovation on y-axis. The quadrant defined how any product start-up in India can be classified as either a tweak or an invention and can have either local or global audience.
The question that hooked everyone in the audience was – Where do most of the product start-ups we can name belong? As Gaurav aptly pointed out, most of the Indian start-ups have been tweaks for the local markets and hardly any targeted Global market.
He named a few that have not just dared to build products for the global market but also turned into successful ventures. These examples saw some contributions from the audience as well and heated up some discussions on the USPs and potential of these startups.
Gaurav listed out five trends that would prepare Indian startups for a global stage –
1. SaaS-based delivery models and Cloud Computing – enabling widespread sales and distribution and easy scalability with minimum investments since it is always easy to get trail users and eventually migrate to pay per use models.
2. Application Ecosystems – These are user-friendly and easy-to-use platforms where anybody can build their own innovative applications.
3. Social Web – The global Tech Blog Ecosystems are showing interest in Startups from emerging economies like India and China. The gatekeepers driving initial adoption of tech startups are waking up to success stories from Indian tech blogs. Leveraging these to find the right resources as well as customers could prove to be a highly fruitful investment of time.
4. Viral Marketing – besides using the social web to build effective social connections, Gaurav pointed these could also be used for creating a buzz about a new product or application by reaching out to millions of subscribers of virality platforms like Techmeme, Tweetmeme and Facebook Connect.
5. Support Ecosystem – Tech start-ups can either build and maintain their own support platforms or leverage social websites like Twitter to find prospects and track customer complaints and then use Skype to convert or close them. Customer-driven support platforms like GetSatisfaction can enable tech startups to offer support at scale without building a big support team.
Couldn’t agree more to the must haves Gaurav listed here. The great part was – I see Drishti fulfilling the first two very aptly. Also we have our in-house 24 X 7 support team answering the 5th one. And the remaining… tech blog ecosystem and viral marketing parts are definitely the ‘Take Aways’ for us.
Another lesson learnt…Social media could be a powerful tool for B2B type of businesses and could prove to be worth the time and patience invested. I’m not considering the costs here since it’s probably the cheapest when mass advertising comes into the picture.
Let me sum up now with a Thank You to Gaurav Mishra for making me understand the core principle of any form of marketing – sell the idea as in “What is the benefit that the end user can derive from your product or service?” The product and brand become secondary to this. Also a confession to make… It was the very idea of – How we can leverage the power of social media for online marketing of our business that brought us to the session.
