Communications – Low Hanging Fruit For Enhancing CX

In Poor Communications: The Seventh Deadly CX Killer, I described the painful experience of activating the new credit cards I recently received from my bank. To recap, I didn’t get a paper PIN mailer as was customary during the previous renewals, and the instructions given by the bank on how to activate the new cards on … Read more

Why Have Payments Banks Flopped?

When Payments Banks were launched in 2014-15, they were greeted with a lot of fanfare. They were expected to bring hundreds of millions of unbanked Indians into the folds of organized financial services because their digital-only footprint would make it cost-effective from them to go to the rural hinterlands where traditional banks with branches have not … Read more

Demystifying The Ubiquitous Sample Size Of 2000

Back in the day, we learned in statistics that you need a sample size of at least 2% of the size of population to make statistically significant inferences about the population. In common speak, the expression “statistically significant” means “valid”. Nevertheless, if you’re like me, you regularly come across surveys conducted on sample size of … Read more

Gartner Publishes Our Article About Hootsuite

We’re happy to share with you that Gartner has accepted our recent article about Hootsuite for publication on its prestigious peerinsights review portal. As many of you would be aware, Hootsuite lets you view all your social network feeds on a single dashboard and cross-post updates to different social networks from a single screen. Hootsuite currently … Read more

Mastering PUSH Notifications – The PayTM Way

In Four Out Of Five Brands Get PUSH Notification Wrong, I shared my experience with PUSH notifications from four leading brands. I found it impossible or very cumbersome to redeem the targeted offers made by them. At the end of the post, I promised to share the rare example of a brand that gets PUSH notifications right. To … Read more

Four Out Of Five Brands Get PUSH Notification Wrong

Customer Engagement Management is a technology platform that helps brands manage their end-to-end engagement with their customers in order to foster loyalty, drive repeat sales, increase ticket size, cross-sell and upsell new products, and generate customer advocacy. Customer engagement spans the following stages: Customer Engagement Management Stages Stage 1: Identify customers and enroll them into … Read more

Blockchain – Calling BS On Decentralization & Resilience

Since I wrote Flight Delay Insurance – Why Blockchain?, I’ve come across several updates that have reinforced my skeptical views around the claim of decentralization and raised new doubts about the touted advantage of resilience. UPDATE #1: SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE Let me take the following remark in my original post: Data is distributed across multiple … Read more

Regulated Blockchain – Oxymoron But Killer App

There are many business relationships where trust is one-sided. Let me give a few examples of such relationships in which the contract between two parties A and B is such that A needs to trust B but B does not need not trust A. #1. METERING Mobile phone subscriber consumes data. The consumption is measured … Read more

Teardown Of The VC Investment Playbook

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn –  valuations. As a result, the average … Read more