Retail Winners & Losers Amidst Skyrocketing Real Estate Costs

The Indian retail landscape has witnessed tremendous churn in recent times. Skyrocketing real estate costs have rendered large swathes of big box and mom-and-pop retailers unviable. In Superior Customer Insight Is Key To Winning Round 2 Of The Indian Retail Battle, I’d quoted the owner of a famous department store in Pune, India. He lamented … Read more

TransPromos Help Billers Grow Advertising Revenues

Electronic delivery of bills and statements promises to save stationery, printing and postage costs for banks, mobile network operators, municipalities / boroughs, utilities and other types of billers. Attracted by the cost savings potential, a large number of billers have adopted eBilling / eStatements technology in recent times. To actually realize the savings, many billers … Read more

The Business Case For Social Media Customer Service

In a previous blog post titled Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music, I’d written about customer service via social media and how it could be a great experience for customers of airlines, banks, insurers, mobile network operators and other service providers. We now look at … Read more

How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?

‘Showrooming’ is being projected as a new threat posed by e-commerce websites to organized retailers’ brick-and-mortar stores. Showrooming can be defined best as “the consumer practice of using a retailer’s stores as a show room, to look, touch, and feel (not to mention partake of the retailer’s employee expertise, such that it might be), but … Read more

Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music

Around the end of 2009, my HP OfficeJet printer broke down. I logged a call with the local office of Hewlett Packard’s service partner. I got no response for three days. I gave up with the vendor’s local office and decided to escalate my complaint to its head office. Thankfully, the company’s Vice President for … Read more

Whither Cross Selling & Upselling With eBills & eStatements?

For a long time, I’ve been hearing about how electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions enable billers to do more cross-selling and upselling. For the uninitiated, EBPP, among other things, generates paperless versions of bills and statements and publishes them on portals or emails them as PDF attachments, or both; the term “billers” collectively … Read more

Pushing The Envelope On Technology – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog post, I had lauded ICICI Bank for pushing the envelope on adopting cutting edge banking technologies by launching a Facebook App and Online Account Opening offering. In this Part 2, let me share the results of my personal experience with these initiatives and voice a few concerns around their … Read more

Say Goodbye To Leakages & Delays In Handling Leads

Good news for banks, e-commerce, insurers, IT, universities and other organizations who generate a large volume of leads from their website. The new “Rocket Routing” feature of our EMAIL360 website leadgen application automatically routes leads for different products and services to different people in these companies – and, that too, in realtime. With EMAIL360, sales and … Read more