Jey Geethan | Business Blog

Introduction

Why am I talking about the Lead Response Times? Because I have been there and done that. I ran a business and now I am promoting my books and other written materials in my website. I have a website that I also run for publishing my messages across my fans and subscribers. I came to understand that replying promptly to your leads or messages has a great impact on building your brand, trust and loyalty.

Is Response Time Really Important?

There is a HBR study that says that online leads that are left for more than 1 hour without replying become stale. Read it here - https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads

HBR study says that the sales reps are likely to have meaningful conversations seven times more if they reply within the first hour. One of the best aspects a probable customer will likely to remember is a meaningful conversation and that helps when it happens with the first hour of contact.

How to Increase the Responsiveness?

The first step is to identify and collect all the incoming leads into a single place which can then be picked up by the sales agents. This is where the lead response management system will come in handy. There are multitude of software that help you achieve this. But ideally pick something that is less costly and easy to use. If you want, I can review a few of them since I have used many of these in own experiences.

The second step is to create a workflow by which you can assign these leads into specific groups of agents. This is usually done by way of matching the skills of the agents with the query that has come in.

There are couple of terms that you should be aware of:

Lead Created Time - the date and time a contact filled out a webform and submitted it

First Attempt Time - the time at which the sales agent tries to connect with the contact

First Contact Time - the time at which the sales agent makes a successful connect with the contact

First Qualification Time - the time at which the contact becomes qualified

By keeping a note of these metrics in your system, you can identify if you are building for a team of professionals who are helping to make that first contact within the first hour.

Don't let the Leads go Cold

The trick is to maintain that customer interest and keep it going as soon as possible. I think most companies are not doing that as of now.

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Basic Support or Unnecessary Support?

Back in the day, when I was running my own startup, I had this fear of missing out on important meetings and I would make sure that I block my calendars with enough of them to ensure that I was on top of everything. In my opinion, this is a basic requirement any executive would have. Comparing this to the customer mindset, there is a very simple yet important requirement that customers want to know any updates to their service or product and how it impacts them at any given moment.

Customer Acquisition is Important. But Retention?

I would like to continue by telling a story that happened to me a few months back. I wanted to commute and I had gotten tired of the two popular cab services in Chennai. I wanted to try something new and got hold of another service provide who was a new entrant to the market. I had started to like their service and was wondering if I could switch completely to them and make my life easier. This is when the following incident happened.

Why is Customer Retention is at the Core of a Business?

Every business tries to optimize their CLV (customer lifetime value) and its CAC (customer acquisition cost) to enable them to get more revenues. On a simpler note, by investing in the CAC, the business gets to have a go at the CLV the customer provides the business. By trying to increase the CLV (rate of purchase and margin of each purchase), a business can increase their gross margin. Though the calculations are simple, the execution of this is always a problem because there are lots of complexities like support, customer happiness, quality of the service/product, price comes into play. These all affect the rate at which the customer purchases again (frequency) and also the amount of each purchase. So, a business has to make more efforts to retain the customer so that the CLV doesn’t get affected by its other functions.

What happened to Me & My Story?

So going back to my story, I booked a cab using their mobile app and I was doing my usual work while the cab arrived. This commute is important because I wanted to reach the meeting at a time before and be ready as always. While I got immersed in my laptop, I had completely forgotten about the cab booking and I was too into the work where I needed to complete a document. Right then, the phone rang and I put the call on speaker and was about to talk to the driver who I thought might have called asking for directions or location. But I was surprised that the call was from their support center and they said that the driver’s location is not moving and he was unreachable and wanted to confirm with me whether to book another driver or find alternatives. I was pleasantly surprised that they had brought up this problem to me directly and wanted to check if the problem could be solved. Even though I went ahead and cancelled the booking and got into an auto on the road, if they had not informed me of the problem, I would have never made the alternative arrangements myself. This I found to be of great importance to me as a customer and made me feel a little bit more safer with them and their support.

Proactive Support

The proactiveness of the above incident really made an impact and helped to get the impression that they really care about. I wanted to write about this very event with one aim - to talk about how caring for your customers helps them in the most fascinating way and helps businesses grow and retain their customer easily. Be proactive, be awesome.

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Introduction

Getting a quick win is hard because it needs multiple ideologies and practices to come together. It would ideally be a combination of least time to support the customer and to help the customer at the right point of their journey. By helping our customers to do the above, we help our products to grow steadily. Microservices can be likened to fast acting customer support, where we are building things in a faster and leaner way. Let’s talk about why an organization would need microservices in the first place.

Why Microservices?

As a first hand believer of picking the right tools for the right jobs, I would caution the reader that Microservices might not be a good fit for all organizations. You will have to take a stock of the needs, the pros and cons of an architecture style and then take a decision to either migrate or start building through the specific architecture. Microservices do help in a few things as the organization grows and it helps the product to be modularized so that it can developed independent of others.

Microservices is a style of architecture where instead of building a product as a single service, it is split into multiple sub modules and are developed as individual services. These smaller services are developed individually by different teams in different repositories without any need for a single big team to be present. Each service has a well-defined role and it doesn’t creep into other services. Each service can communicate with each other through APIs or any messaging channel.

The advantage is that the each microservice can be scaled, deployed, updated independently. The teams work fairly independent on their services and this helps them to move faster wherever possible.

What does Microservices Help Us to Achieve?

Microservices helps us to solve many problems that come with maintaining a huge monolith. When individual teams focus on a single problem to be solved, it becomes easier for them to build into their own service. It helps them focus on important features or bugs and develop them quickly. This leads to a quicker deployment as well since the deployment belongs to the smaller team and they release as quickly as possible. When multiple teams work simultaneously on different services, the development gets parallelized without entanglements. Also, if there is a need, a single service which has huge volume of requests, it can be scaled to solve the problem instead of the scaling the entire service as a whole. There is another intangible benefit that help us in building distributed systems - a contract based development where the other teams need not worry about what goes inside the system and can blindly believe on the contract specified by the team for their APIs. In a nutshell we can list them down as:

Focussed Development
Faster releases
Parallelized development
Scalability
Black box APIs
Technology Diversity

While building microservices, if care is not taken it could lead to a few problems of its own as listed down below.

Too much fragmentation could arise
Increased complexity of maintaining and integrating different services
Distributed monolith

Areas of Deep Dive Needed

There are some potential areas like Authentication & Authorization where the services can know who was calling and to check whether the request was authorized that needs to be baked into each service. Also backward compatibility might become an area where each service has to be compatible in their APIs with microservices that are still using the old endpoints. Service Discovery is also another topic which needs to be discussed in detail where how services establish themselves for others to be discovered. API Gateway is one another topic that can talk about how each call goes through to the services from the public consumers.

Since I have talked about the fundamentals of microservices architecture, I will be diving deep into these topics and how I have solved some of these problems at my work in another post.

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This is an personal opinion essay from Jey Geethan about chatbots and its future.

Pre-Introduction

Chatbots are programmatically independent software engines which mimic the way that consumers talk to a person and answer them in a appropriate ways - This could be the simplest way in which you can describe them. Also, you can imagine them to be a situation where instead of you talking to a real person over chat, social media, phone or email, you are instead talking to a computer agent who replies on the human's behalf.

Introduction

Chatbots are almost everywhere now. Every banking website that you see, you have a bot icon at their bottom right corner. Website owners are also implementing chatbots for their websites where they feel that the chatbots can help their visitors in terms of information and also to reduce the amount of work done by the human counterparts.

In this essay/article, I would discuss about what the future of conversations are. What might happen to chatbots and what could become of the chatbots as we see now.

Computers are becoming more conversational as future unfolds.

Reduction of Human Work

Chatbots reduce the amount of work that needs to be done from a company perspective. If you see the following example, one can find that the work of understanding and taking action on it is being already done by the chatbot.

It just feels easier to use conversation to get things done. Image Credit: Loyalty Apps

The advantage the consumer gets is that he/she feels the same way about talking to another person and also getting the work done. It doesn't feel out of place and the consumer is still in his/her comfort zone which by business parlance is just as good as it can get for retaining the customer trust. The reduction of work by humans can come in many ways:

Information retrieval - pulling out information related to customer questions

Example: Frequently answered questions on consumer queries

Information submission - note down relevant information from the consumer

Example: Table booking at a restaurant

Information transformation - Present consumer's data in a readable format

Chatbots can actually go up a higher on the pyramid and try to build meaningful conversations that can help the consumers to trust and and build a rapport with the business brand.

Are All Conversations Good Conversations?

The smothering truth of the conversations with the chatbots is that you will feel repeated and you will end up wanting to talk to a real person who can help you better. See the below example.

Chat conversation gone wrong. Image Credit: Chatbots Magazine

Conversations that can definitely improve on the current consumer situation - be it a helping hand, providing the right information at the right time or helping the customer to commit to the right journey for him/her - would be the utmost purpose of a conversation chatbot. If it fails to accomplish the same for the various reasons, we will be getting the consumer distrust and irritation.

Can Chatbots Rule the World?

I personally think that the chatbots if done well, can in-fact rule the entire world. For example, take the google's example of Google Assistant calling the restaurant to book a table for you. This is a real good example of how a computerised system can do better and complex jobs for you and even take decisions for you. If the complexity that goes into building a chatbot and decisions that come out of each interaction with the chatbots increase with time, the future is near for the chatbots to take care of our almost entire day-to-day work.

Combine this thought process with the availability of big data and you have a customer profile which can be a very useful additive to base decisions on. When big data can enable marketing, big data can definitely help chatbots become more useful in the future.

The Future is Conscious Bots

The bots that behave in alignment with the users' consciousness will outweigh bots that are just conversational in nature. When you can empathize and sympathize with your consumers intelligently and understand where the consumer is feeling the pain, that's where the chatbots will excel very much. Conscious bots are an extended arm to what chatbots are currently with more decisions that can be taken by the bot on behalf of the consumer. The conscious bots can possibly do these in the future:

Get to understand consumer behavior

This can be done by understanding the customer behavior on website, and elsewhere

Support more and vast variety of customer decisions with actionable items

Enable consumers to do anything that they want and not limited to a set of pre-built actions

Suggest options based on the consumer mood and emotion

Understand the consumer in his/her journey and suggest options accordingly to his positive or negative experience with the brand.

Take proactive actions based on consumer behavior

Enable consumers to repeat or automate certain actions based on his/her previous actions and the bots can extract this insight from the big-data blackbox of consumer behaviors and his/her similarly profiled consumers.

Conscious bots will sprout when the current chatbots can enable the people to do more things correctly and when it hits a ceiling of possibilities with the current chatbot model.

Conclusion

Chatbots are on its way to success in helping consumers in getting their actions done. But it also means that it will pave its way for something more meaningful to rise up and be the heart of the Tin-Man of Oz.

Share your comments and views below.

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There are umpteen number of articles about marketing and how to do it better. I am going to take a shot at quickly defining what marketing can do to your business and how it will help you increase your sales and thereby revenue.

What are Jey Geethan's Quick Articles?

These are short articles which are easier for the readers to read/consume. These articles will give you a short burst of information in a smaller timeframe. This is not a way to move away from long content, those are available in this website and you can subscribe to my email newsletter to receive more.

What is marketing? - Jey Geethan

At first lets talk about what marketing goals are. These goals can be attained by numerous activities which I am going to let you figure out. Marketing can be described as an activity with these goals:

Make sure the product is aligned with the market
Research the target audience
Reach the target audience for a product/service
Strategic messaging to create awareness
Increase product demand

PRODUCT MARKET ALIGNMENT:

Goal: Make sure that the product that you are building is catering to market. Don't build something that doesn't have a market. This is done by market research surveys etc.

TARGET RESEARCH:

Goal: To make sure that the target audiences/consumers/customers are defined and their personas are ready with you. You need to know whom your end customers are going to be and define their income range, region, persona is. This can be done by field research and competitor research etc.

TARGET REACH:

Goal: To reach your target in the most specific and targeted way with your marketing materials. Read here about content marketing.

STRATEGIC MESSAGING:

Goal: To go beyond your usual target reach and make sure you tweak your messaging to cater to recent trends. This is done by hosting conferences etc. New trends in marketing could help you make such decisions easily.

INCREASE PRODUCT DEMAND:

Goal: By following the above said goals, you increase the current demand for your product thereby increasing the sales and conversion.

This is a very short introduction to marketing. Hope it was worth reading a few seconds of your time.

Share your views on the comments below.

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In 1940s, there was a shop called Tim's Burgers in one of the alley of the city of New York. Tim Crompton was the sole owner of the shop and made delicious and juicy burgers which was loved by all of his customers. The burgers are so delicious that it was mouth watering to see them come in a nice small plate as you sit inside the small but cozy place.

The customers were all known to him and nobody from outside his usual customer base were his regular visitors. Because of literally no marketing, and no new customers coming into his shop as time goes by, the burger shop died a slow death even though it was more tastier than the established McDonalds and KFCs.

Reasons for no New customers

New customers gain entry in to brick & mortar stores based on foot volume and mindshare of the shops' advertisements that are available over the locality. The marketing materials that you publish outside the store has to be prominent for customers to notice and get them registered in their minds. Thus, if there is enough advertisements that can be noticed by enough people, the store will get more volume of customers coming in through the door.

What about the digital marketing landscape? The same concept applies to the digital channels as well. The more you market yourself, the more people will walk into your channels and engage with content there. Let's see what reasons could be there for people not to get converted into your customers.

There is no proper or easily identifiable funnel for people to convert to customers/subscribers
Channel doesn't have instant gratification for the displayed CTA
No inherent value for the content published in the channels

What is Channel based Marketing?

Channels are the mediums through which the marketing works. For example, facebook could be a channel and twitter could be another channel. Here, we define the channels as the set of users who belong to a particular system and know how to use the same system.

Channel based marketing thrives on the fact that each channel is different and the people's behavior is different in each of its channel. Each channel has its own structure and you cannot apply the same principles to the different channels because one technique that worked in a single channel may not work in the other channel. So the idea is to customize your strategy for different channels differently.

What each Channel should aim for?

Even though the channels could be different, there is a common goal on which you could make some assumptions. The common goal is

CONVERT STRANGERS TO YOUR LOYAL SUBSCRIBERS

The strangers who are just visiting your media channel (either facebook, twitter, website etc), can see your website, read some content and move on to the next eye catching channel. This could happen multiple times and you would lose out on the users who could become your subscribers by default. The subscribers are the footloose visitors who become gradual customers in a brick & mortar store. Thus, if you have the ability to make strangers your pals, they will become your customers eventually. And, that should be our goal for sure!

Converting the stranger into a Subscriber? Is it hard?

Not really. More volume of people coming in combined with relevant content, will make majority of your users a subscribers. So there are two problems to solve:

Get more users to visit your media channel
Give relevant content to them

To solve the first problem, you will have generate areas where your intended customers are sitting and move your channel's focus towards that. And get more visitors to come to your websites and reach out to the CTAs. There are multiple tools that does this for you. You can try to get more likes and followers for your channel and get more people to see your content.

Follows:

The above said company is good at what they say. They will bring in more followers for your channel and make it available for more consumers to consume your content. They can also help you get more likes for your facebook page and they are targeted in what they do. They are really good at this. If anybody is interested, let me know I can put you in touch with them. You can visit them here: Follows.com. Also please follow their blog at https://follows.com/blog/ to read more about social media marketing and how it helps you get more subscribers.

Relevant Content:

Giving relevant content to your users is the basic and very important task that helps users decide whether to follow you or your page. This is very instinctal and if you provide constant value to your users via your content, they will definitely engage with your content and take it for a spin.

Conclusion

So what are you waiting for? Get your social media marketing up and running, and get more customers as you desire.

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Solution 1 - Use a chrome plugin available in your chrome marketplace

Solution 2 - Use your own local chrome plugin (I chose this)

Solution 3 - Rewrite your /etc/hosts

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Introduction

Is Response Time Really Important?

How to Increase the Responsiveness?

Don't let the Leads go Cold

Introduction

Why Microservices?

What does Microservices Help Us to Achieve?

Areas of Deep Dive Needed

Pre-Introduction

Introduction

Reduction of Human Work

Are All Conversations Good Conversations?

Can Chatbots Rule the World?

The Future is Conscious Bots

Conclusion

What are Jey Geethan's Quick Articles?

PRODUCT MARKET ALIGNMENT:

TARGET RESEARCH:

TARGET REACH:

STRATEGIC MESSAGING:

INCREASE PRODUCT DEMAND:

Reasons for no New customers

What is Channel based Marketing?

What each Channel should aim for?

Converting the stranger into a Subscriber? Is it hard?

Conclusion

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