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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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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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.

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.

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 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.

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.


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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 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:

1. Make sure the product is aligned with the market
2. Research the target audience
3. Reach the target audience for a product/service
4. Strategic messaging to create awareness
5. 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:

TARGET REACH:

STRATEGIC MESSAGING:

INCREASE PRODUCT DEMAND: