New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman! Imagine the following scenarios: I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon. I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone. I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone. I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company. I can buy any consumer durable […]

Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button

Vinay Iyer recently wrote a very interesting post about the importance of Capturing the real 360 degree ‘Voice of the Customer. You can read the post here: Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button. There are some very interesting things that he talks about: Find smart ways to “mobilize the promoters” and “recover the detractors. He also explains why context is key in any form of survey done with the customers. Though, I agree with all of his suggestions, I still think that this is a reactive way to engage with your customers and could work for simple transactional situations. […]

Education Unleashed: Now It’s All Up To You

Education Unleashed: Now It’s All Up To You. Very interesting and informative piece, put together by John Mayerhofer, Vice President, Innovation, SAP. Notes section has a lot of information on all the resources currently available for anyone who wants to learn (anything). I have taken a course on Coursera and can talk by experience that this is a great tool for continuous education for anyone with an internet connection and a will to learn. In my opinion, education as a sector is ripe for complete disruption and online education offerings will play a big part in this disruption. The current education […]

Great use of Social Media

Japanese car maker Nissan wanted to showcase the benefits of electric cars and promote its award winning electric car – Nissan Leaf, in the UK. Their approach was fresh, engaging & effective. Nissan used Twitter to engage with its target audience. Nissan enlisted a series of Leaf cars as taxis and offered a free ride to anyone who tweeted their destination on twitter along with the hashtag #6XCHEAPER. Authors & content marketers have been using the ‘pay-by-tweet’ option for sometime now with moderate success. The combination of online engagement with offline engagement proved to be a clincher for its customers. […]