Customer Engagement

Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the call.

How many times have we heard this and felt the exact opposite. I hate listening to some automated machine telling me that the company thinks my call is important to them and yet they put me on hold for more than 5 mins. Has the company’s senior management ever waited for 5 mins on a call to register a complaint or to seek more information or ask a question? So, what can we do to totally avoid this situation. Hire more agents. Train them well. Provide an option to request for a call back before going on hold. Make sure […]

Innovation, Leadership, transformation

Can CIO’s or CTO’s become Agents of Innovation or Transformation

Recently, Dan Burrus wrote a couple of blog post for HBR, where he expects that  CIO’s and CTO’s to embrace new roles within their organizations. He expects and the CIO’s should embrace the role of Chief Innovation Officer and CTO’s to embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. I do agree that this is an unprecedented opportunity, the current times requires organization to find ways to foster innovation, I don’t agree that every organization needs to start on a transformation journey. There are industries that are currently at the cusp of major transformations (Print media, automotive, retail). Organizations in these […]

Marketing

Was Mahatma Gandhi the Ultimate Marketer?

As India celebrates its independence day, we remember the leaders and the hundreds of thousands of martyrs who laid their lives for the country. As I look upon the history and Gandhiji’ s actions, I can’t but think of him as the ultimate marketer. The job of every marketer is to move people to action. That is exactly what he did, he moved people across the nation to action. So, I think there are some lessons that every marketer can learn from Gandhiji. Know whom you want to move: There were three sets of people – The British, The Indian […]

Marketing, Sales

How (Not) to Demo

Last week I attended a conference, where during the keynote, a cool new product was introduced and someone asked to show a demo of the product. The presenter lost the audience in two minutes flat, not due to the product not being cool, but due to the way the demo was run. I learnt the following from the demo about the art of running demos. I learnt that Talking and showing features and functions does not work anymore. Context is the key ingredient. Ensure that the demo is visible to everyone in the audience. In this case, the people sitting […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Elon Musk’s HyperLoop – Hope or Hype

At last Elan Musk unvieled his design for ultra speed travel system – HyperLoop. I think that the idea that he laid out in a 57 page document, is as good an idea as we might have currently. However, After having read through the generic description, I think that this is a good start to the pursuit of sub-sonic ground transportation. However, in its current state, this concept is impractical due to the fact that the entire concept seems to have been designed with the Los Angeles to San Fransisco route in mind, which, is mostly without much curves in the […]