I recently shifted a lot of my blog reading from a laptop to a smartphone. Some blogs like TechCrunch can be accessed via mobile web (apart from PC web, that is) whereas others like Finextra, Huffington Post and Labnol (Digital Inspiration) are available as native Android Apps. I found TechCrunch and Huffington Post to be very well optimized for the smaller form factor.

One month after the shift, let me take TechCrunch as an example and list down a few key differences in my experience of “consuming” this blog from a smartphone versus PC:

1. Believe it or not, it now only takes me only 15 minutes to finish a day’s reading of this blog on a smartphone whereas I could never finish the same amount of reading in less than one hour from a PC before. I know this sound counterintuitive – how can it be easier to read something on such a tiny screen? – but I promise you that it’s not an exaggeration. Go ahead and try it out for yourselves.
2. In the past four weeks, I haven’t clicked a single ad on this blog from the mobile. Whereas, while reading it on a PC, I used to click at least 4-5 ads every day. If most readers respond to ads in the same way, it could make a huge difference to publishers dependent upon income from Google AdSense and other PPC  ads displayed on their blogs.
3. It’s a lot easier to post comments from a PC.
4. There’s no way I’ll go back to a PC to read TechCrunch – or any other mobile-optimized – blog in future.
5. TechCrunch proves that you can deliver great UX even via mobile web. Per contra, my experience with Finextra suggests that a native app by itself doesn’t guarantee mobile optimization.

At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it would appear that mobile-optimized blogs deliver superior experience for readers but that PC-web versions are more enriching (pun intended) for the publisher and the overall community. The latter conclusion can get turned on its head if mobile versions of blogs generate net additions to readership figures by attracting new readers who never read the blog on a desktop or laptop before. I invite readers, especially bloggers who run both desktop web and mobile versions of their blogs, to share their thoughts in the comments below.

PS: I’ve written this post as a blog reader. In my other role as a blogger myself, I’d used a third-party service called Mofuse to mobilize Talk of Many Things back in 2008 when Android wasn’t a household name and smartphones weren’t as common as they’re today. Mofuse has since then pivoted from its freemium model, so I’m now in the process of deciding whether to upgrade to a paid plan of Mofuse or ditch Mofuse altogether and develop a native Android App for Talk of Many Things from scratch. Stay tuned, I’ll keep you updated.

Around 7-8 years ago, I came across the following example that illustrated how an MNO could exploit an EBPP software’s cross-selling / upselling capabilities:

By mining your billing data, our software could reveal that a high percentage of calls made by a certain customer are to one particular telephone number. Using this insight, our software would prompt you to offer your new “Partner FreeCall” product to this customer and thereby earn a higher fixed fee every month.

Sounded great then, sounds great now. However, it never seems to happen in actual practice. At least not to me or anyone in my family or friends in all our interactions with billers spread across many countries viz. India, Germany, UK and USA. And, recently, when I was definitely a candidate for one such offer, the biller in question never informed me about it.

I’ve wondered if this total absence of cross-selling and upselling in real life reflected a fundamental disconnect between what a vendor claims its software can do versus what the software actually does. A recent personal experience convinced me that it didn’t, and suggested that there could be larger issues at play.

I recently got a bill of INR 1,000 (~ US$ 20) for my daughter’s new smartphone connection. When I saw this figure, I got a ’sticker shock’ of sorts because, according to the plan we’d subscribed to, the monthly fixed fee was only INR 150 (US$ 3). The itemized charges revealed more than 600 SMS messages. At INR 1 per message, that itself translated to INR 600, so I ruled out any billing error. Since her GenY friends are equally addicted to texting as my daughter, I checked around and found out they’d subscribed to various SMS packs that let them send a huge number of free texts for a small additional monthly charge.

Omnichannel Retailing (Telephone Interactions Not Shown)

Armed with this information, I tweeted to my MNO – Vodafone, by the way – to inquire if it had such SMS packs. I soon received a reply that, yes, for an additional fee of INR 35, I could get 1,000 free SMSs. I immediately ordered this pack and, hopefully, the days of sticker shock are behind me. (As an aside, my interaction with Vodafone in the above example started with Twitter, moved to telephone and ended with email. It looks like Vodafone has already jumped onto the omnichannel bandwagon, a subject about which I’ve written here, here and here.)

This was a great example of cross-selling / upselling, except that the biller didn’t trigger it. I wondered why. Surely, my MNO had EBPP. Since its CSR who called me in response to my Twitter update knew all about this SMS pack and could put through my purchase in seconds, the MNO’s inaction can’t be attributed to apathy, untrained personnel or immature processes.

A small back-of-the-envelope calculation makes me believe that my MNO’s lack of proactiveness in upselling its SMS pack is deliberate and has nothing to do with technology. For marketers, cross-selling and upselling mean not only selling more products and services to existing customers but also growing revenues in the process. While the SMS pack in question meets the first condition, it falls miserably short on the second: It fetches INR 35 but results in a loss of INR 1,000 – the normal price for 1,000 texts @ INR 1.00 per text – in revenues every month (or at least until the month that subscribers wake up and take corrective action).

When addon products and services carry such a massive revenue downside, only billers who value customer satisfaction and advocacy way ahead of a hit on their toplines will truly exploit the cross-selling and upselling capabilities of their eBilling and eStatementing solutions. For the others, there’s TransPromos. More on that later.

The article and all comments in response to it were focused around refund issues arising out of disputes over deductions. For the uninitiated, tenancy agreements in the UK – and many other countries – mandate that, when vacating the house, the tenant should leave the house in the same condition as it was when they occupied it. Any differences in the condition – burned carpet, for example – will attract charges that can be deducted by the landlord before refunding the deposit.

I went through a different – and arguably worse – experience, namely, years of delay despite reaching agreement on the deduction amount fairly fast.

Around four years ago, I was getting back to India after spending two years in London. The building management company – a reputed one in Docklands, if I may add – that was managing the apartment completed the takeover / survey on my last day in UK. I got the schedule of deductions some 15 days later by email. Some deductions were reasonable, others were not, but I was already in India by that time and logistically it wasn’t worth my while to get into a dispute. So, I signed the form accepting all the deductions and faxed it back to this company the same day.

Then started the wait.

When I followed up a few weeks later, the clerk in the company told me that she hadn’t received my fax. I reminded her that I’d scanned the signed form and had emailed it to her regular email address the same day that I’d faxed it. She denied receiving the email but promised to get on the job if I re-faxed the form. Which I did immediately. A month later, there was still no response. I decided to escalate this matter to the company’s Estate Manager. He blamed some system problems, promised immediate action and spent the rest of the international call – I was paying, sigh! – telling me stories of how he enjoyed himself during his previous trip to India and how he looked forward to connecting with me the next time he visited India a couple of months later.

Months have turned to years. My reminders are getting more and more strident. Long story short, I left the apartment in July 2008 and still haven’t received my deposit.

Having used my new smartphone for so many things that I have previously done on a PC or telephone, I explored the possibility of doing the aforementioned upgrade transaction via my smartphone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t, since my MNO had no mobile app. What was worse was that its INR 200 / month plan was launched recently and it wasn’t possible to activate it even via SMS (which is how I’d activated the first plan before). The only way forward for me was to call the MNO’s Customer Care.

In general, I’ve never liked call centers, what with their phone trees, endless amount of waiting and listening to hold music. But, after my glorious experience with mobile apps during the previous month, an encounter with call center almost seemed like torture. I procrastinated for several days. But, eventually I went ahead and made the call because the alternative – incurring huge charges for busting my data plan – was even more unpleasant.

This experience got me thinking about whether I’m ever likely to buy additional products and services if my MNO forced me to use the phone or, worse still, told me to visit its physical store to place the order. Unlikely, especially for simple and discretionary items. On the other hand, if I got the opportunity to browse its Value Added Services (VAS) at my leisure using a smartphone, the chances of my ordering something or the other would go up dramatically.

If personal experience is anything to go by, MNOs and TELCOs have a tremendous opportunity to boost their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) by launching mobile apps and letting their customers manage their accounts and order value added services through them. This is even more true in the case of 3G and other high ARPU customer segments. Such apps don’t even have to be enabled for (micro)payments, which could be a major source of friction for the relatively small amounts applicable for many VAS items: I noticed that, when these purchases happen over the phone, the MNO simply adds the charges to the monthly bill and presumably uses the recording of the telephone call as proof of order. For an order placed via mobile apps, clickstreams – or, are they called ‘tapstreams’ on smartphones? – should provide even more unequivocal proof.

Dear Editor of The Economic Times:

In the past, whenever I’ve come across articles on restoring work-life balance in the media, I’ve found their suggestions to be highly impractical in today’s world and have never managed to get past their first or second paragraphs.

That is, until I saw “Work On Bringing Balance To Your Life” by Priya Kumar in a recent edition of The Economic Times.

So far, the sum and essence of what I’ve heard about work-life balance can be reduced to one sentence: “Spend equal time on work and family”. For the first time, I read a very different viewpoint in Kumar’s article viz. work-life balance doesn’t mean giving the same priority to all facets of life. This perspective makes a lot of sense and resonates very well with the zeitgeist of modern times. Ms. Kumar describes several signals – or red flags – that are strongly indicative of work-life imbalance in a person. This list is especially useful since many signals in it can be spotted not just by the said person but also by others around him or her. By giving a set of remedial actions against type of red flag, the article stakes a credible claim to be a practical guide to restoring work-life imbalances. Counter-intuitive as it might seem at first glance, the author’s advice to spend less – not more – time with family makes a lot of sense when a person displays the attitude signal.

Props to Priya Kumar for an excellent article. I’m now personally sold on the need to maintain proper work-life balance and convinced that it can be done even when subject to the pressures of today’s world.

Thanks and Regards.

Ketharaman Swaminathan

ICICI Bank's Response To Online Account Opening Application

After completing the online account opening process, I received the following message on the bank’s website:

“Thank You. Your application has been saved successfully and Account Number XXXXXXXX abcd has been allocated to you”.

When I received only the last four digits of the account number (abcd), I felt a bit cheated since much of my praise for the bank’s initiative was centered around its promise of issuing an “Instance Account Number”. Its marketing communication was definitely misleading when compared to its actual performance.

Not only that, the website message went on to request me to keep a cheque ready for INR 10,200 or more, being account opening amount. I was wondering “why only cheque?” Since I’ve chosen the online channel to open the account, should it not strike the bank that I might be equally interested in an online channel to fund my account and logically offer me the option of electronic fund transfer? Called NEFT (National Electronic Fund Transfer), such an option has been existence in India for several years and is widely promoted by most banks including ICICI Bank, which is India’s largest private sector bank.

Sorry ICICI Bank, what happens in FB must stay in FB!

I posted these observations on the bank’s Facebook Wall since it was here that I had learned about the Online Account Opening functionality.

Instead of receiving a straight answer, I got a reply asking me to explain my problems via email to its Customer Care email address. I was immediately ticked off. For one, since I had already taken the trouble to list my questions and concerns on its Facebook Wall, there was no way that I was going to waste my time repeating everything over email. Secondly, I believed that, like “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, whatever happened on FB should stay on FB. I did not appreciate the bank’s tactic to redirect me, and virtually everyone else who had posted on its wall, to another channel. I expected the bank to understand that, had I wanted to use email, I would not have bothered with Facebook. When I replied back declining to use email for the aforementioned reasons, ICICI Bank replied back saying that I had to continue the discussion only over email since it wished to “maintain customer privacy”.

Duh? Customer privacy? Did ICICI Bank not realize that I, as the customer, should be the one more bothered about customer privacy?

To me, the bank’s behavior suggested that it did not get the notion of customer privacy or, worse still, chose to use it as a bogey to avoid public admission of the obvious limitations in its online account opening offering. Either way, I did not find any point in continuing the conversation.

It is still early days for ICICI Bank’s new initiatives. Hopefully, it will quickly understand that customers are no strangers to online and social media channels and enhance its online account opening functionality and modify its Facebook behavior such that the gulf between what customers expect and what the bank offers narrows down. If it succeeds in doing so, ICICI Bank could well serve as the lighthouse for the entire BFSI industry towards adoption of cutting edge technology to cut costs and enhance customer experience. On the other hand, if it fails, ICICI Bank risks seeing its new initiatives fizzle out.

We’re pleased to launch GTM360 Mobility Solutions.

This new line of business focuses on design, development and support of Android apps that are functionally-rich and call for superior user experience. Our areas of specialization include location based (LBS) apps, QR codes and apps centered around sales and marketing.

In an already crowded space, we believe we differentiate ourselves with

1. Solid domain expertise in sales and marketing functions and in location based technologies (viz. GPS, cell tower triangulation)
2. An ability to think from the end-user’s perspective, and
3. A commitment to testing our apps on smartphones, instead of PC-based mobile simulators, prior to delivering them to you.

Even before our formal launch, we’ve completed the following customer engagements:

NEW YORK – CONNECTICUT DUAL RESIDENT EXPECTS TAX AUDITS TO BE A BREEZE

GRAD SCHOOL STUDENTS CREATE AWARD WINNING MOBILE LBS APPLICATION

For more details, please visit the mobility solutions section of our website.

Clik

In a post titled “Why Is It Easier To Search The WWW Than A Single Website?”, we’d cited the examples of TechCrunch and a couple of other third-party websites to conclude that it’s generally tougher to search a single website compared to the entire world wide web – even when we use the same Google Search Engine to conduct both searches.

When we wrote this post, we never imagined that our conclusion would apply to a website owned by Google itself. Looks like it does! Cut to the recently released Clik smartphone app.

On the back of the huge media buzz that followed the app’s launch a few weeks ago, the company counted some 100K downloads of the iOS version of its app on Apple’s AppStore. However, the Android version of Clik saw absolutely no traction on Google Play (new name for Android Market). Reason? The app was totally invisible to searches done there. Apparently, when you search for Clik on Google Play, the Google Search Engine there assumes that you made a typo and searches for “click” instead – hence search results are topped by “1-click cleaner” and not Clik.

In this TechCrunch post, the company’s CEO Ted Livingston says laconically, “It’s pretty ironic — the king of search can’t do search”. I think he missed adding, “on its own website”, out of politeness or caution.

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 marketing managers can say goodbye to leakages and delays when leads are routed manually, and be assured that each lead will be handled by the most most capable employee in their organization.

Please visit our website for more information on Rocket Routing.

Sign up for EMAIL360 and get started with five free leads. Join over 225 other companies who have already done so. Immediately see an increase in your lead flow and gain the capability to respond to your leads faster, better and cheaper.

ICICI Bank Facebook App Features

Banks have the opportunity to cut costs and enhance customer experience by adopting mobile, social media and other cutting edge technologies. However, most of them drag their feet on being innovative, often citing security concerns, regulatory constraints, and so on. For example, statutory KYC requirements precluding 100% online and automated account opening by forcing banks to collect paper documents and account opening forms with wet-ink signature.

With the recent launch of Facebook app and Online Account Opening, ICICI Bank, which is India’s largest private sector bank, pushes the envelope on adopting state-of-the-art technologies while staying compliant with the local laws.

The bank recently launched an FB app which offers a whole lot of features such as account balance, mini statement, cheque book request without leaving Facebook. GenXers – like me – who have been using Internet Banking well before Facebook came along might be wondering why someone would want to do their banking on FB. However, from the speed at which my GenY nephew signed up for this app, I’m convinced that ICICI Bank has a winner on its hands with this initiative.

Coinciding with the launch of its FB app, the Bank also launched Online Account Opening functionality on its website. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of blog posts in the past (click here and here), most “online applications” for financial products in India and elsewhere are glorified lead collection forms that fall way short of end-to-end fulfillment of the account opening process. ICICI Bank has got this customer pain area and has advertised its new offering by specifically committing “Instant Account Number” issue. Props to ICICI Bank for doing what, to the best of my knowledge, no other bank or financial institution in India has done so far.

By no means does ICICI Bank complete the account opening process – that’s simply not possible under the current laws. But, by doing whatever it has done, it has demonstrated that it is possible to use cutting edge technology under the current regulatory environment to improve improved the status quo. ICICI Bank has also proved that, while doing so, it is possible to cut costs and enhance customer experience: By getting the customer to complete the application form online, it has saved the cost of printing paper forms and distributing them to over 2,500 branches all over India as well as the cost of entering all that data manually; and by offering to collect paper documents from the applicant’s doorstep instead of forcing the applicant to visit the branch, it has also enhanced the customer experience. And I think that’s a big deal.

In Part-2 of this blog post, I shall dig a little deeper into ICICI Bank’s Facebook behavior and its communication of the online account opening offering. By getting these right, ICICI Bank can serve as a lighthouse for adoption of cutting edge technology for the entire BFSI industry. Watch this space.