Talk of Many Things

In my early blogging days, I’d written a blog post called Indian Education System is the Best … for India!

Despite realizing that my views on this subject were, ahem, somewhat contrarian, I didn’t hunker down in some dark corner. Instead, a couple of years ago, in another blog post, I’d wondered whether the much-maligned rote-learning method of Indian schools was what the doctor recommended for NYC’s schools. I wasn’t surprised to receive tons of brickbats from near and dear ever since, especially from friends and colleagues who’d recently relocated to India from the USA and had chosen to send their children to international schools despite the higher costs and longer commutes they entailed.

Now, after hearing about a recent HM Government’s plan and the deliberations among British public around its feasibility, I’m tempted to suggest that the Indian education system is ready for adoption by the UK as well. Before you start doubting my sanity and throw more brickbats at me, let me make my case.

The UK government has recently raised an e-petition to make financial education a compulsory part of the school curriculum. According to the petition, banks and financial services providers are spending “billions on marketing and teaching their staff to sell” loans, mortgages and an array of financial products, and it’s time British schools ensure, as part of “buyers’ training”, that “every child in the country gets a basic understanding of personal finance & consumer rights before leaving school”.

There’s a lot of debate in the British media about the pros and cons of imparting financial education in schools. This article on lovemoney.com and the accompanying comments provide a comprehensive round-up of both sides of the story. Arguing in favor of the petition, a commenter who goes by the handle of WhosgotmyName says, “Until the government recognises that these esential (sic) skills should be part of the national curriculum, generations of consumers will continue to be vulnerable to everthing (sic) from dubious to outright illegal practices.” On the other hand, AndrewFSmith feels that “it is utterly wrong to take time out of the school curriculum whilst one in five of our teenagers leaves school without being able to read properly or do basic sums”.

Personally, I found the views of one Mike10613 to be the most sensible. Apart from suggesting that financial education should be “integrated into existing lessons” instead of being treated as a separate subject, Mike10613 predicts that it will “make learning arithmetic and maths more interesting”.

It struck me that this is probably what the Indian education system has already done when I had a casual look at some of daughter’s study material recently. Her Math text book for the eighth grade at an ICSE school in Pune, India, is full of problems around simple interest, compound interest, loan repayment schedules, and so on. For an assignment in Computers, she’d to include the revenues and profits of IBM, HP and other leading global IT companies.

I don’t remember getting this level of financial exposure even during my grad days, let alone eighth grade. Without attempting to make any claims to being young, I must note that the concepts of simple and compound interest existed back then and companies like IBM and HP were no strangers to the IT industry of that era either.

Having said that, it’s not that my daughter has a separate course called finance education or whatever. It’s just that the basic principles of finance seem to be nicely dovetailed into her existing courses. From personal experience, I can say that Mike10613’s is absolutely right when he predicts that this could make math more interesting.

Integrating finance education into the regular school curriculum is self-admittedly what the UK needs. It’s evident that the Indian school system has already done it.

I rest my case.

The use of QR codes in advertisements continues unabated. We came across three of them on a single day recently. As you can see below, there’s one from the leading Indian retailer SHOPPERS STOP, another from THE BODY SHOP, the UK-headquartered multinational that is the global leader in ethically produced beauty products, and the third one from the leading IT magazine DATAQUEST.

Recent Ads Using QR Codes

Our own experience mirrors the growing trend of QR code usage. We’re currently developing a SmartResponse QR code product called QR360. Although it’s still in the pre-launch stage, we’re receiving a lot of inquiries for QR360.

Having said that, the awareness of QR codes among consumers still has a long way to go. As a matter of fact, we’ve noticed that even the adoption of smartphones – which are required to scan QR codes – has a lot of ground to cover before we can consider them mainstream.

At the same time, we’ve seen a distinct trend in smartphone ownership during the course of community-testing QR360: Almost one in three people below the age of 30 has a smartphone, whereas the corresponding figure among 30+ is less than 10%. We’re not sure if these are representative numbers but, until the demographic pattern of smartphone penetration become clearer, it might make sense for advertisers to treat GenY as the sweetspot for QR code based advertising and restrict their use to this age group.

Advertisers using QR codes in their ads might also want to give a strong reason to consumers for scanning them. Taking the above three examples, the Shoppers Stop ad provides a place of prominence to the QR code and promises “delightfully low prices” by scanning it; the QR code was snuck in a corner of the ad by The Body Shop and contained no explanatory text to incent the reader to scan it; not only is the QR code in the DATAQUEST ad prominently located but it also serves as a mobile coupon by offering 5% discount on the already-discounted subscription rates. We won’t be surprised if DQ and Shopper’s Stop achieve far greater consumer engagement with their QR codes.

RELATED LINKS:

Use QR Codes To Create Augmented Reality & Bolster Conversion Of Leads To Deals

Use High-Tech With Caution In Ads

Who Will Bell The ‘QR Code Reader’ Cat?

In Part 1 of this blog post, we’d compared the realtime SMS alerts for credit card transactions sent out by  two banks, BANK1 and BANK2. In this Part 2, we’ll look at these SMS alerts as ‘products’ and see how well they work for the customer towards detecting and preventing fraudulent credit card transactions.

Both banks permit the following modes of card usage.

1. Card Present One-Off. This is the most common usage scenario in which the cardholder physically hands over the card to the merchant to pay for product or service. Authorization happens for that specific purchase transaction.
2. Card Not Present One-Off: In this typical online usage scenario, the cardholder makes a purchase on a website, enters the card details on the merchant’s website, and authorizes that specific purchase transaction.
3. Card Not Present Recurring: The merchant picks up the customer’s card details from file and uses them to execute recurring transactions on the basis of a one time authorization issued by the cardholder.

As seen earlier, BANK1’s alert is not detailed enough to work for the third usage scenario. As a result, it doesn’t really fulfill its purpose of alerting the cardholder to potential fraud, let alone help them prevent it, under all usage scenarios.

We can easily foresee BANK1 defending its product by arguing that the cardholder could visit Internet Banking to find out more details and judge the veracity of the transaction. That argument would fall flat for more than one reason: One, it defeats the basic purpose of using an everywhere-everytime-on channel like mobile phone. Two, it demands more effort from the cardholder. Three, and most importantly, it won’t work anyway: While SMS alerts come in realtime, card transactions are posted only a couple of days later on Internet Banking.  A visit to Internet Banking immediately upon receipt of an SMS alert wouldn’t reveal the existence of the transaction, let alone its underlying details.

If BANK1 continued to defend its defective product design by telling the cardholder to remind themselves to go the Internet Banking portal a couple of days later, I imagine that many people – including me – will go to another bank instead.

BANK2 has gone the extra mile and designed its SMS alert product in a more comprehensive manner. By delivering more detailed information, its SMS alert clearly accomplishes the goal of alerting cardholders to potential fraud.

2-way SMS Alert

On the face of it, the difference between the two products might appear trivial to a product manager but, to a customer, it makes all the difference between a good and a bad product. We wish there was a better way of putting this, but the plain and simple fact is, BANK2’s product works and BANK1’s product does not. Worse still, the sloppy design of BANK1’s product leads to False-Positives, induces anxiety and asks the customer jump several hoops to derive any actionable intelligence from it.

Now, moving on to the second goal of the product, namely to prevent fraud, let’s look at how these two products fare. Supposing a cardholder spots a fraud, what should she do? As per current design, the cardholder has to call the bank’s call center to report this transaction. We all know how painful that could be, especially for something as time critical as this.

We wish banks implement 2-way SMS alerts – yes, they’re already available  - such that the cardholder can reply with a simple “STOP” message to block a fraudulent transaction.

For banks who think we’re perhaps asking for too much, we’re not: We admit we could be victims of a common consumer affliction that is so succinctly expressed by the German saying “Waehrend des Essens kommt das Appetit“, which translates to “the appetite grows during the meal”. At the same time, like most consumers, we recognize that “there is no free lunch” and might be open to paying a nominal charge for the advanced version of this product. This could create an additional revenue stream for banks, which isn’t something they would want to sneeze at, especially in this post Dodd-Frank-Durbin era of the tight squeeze exercised by regulators on overdraft, interchange and other traditional sources of fee income.

I recently realized that wherever I go, malls follow.

My mall karma started when I was working in Ramco Systems in Chennai, India. Located in the basement of Apex Plaza in Nungambakkam High Road in the late ‘nineties, my office was adjacent to Landmark. Now a part of the TATA Group with countrywide presence through several stores selling books and music, Landmark was then a single bookstore. When its management decided to enter music, the store needed more space and took over our side of the floor. And out we went – to the third floor of the same building.

Phoenix Market City, Pune-Nagar Road, Pune

Then came my stint at the headquarters of Zensar Technologies in Pune, India, in 2003. My office was located in a building on Pune-Nagar Road that was a famous landmark in Pune for several decades. Although I moved on from Zensar in 2004, the office location remained on my radar since it’s close to my home in Kalyaninagar. Around 2005 or so, Zensar sold this plot and moved to a new facility. For the next 3-4 years, we were seeing some massive construction activity happening there on a “stealth” mode. Only around six months ago did it become widely known that this was the site of one ‘Phoenix Market City’, a mall. And so it turned out that yet another of my office locations became a mall.

While I haven’t been able check the current state of some of my ex-offices in Ruwi (Muscat, Oman), Niederrad (Frankfurt, Germany), Dreieich (near Frankfurt) and Marsh Wall (London, UK), I won’t be surprised if I were to find that they’ve made way for glitzy new malls.

Readers of the iconic Catch-22 might recall the character of Chief White Halfoat: Every place Chief White Halfoat pitched his tent, oil companies would sink a well and hit oil. When I’d read the book around thirty years ago, I found its characters hilarious but never imagined that I’d come across their likeness in real-life. Around 2-3 years ago, I started having second thoughts when I read about  Charles Tyrwhitt and COBRA. Now, with malls following one after the other of my offices, Catch-22 started to seem not only increasingly plausible but chillingly autobiographical!

I’ve decided to take the bull by the horns with my latest move. My present office in Regus Business Center is actually located inside a – ahem – mall (Connaught Place in Pune, India)! Instead of malls following me, I’ve started following malls and succeeded in reversing my mall karma!

Credit card holders in India might have noticed of late that they’re receiving SMS alerts on their mobile phones each time they use their cards. I’m not sure if this is a bank/card-specific initiative or the outcome of some new government regulation applicable across the industry, but I’ve been receiving these notifications from the issuers of both my Visa credit cards since the middle of June.

At the outset, let me thank both banks for this new ‘product’.

Since these alerts occur in realtime, I guess they’re primarily intended to help cardholders to detect fraudulent transactions rather than to serve as a budgeting / expense tracking tool. I can’t be sure of their true purpose since I never received any communication from these two banks when this product was launched.

As I’d pointed out in this post a few months ago in a different context, a little extra effort at communication on the part of banks can go a long way in fostering customer retention and customer delight. However, I won’t complain if these banks have chosen to stay silent either out of humility or the desire to stay below the radar of one CNSC. This Miami, FL-based company sued Visa for launching a few pilots of something similar in the USA last year, claiming that it infringed upon its patent on the underlying technology. (I don’t know how SMS can qualify for a patent, but I’ll let that one pass for now).

Assuming my guess is right, let’s see how these SMS alerts help cardholders detect fraud in realtime.

First, let’s look at a couple of recent alerts I received from BANK1, a large multinational bank headquartered in the UK and active in India for several decades.

SMS Alerts From BANK1

Since I’d handed over my credit card at a store for a purchase of INR 2370.00 on 21-Jul-2011, I could be sure that the first transaction was genuine.

Now, when I received the second alert, the card was tucked away safely inside my wallet. I’d neither handed it over to anyone nor used it online. However, for all I knew, this could’ve been an alert for one of many genuine card not present transactions put through by a merchant on the back of a recurring mandate issued by me before. Such recurring transactions based on a one-time approval are very common among American merchants (e.g. Hostgator for website hosting, Skype for monthly calling plans) and have recently started making an appearance in India as well (e.g. Regus for office rentals). Since they don’t require case-by-case approval, such transactions don’t always ring a bell at the exact instant that I receive the alert. Exacerbating the ambiguity is the fact that, while the mandate amount would be a constant figure in US$ or some other foreign currency (say US$ 8), the amount displayed on the SMS alert is in INR and varies from transaction to transaction depending upon the USD:INR prevalent on that day. If this alert was the result of transaction coming out of some such pre-issued mandate, it didn’t signal a fraud.

On the other hand, the alert could equally well have been triggered by a card not present transaction initiated by a con artist who had stolen my credit card details or a fraudulent merchant to whom I have not issued a recurring mandate.

Point is, without the merchant’s name in the SMS alert, it’s difficult – well-nigh impossible if you do a lot of CNP transactions like me – to figure out the authenticity of a transaction.

Now, let’s look at the following alert from BANK2, which is a Top3 Indian private sector bank.

SMS Alerts from BANK2

As you can see, these alerts provide valuable extra information viz. the merchant name and the time of transactions. Using these additional details, it’s much easier to differentiate between genuine and fraudulent transactions: Since I’ve never dealt with anyone called KUMARAUTO, I could conclude that the first transaction was fraudulent the moment I received the SMS alert. Whereas, since I’ve signed a mandate with HOSTGATOR for auto debit of monthly website hosting charges, the second transaction was genuine.

In Part-2 of this post, we’ll look at these SMS alerts as a ‘product’ and see how well they work for the customer towards detecting and then preventing fraudulent credit card transactions. Spoiler Alert: One bank’s product rocks, the other one’s product sucks, and the difference is in the details.

Those of you familiar with the world of search before Google would know that Google’s search engine attained massive following because of its blazing speed and exhaustive coverage of the Internet. Awed by the speed of Google Search across billions of websites spread in the far corners of the world wide web, have you ever wondered

1. Why does it take far longer to do a Windows Search of your PC’s hard disk?
2. Why do search results on one website leave a lot to be desired even when you’re using Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) to conduct your search?
3. Why is it so hard to find a particular transaction within your Internet Banking transaction history?
4. Why is it even more difficult to search for a particular post or comment on a blog? As TechCrunch says, “TechCrunch has published thousands of blog posts over its nearly 5 and a half years. Many are good one-day stories, some we’d like to forget, but others are gems. These classics are just as interesting today as when they were first written … But try discovering them. It’s nearly impossible.” By the way, TC uses Google CSE for site search.

I’ve obsessed over this subject for a long time. Only recently I learned that this is not a problem with any specific website. Since Google and many other search engines rank a web page on the basis of backlinks to it from other websites, they fail to do a good job within a website where the concept of backlinks doesn’t apply.

Is there a solution to this problem, then?

Looks like I stumbled on to one.

I was recently trying to recall the name of a PPC search engine about which I’d read a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago. When I used Google CSE to find this post on TC, I got long list of results but none of them took me to the right one.

I was about to give up in exasperation when it suddenly struck me that, like most posts on TechCrunch, this one also might’ve been retweeted a few times. I did a Twitter Search for “TechCrunch PPC” and struck paydirt. There were only two results to go through and both of them took me to the TC post that I was looking for.

Given the realtime nature of Twitter, I’m not sure if its search would be as effective a few days or weeks later, but for now, it works!

In Part 1 of this post, we’d introduced the new crop of cloud-based providers of A/B testing solutions. To do a quick recap, Optimizely, Unbounce and other providers of such solutions do all the heavy duty lifting on the cloud, freeing up website designers to focus on the business side of optimizing their web pages. Designers don’t need to do any programming. By adding one line of code to their websites, they trigger the A/B testing and leave it to the service providers to handle the rest. Some providers like Optimizely provide many popular metrics out-of-the-box viz. engagement (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked any part of the experiment page) and signup (i.e. percentage of visitors who triggered Sign Up).

EMAIL360 Original Page

We were recently curious to find out if there was any scope for improvement in the text and color of the CTA (call to action) element on the homepage of our EMAIL360 website. As the screenshot on the right shows, the original page had the somewhat geeky “Get this widget!” text inside a somewhat staid gray-color button. This probably echoed the flawed assumption of the original design team that EMAIL360 would be used by programmers who knew what widget meant and didn’t bother about aesthetics. However, we had no intention of restricting EMAIL360 to the geek squad. In fact, it has more value for small and medium businesses who lack much IT support. Therefore, we started wondering if changing the text to something less technical (e.g. “Sign up!”) and the color to something more attractive (orange / blue) would make a significant difference to conversion i.e. percentage of visitors who actually entered their details and clicked this button to collect the widget code. Since there was no definitive answer to this subjective question, we decided to carry out an A/B test.

Put off by Wingify / Visual Website Optimizer, who was the first vendor we contacted, we used Optimizely for our A/B test. Our test was conducted on the original page and four variants of button text and color i.e. five versions in total. To illustrate, variant 4  matched the original page’s text (”Get this widget!”) but sported a more attractive blue color.

Original Page versus Variant 4

As promised by Optimizely on its website, we didn’t have to do any programming while specifying the different versions of the page. We used five metrics, including the most key one, namely, sign-up. We ran the experiment for around two weeks, which was the time it took for the results to reach statistical significance.

A/B Test Results

On the engagement metric (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked any part of the experiment page), all five versions performed fairly similarly. Whereas, when we looked at the key signup metric (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked the “Get this widget!” button), we found a significant difference between the five versions. Our original page had a paltry 5.8% conversion whereas Variant 4 delivered more than 3X conversion at 16.7%.

The writing was the wall. Thanks to Optimizely, we acquired a strong scientific basis on which to take the following decisions:

• Don’t change the button text
• Change the button color

We implemented the above change to the homepage of EMAIL360 and have since seen a sharp uplift in customers.

It’s worth noting at this point that the incremental customers we acquired subsequent to our A/B testing came from absolutely no increase in website traffic. In other words, A/B testing fits into the CONVERT – rather than ATTRACT – stage of inbound marketing and logically forms a part of our suite of Frictionless Online Interaction Solutions.

We’d like to take this opportunity to laud Optimizely for its excellent understanding of our situation and prompt support at all crucial times of the experiment. The next time we intend doing A/B testing for ourselves or our customers, we won’t look anywhere else. For the value Optimizely delivers, its price is hardly a pocket-pincher. For vendors like Wingify / Visual Website Optimizer who bungle on the very first base and seem to lack any go to market theme other than low cost, our experience should serve as an eye-opener: Genuine customers will always pay for value and won’t buy products that lack in value even if their sellers give them away free.

I’ve traditionally been buying books regularly to feed my self-admittedly voracious reading habit. A few months ago, I started running into a severe space crunch in my bookshelf and therefore decided to borrow books instead of buying them.

However, my experience with book lending libraries hasn’t been anything to write home about. Over the last 12-18 months, I’ve tried and given up on two online libraries, Librarywala.com and BooksAtHome.in. I’ve written about my woes with the former in a previous post (in short, erratic logistics and q’jacking). While the latter has decent logistics and is insulated from q’jacking since it doesn’t use a queue, its collection of books simply sucks. It accepts recommendations for new books from its members but doesn’t seem to do anything about them for weeks. My plan entitles me to borrow two books at a time. When I recently found it impossible for the third time in a row to find the second book to add to my shopping cart – which is what its website uses in the absence of the queueing feature that’s common to leading online rental companies – I decided to bid farewell to BooksAtHome.in.

At about this time, I came across JustBooks. From its newspaper insert, this library seemed to blend the online and brick-and-mortar worlds in an innovative fashion. A trip to its nearest store confirmed my first impression.

Unlike the aforementioned online libraries that deliver and pick up books from your home/office based on your online actions, you need to visit a JustBooks’ physical store location to borrow and return books (unless you sign up for its AVID READER plan, more on that in a moment).

However, JustBooks makes excellent use of technology in its stores to deliver a superior customer experience. Its membership card and books have embedded RFID chips in them. To have new books issued or to return read books, you place your membership card and the stack of books on a kiosk located at the front of the store. The kiosk recognizes you based on the RFID chip embedded in the membership card and automatically logs you into your account. You simply tap on the ISSUE or the RETURN button. The kiosk automatically reads the names of all books in the stack at one go – no scanning one barcode at a time. You confirm the list, logout and off you go. That’s it.

Now, if you sign up for JustBooks’ highest end plan called AVID READER, you get to experience “order online, ship from in-store inventory”, which is one of the most cutting-edge omnichannel retailing practices according to analysts like RSR Research. Customers of this plan can order a book on JustBooks’ website and the nearest physical store will deliver it to their homes. I asked the owner of a JustBooks franchise how it could afford the cost of home delivery, especially in the low value book lending business. She told me that that JustBooks is hoping to recover the higher costs through substantially higher revenues. This is entirely possible considering that the store-to-home feature is restricted to JustBooks’ most expensive membership plan. Unlike other plans where customers pay a small amount on a monthly basis and can walk out anytime after the initial three months’ lockout period, the costliest plan locks in the customer with an upfront payment for one full year, which results in 20X greater revenues. As an aside, this example shows that it’s possible to adopt innovative practices that fulfill customer’s needs better, and, in the process, upsell and boost topline without necessarily sacrificing bottomline.

It’s still early days for me with JustBooks. Much as I found their process and technology innovative, I wasn’t too impressed with their staff. One of them was perpetually grumpy, another was highly patronizing and the third one couldn’t speak English and doesn’t belong in a lending library for English books. They might need one more kiosk to handle peak rush. I don’t like it that they charge a 2% ‘convenience fee’ for paying monthly fees online. They keep whining about accepting credit card payment for monthly fees even though they confirmed to me at the time of signing up that I could always pay by credit card and also prominently display a “credit card welcome” sticker on their door. Given my not-so-great experience with the two aforementioned online libraries, I’m keeping my fingers crossed with JustBooks. But, whether I stick around around with JustBooks or eventually order another bookshelf, its novel business practice and innovative use of technology must be noted. Consider  it done.

Beneath their hoods, software applications and websites may be all science but there’s a lot of art on their surface. There’s no right answer when it comes to screen layout, color schemes, navigation flows and other design elements. While one designer might prefer an orange button over a black background, another would swear by a white background and blue button. Some etailers might be satisfied with basic credit card validation, fearing that CVV, VbV and other stronger authentication methods might turn off an average online shopper whereas others might want to minimize their fraud risk and let the shopper be ferried around by electronic payment gateways across third-party websites before bringing them back to their own website to issue the order confirmation.

Traditionally, gut feeling has played a strong role in deciding what option to choose when it comes to the aforementioned design elements.

However, website owners, etailers and designers are aware that even small changes in design could have a major impact on the conversion of browsers to buyers, so they’re forever  looking for scientific techniques to help them with their decision making instead of leaving it totally to their gut. Traditionally, they’ve relied on surveys and focus groups. However, in today’s world, such techniques are not really adequate. Witness, for example, the fate of BORDERS and Barnes & Noble who continue to close stores across the nation even as they managed to take the top two spots in Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index that is based on surveys.

What if designers had a way to test their alternative designs using live traffic instead of relying on the verdict of a bunch of community testers?

With online A/B testing, they do. Designers select one or more conversion actions on a given web page and model two versions of that page. They split their live traffic into two parts and route one through version 1 and the other, through version 2. By measuring the conversion metrics on each version of the page, they can scientifically conclude which version fares better.

In the above illustration, a click on the “Sign up!” button by a website visitor would be an important conversion action. The two versions of the webpage are Design A and Design B which have different background and button color as shown in the above diagram. If an A/B testing indicates that (say) Design B converts better – that is, has a higher percentage of visitors who clicked the “Sign up!” button – the designer would be in a position to scientifically decide that Design B is the way to go and ditch Design A.

While A/B testing as a statistical tool has been around for a long time, its use in software design has been restricted. Despite early adoption from the likes of Amazon, A/B testing never went past the realm of the big e-commerce players. The reason isn’t hard to figure: While designing an A/B test and developing multiple versions of a page (or sets of pages) are quite simple, executing the test demands close coordination between the designer and the hosting provider in order to activate the right version of the page at the right time, manually record traffic and conversion for each version, and jump a few more hoops.

Google tried to mitigate some of the pain involved in executing A/B testing with its Google Website Optimizer launched a few years ago. However, according to anecdotal evidence, GWO didn’t go far enough and A/B testing remained too difficult for the average website owner.

No longer.

A new crop of cloud-based solutions from Optimizely and a couple of other companies makes A/B testing easy. These companies do all the heavy lifting on the cloud and free up designers to focus on the business side of optimizing their pages.

EMAIL360 Original Page

We recently wanted to carry out an A/B test to figure out the best possible button text and color for the “Get this widget” button on the home page of our EMAIL360 website.

At about this time, we’d read about Wingify / VisualWebsiteOptimizer in a local newspaper, and signed up with it. Unfortunately, VWO couldn’t track even elementary conversion actions like a button click. As a result, we decided to abandon it. We got an email from its founder a day later. Although we’d set up our experiment on Wingify’s website, its founder’s email showed no prior knowledge of what we’d attempted to do, and why we failed. We replied back asking them to review our experiment and tell us how to proceed. Instead, their response was, like, duh. This send major alarm bells ringing in our mind. Since we knew the basics of A/B testing, we weren’t sure how Wingify would handle more complicated questions that would inevitably crop up as we went deeper into the execution of our experiment and decided to stop dealing with it.

We then decided to check out Optimizely, a startup we were quite impressed with when we’d read about its launch around a year ago.  Thank goodness we did that. Whatever our  experiment needed, we found them easily on Optimizely. Its founder, Dan Siroker, himself stepped in with help at crucial times. It was commendable that a person of his pedigree – Director Analytics for Obama Campaign and Google Chrome Product Manager - was personally involved during the whole process, “getting” our questions immediately and reverting back with crystal clear, actionable responses within reasonable time.

In Part-2 of this post, we’ll share the findings of the A/B testing done on the EMAIL360 website using Optimizely (Spoiler Alert: We learned that the original design had a lot of scope for improvement!). Stay tuned.

Crossword, Landmark and other physical bookstores in India would surely be aware of the fate of BORDERS, the leading American bookseller that recently filed for bankruptcy protection and closed down its stores after years of getting thrashed by Amazon and other online bookstores.

I was recently complaining to the manager of a CROSSWORD store that its prices – no discount on the list prices printed on the back covers of the books – were simply too high compared to the 15-30% discounts offered by various online booksellers like @Flipkart. He agreed with me and defended his prices on the basis of the higher cost structure of a brick-and-mortar store. Apparently, Crossword pays INR 3-5 Lacs (equivalent of US$ 6,666 – 11,111) per month just in rent for a typical store in an upscale retail location. Add salaries, utilities and other costs, and I was supposed to get the drift and fork out the extra cash happily. Thankfully, he probably realized that we were well into the second decade of the 21st century, and spared me the standard spiel that many others would’ve given under such situations about how online shopping could never match the touch-and-feel experience afforded by a physical store.

I began wondering that day if Crossword was heading towards a ‘BORDERS moment’.

Today, I became convinced that it was, indeed.

While trying to find out its Twitter handle – it’s @crossword_book, by the way - I discovered today that Crossword has an online store. In fact, its online prices were substantially lower than its store prices for many books I checked. Besides, shipping was free.

For a brief moment, I wondered why Crossword’s store manager never told me that I could buy books cheaper at Crossword’s own online store when I was grilling him about the lower prices offered by its pure-play Internet competitors. I then realized the answer to that question in a flash: Like BORDERS, the physical store and web are probably two different channels for Crossword and never the twain shall meet.

While Crossword surely knows what happened to BORDERS, it might be enlightened to note that BORDERS faced a ‘BORDERS moment’ not because it didn’t have an online presence. Despite having a website that rivalled Amazon’s in variety and prices, BORDERS sank because it had never managed to integrate its online store into its organizational psyche. Employees of BORDERS’ stores rarely promoted its website even if that meant losing business to Amazon and other online competitors.

I see parallels at Crossword, which is why I’m convinced that it is hurtling towards a BORDERS moment. But, since e-commerce is not yet mainstream in India, Crossword can easily escape BORDERS’ fate.

How? By behaving in a channel-agnostic manner in front of customers.

Will that happen by itself? No chance.

Can Crossword make it happen immediately with the wave of a magic wand? Doubtful.

Will Crossword bite the bullet and bring about the required internal transformation to make sure it happens soon enough to escape the BORDERS moment? Probably. Only time will tell.