Week in, week out…

So it’s been about 9 days since I joined here at Chaupaati and yes its fun. Boy, am I blown away by the amount of work we accomplish on a daily basis. Although my checklist is just a few lines, some checklists that I have seen here require entire white boards. Basically we are a phone commerce company that caters to both online and offline mode of commerce. So what have I learnt in these past few days? Let me jot it down.

First I learnt the value of customer feedback. In a business like ours where we do this 24*7*365, customer feedback is one of the foundation stones. If the customer is not happy your business can’t be doing the best it can. As a part of an exercise I called up some of our Amar Chitra Katha customers. And I was surprised to hear the feedback. Here’s an example:

Yashad (Y): Hello am I speaking to Mr. X?

X: Yes, who is this?

Y: Hello Sir, this is Yashad calling from Chaupaati Bazaar, do you have a few minutes?

X: Yes, go on.

Y: Sir, you ordered a few products from our website from ACK; I just wanted to know your user feedback.

X: I could navigate through your website easily; I found what I wanted and would like to tell you that your call centre guys are very good. They are very resourceful. They gave me every bit of information that I wanted.

Y: Anything else, sir?

X: No, I will keep shopping from Chaupaati. I like it.

Y: Thank you sir, have a nice day!

An interesting case was when I called up a lady and she said that she and her son both love ACK products. They own many of the titles that we have uploaded on our site, and so they visited our site to see if they could find the titles that they didn’t have. Interestingly the lady told me that she isn’t technologically savvy so she had her son sit on the computer and tell her what books he wanted to order! “It’s very nice that you have ACK in your catalogue, I liked shopping with you, will definitely tell all my friends that I have found a good place to buy ACK from.”

A third and perhaps most interesting of all the cases was from one of our abroad customers in Dubai.

“Wow

I got my order already today…..So quick and so efficient….SO EXCITED…..going to start reading them ASAP.

Thank you”

That’s the mail he sent, after our delivery reached him in 3 days instead of 15.

Phone commerce isn’t a simple to pull off. That’s the second of my learnings here. Imagine that you are ordering for a product via the phone and want it delivered to your doorstep. So we have to do everything from answering your call to getting you the delivery in good condition within the specified time. Try to mentally map the steps you may take while you do this. Once you have that in place multiply that several times and now you know the intricacies of the business. Well, try sending your next door neighbor a package via post. Once you have visited a DTDC or a Vichare you will know how tough it can get.

Putting together the machinery that does this seems to me like a hard nut to crack. Imagine that you have to get a catalogue from every brand, host a website, get permissions, upload your catalogue online, acquire a phone line, and set up a call centre to handle calls and you are done with only step one. Order processing and fulfillment are the other side of this coin. But the job has only begun here. You constantly have to get customer feedback and better yourself. Have I mentioned Sales yet? Okay, sales is the third part of this process, since we constantly get real time data from our call centre, we have to put it into an understandable medium so we can comprehend it and generate more sales.

Here we as designers, catalogue managers and sales executives have to think of each new idea in two ways. One from our point of view and secondly how the end user will think about it. This effectively doubles up our work load. We learnt about web designing in XIC but I never knew that what we do here in about a 100 times tougher than that. It’s not always about hyperlinking photos to static pages. We conveniently take that for granted as well. So in conclusion:

• Phone commerce is a very demanding business

• It is heavily based on customer feedback

• Getting your operations right is only part of the process.

So do visit our website www.chaupaati.in and give us your feedback.

Have I mentioned that I like what I do here? Well, for the record, I do. More on that later. Its time to get cracking!