Tag: Web

Financial Services: A sunrise sector

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

In any developing economy, the one thing that’s always on the rise is the GDP, the expenditures and yes, the expendable income available with an individual.

Over a period of time, the same individual realises that keeping money in the bank is the same as wasting that money away. This is due to the high inflation rates that developing economies have. With a saving interest rate of 5-6% and an inflation rate of 11%, the opportunity cost of keeping money in the bank is a whooping 8% (give or take a few basis points).

Soon, this individual will start looking at a portfolio of financial investments to get better returns on his savings. Depending upon the risk appetite, he will choose between vehicles such as Mutual Funds, Bonds, Commodities and more. These are Financial Services … a rising sector in all developing economies.

In fact, with a rising economy, you will find a host of international firms looking to set-up shop in that country. With international firms come top-paid jobs. In this case, jobs in the Financial Services sector. Careers in some of the top financial institutes of the world.

Needless to say that such specific and specialized knowledge work requires specialized people to find the right people for the task. Of course there are sites such as Monster, et al for your normal run of the mill jobs, but what about specialized portals for financial services?

I came across AP Executive, which does executive recruitment for some of the top financial institutes in the world. Recruitment is a big cost driver for many companies and most organizations have a clear cut recruitment policy. In the past 6 months or so, we have seen recruitment on the rise, even in developed nations. Sectoral growth leads to higher recruitment, better players, more competition and finally a better consumer experience.

After what happened nearly 4 years ago, it is great to see this growth in the past year or so. Put the right people behind the wheel and there will be success. Financial Services as a sector shows great promise and increasing dividends … but only if the right people are in the leadership positions.

Jinx’s awesome service

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

I have always been a fan of Diablo, and even better cool Diablo T-shirts that I can wear at work. Jinx, is one of the few online e-commerce fronts which provides such products. This is the story of their service, and what makes this entire event worth mentioning!

Prelude

It was the 6th of June, and my family wanted to gift me some clothes for my birthday which was in the next month (9th July). So after great deliberation and going through their broad choice of shirts, I finally decided to purchase 4 shirts and opted to ship them to India using the basic shipping method, that’s USPS.

Now, for those of you who have not shipping anything from abroad, keep in mind that USPS is the US equivalent of the Indian Post Office (I certainly was not!!). What this means, is that they are as efficient as their Indian counterparts!

Eternal Wait

I ordered the goods, and the expected date of delivery was after 20 odd days. Great, no problem. After a good 20 days, the dispatch was yet to arrive. So I started tracking the dispatch. Turns out that USPS does not provide tracking of the dispatch once it leaves the American shores. That means, its pretty much lost in the darkness!!

Thus, started my period of eternal wait. Everyday I would try following up with different agencies – USPS customer center (as bad if not worse than their Indian counterpart), Indian Customs Office (try find their number online, even Google fails!), Indian Postal Office (who keep directing you to different numbers).

Re-Shipped!

With the d-day close, I got in touch with the folks at Jinx and informed them about the lack of tracking. The support was understanding and they immediately shipped a second shipment. This was due to arrive in India by the end of July. The shipping was still the same, USPS, which meant that I would face the same problem tracking the shipment. As expected, tracking shipment was an impossible task (we visited the GPO, the local PO, the Customs Office), no luck.

Now I was getting pissed off, and quite disappointed, two shipments dispatched and not one was being tracked. I gave up hope and did not follow-up for another month.

And there shall be Light!

Finally, in the month of August (near 25th or so), I dropped the support person a mail, and asked what can be done regarding this issue. This time around, they verified my shipping address and informed me that they would be using the premium shipping method … whew, I was glad to be rid of USPS service!! Or so I thought, the premium service used USPS in the backend as well! Contacting them was even more futile and I had more or less given up all hope of those 100 dollars that I had spent 3 months back.

It was the first week of September, when I received a call from my wife, and she informed me that a shipment had indeend arrived and it was from Jinx! I was elated .. finally the package had arrived!!

Thank you Jinx!

Not only was this service patient and understanding, but also they were willing to go the extra mile and provide me outstanding service. The package delivery was not exactly their problem, however, they owned the delivery and ensured that it finally was delivered. Good show on you folks!

Using Bugzilla

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

At Pristine, the team I am leading has a gargantuan task at hand. We are creating a custom Learning Management System (LMS) in addition with a completely overhauled new website for the international audience. This entire process of planning and detailing the products feature-wise has taken roughly 2 months, but it is well worth it. Continue reading “Using Bugzilla” →

Dominos goes online

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My family loves pizzas, so whenever we spend a lazy holiday, we generally order for them. Unfortunately Pizza Hut does not deliver in my area :-(, and the other niche brands take quite some time do deliver their wares. So we have adjusted our palates to enjoy Dominos. I don’t have anything against Dominos, no … in fact I have begun to enjoy their thin crust pizzas a lot (even when they get stale!). So when my wife asked me to find Dominos coupons, I did a quick Google and clicked on few of the top links.

Interestingly enough, one of the links was an ad by Dominos themselves. They are running ads on branded keywords, interesting I thought. On the landing page, I noticed that they are providing a decent coupon (50% off on 2nd pizza) if you order online.

The Domino’s storefront is pretty simple with you getting a list of pizzas and side orders which you can customize. No great shakes. Not a bad experience though, but nothing to ooh and ahh about. After adding the orders to the cart, I proceeded to check-out. On check-out, I was given an order receipt and also given the address and phone number of the store who would fulfill my delivery. Unfortunately, the facility for entering your own address was not that great, and I ended up entering only part of my address. After 10-15 minutes when there was no communication from Dominos (except the order confirmation with the partial address), I got a bit worried and called up the store responsible for the order fulfillment.

Now here’s the kicker, after I contacted them, they decided to check whether my address comes in their area! The order was confirmed, but the operator was prudent enough to provide me a disclaimer that it may take longer than 30 minutes! As I sat down and write this down, the delivery guy rang the doorbell (well within 30 minutes!).

All in all, it was a good experience – however the customer touch points need to be appraised of this online transition (had the operator whom I contacted been a bit more well informed about the online store, then my experience would have been far better!).

Btw, here’s the coupon code I used – FRIFRK50, and you can redeem it here.

Google Analytic’s URL Builder

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

Aside from being EduPristine’s CTO, I also happen to be my company’s webmaster. I really do not mind this task, in fact I think its one of the most under-rated jobs out there in the market.

The cool part about this role is how closely you have to work with the Google ecosystem of Analytics, Adwords and Webmaster tools. The thing about Google products is that many people might know about them, but how many of them use it the way they are intended to be?

In my quest to find the right person I have interviewed so many professionals, that its not funny. Almost all of them put everything but the kitchen sink on their resumes. That might be a good idea, but they all of them come down crashing in the interview. A royal waste of time.

In case if you want to differentiate yourself from the horde of wannabes out there, this is one of the things that you have to know!!

URL Builder Tool

Here’s the link to the tool.

* Ta-da! and all the fanfare *

What this tool allows you to do is allow you to track a segment of the visits which are generated on the provided link to be tracked as an individual campaign! The reason why anyone should be excited, is that now you can slice and dice all incoming links to your website (provided you can alter the incoming links).

Some of the ways in which it can be used is –

  • Tracking a segment of your traffic which is coming via an online-ad – For example, I could put a banner ad on Timesjob, or some site. I could also have posted a job posting there with my website’s URL in the job description. Now instead of relying on the simply the data from Referral traffic to measure the ROI of this ad campaign, I can give them a generated URL and track it without worrying about any other source of traffic
  • Email Campaigns clicks can now be tracked as a segment. With a little help of Goals and Conversions, I can calculate the ROI on a per email basis
  • You can even measure the effectiveness of traffic being generated from different properties on your website

Well, this is just the start, you can go pretty much wild with this tool. Just remember folks! Slice and Dice data for better control and tracking.

CRM is the new website

Prasad Ajinkya5 Comments

Back in 2000, the dot com market in India was booming. Every company who wanted to have it’s presence online was scrambling to find domain names, hosting, email solutions, etc. Companies such as Net4India sprung up and came up with offerings with ridiculous prices (some of these offerings still exist to date!). Executives bought these websites thinking that somehow building a website would translate into revenues. In fact even today, the average “Indian IT company” continues to dole out development costs of websites propelled by content management systems (CMS) to be around 5-6 lakhs. If you are lucky, then that figure can go as high as 14-15 lakhs :-) !!

What was the mistake then?

The single minded assumption that building a website will translate into revenues.

I still see folks who nurture this piece of ticking bomb waiting to explode and set their businesses to ruins. As a result, all derived-demand business also went bustville. It took a fair amount of years to clear the damage, and come back on track.

So why bring this up Now?

These days, whomsoever that I am talking (and you can include me in this list as well!!), is thinking about having an online enterprise. A sweet setup, where the person can run a business irrespective of where this aforesaid individual is. There are more than a fair share of success stories around, and these people have become heralded role models.

Yes, the online dream can become true. Yes.

Feels good to hear these words, don’t they? These days I am seeing a lot more structured approach, newsletters, opt-in forms, CRM systems, mass emailing systems, affiliate management systems, advertising networks, etc … the systems are all there. People just need to start using them and start churning the proverbial money mill.

But …

Back then it was IT firms, now I am seeing a large growth of Digital Marketing firms. It’s the same plot, just the players are different now. Organizations are again back to setting up websites, now with complex marketing and sales systems. But how are you doing in terms of sales? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

If you do own a website, could you share with me what are the plans that you are thinking of to generate sales? Are you creating value to generate those sales?

The Blue Nothing Digest

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

The internet is virtually an infinite source of inspiration, great news, stupidity and entertainment. I thought that I might share some gems which are either relevant to me, or which I think you might find interesting.

  • It’s been a month that I have been a father of two, oh, we are going to name him Malhar!
  • Hilarious sledging of Delhi boys, by a Madrasan (damn, that post has generated 2.3k comments in a week!)
  • My organization got funded last week, by the very firm which funded some awesome products such as Facebook, Bittorrent, etc.
  • The Big K from CrazyEngineers embarks on a Journey of a Lifetime

Oh, in case you are wondering what the heck is Blue Nothing, it’s a term I read in one interesting novel on Social Engineering (and it’s evils). The internet is the Blue Nothing!