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Customer Focused Supply Chain Strategies
by Tony Hines, PhD In this article, I want to discuss what it means to be customer-focused and to develop customer-focused supply chain strategies. I will define and explain what I mean when I talk about customer-focused supply chain strategies and why everyone benefits when supply chain strategies are customer-focused and demand-driven. About thirty years ago I decided the one thing absent…
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Presenting Collections: A new way to feed your fancy
As American food writer Mary Fisher rightly said, "First we eat, then we do everything else". It's fair to say all of us spend a good part of our lives trying to answer the "where should I go to eat (or drink ;)) today?" question. At Zomato, we'd like to believe that we've spoilt you for choice more often than not with our exhaustive coverage of restaurants. In the version of Zomato that we released last month, we made a mistake by looking at the wrong data set and taking out the "Top trending restaurants" section on Zomato. What followed was a deluge of emails asking why we removed this feature. That got us wondering about what we'd got wrong. We realised that a lot of our users open Zomato with no idea about what to search for. They just want to go out, and have a good time. This is where the "Top trending restaurants" kicked in. It was a list of popular restaurants in town — something that helped our users browse and decide quickly. We also took a deep dive into popular search queries on Zomato, which revealed that users look for very specific types of places to go — for example, you might be wondering where to take your significant other for a romantic dinner, or where you can find a microbrewery to beat the heat. So we decided to take the solution to this need gap a notch further by giving you a starting point based on popular themes and occasions, instead of you having to structure your thoughts into a search query. From today, Collections have you covered if you find yourself staring at the search bar not knowing what to search for.
From ravioli to romance
Collections are bite-sized lists of restaurants in your city that cover various themes and occasions to make deciding where to go easier than ever. We've worked hard to create Collections based on each city's unique flavours as well as seasonal trends. For example, you can gorge on the best burgers London has to offer, find pet-friendly restaurants in Bangalore that'll let you bring a furry friend along, or even have your tastebuds seduced by a master-chef at one of the celebrity chef restaurants in Dubai. The restaurants you see in Collections are picked by our intelligent algorithm, and then vetted by our in-house team of foodie ninjas to ensure only the tastiest get through.
Looks great, tastes better
Collections package the best your city has to offer into a simple, visually engaging experience. To showcase these great restaurants, we've designed a new card-based browsing experience on our apps that will keep you flipping through Collections for more! When something catches your eye, tuck it into your Wishlist for future deliciousness.
Collections are available on both, our website, as well as on our mobile apps across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. So whether you're planning to laze at a beach bar in Lisbon, or you're stuck in Mumbai traffic dreaming about cupcakes, inspiration is always within reach. So go on, give Collections a nibble, and feed your fancy.
Monetizing editorial content? Stick to the basics.
Zomato’s almost 4 years old now. And our primary revenue model is advertising. Advertising from restaurants – yes, the very ones which you see, rate and review on Zomato. Being a local search platform, we very much have the technological ability to modify the ratings or reviews of a restaurant and drive footfall to that business. But we have never done that and are very clear that we will never compromise on our content for revenue. This is indeed a difficult line to draw - here are some tidbits of the challenges we face while maintaining our stand. First, let me give you a couple of specific examples: 1) When we launched our print guide, there had to be only a couple of hundred restaurants included in the guide. The concept of a print guide that we were putting on the table did not give us the liberty to be comprehensive. We had to be selective. In Delhi NCR region alone, we have about 300 restaurant businesses advertising with us. A large chunk of these was not a part of our print guide. While we could have included all/most of our existing clients and made an effort to up-sell print advertising to them, we chose not to do this and instead create a product which our customers would enjoy. 2) A newly opened restaurant got a bad review on its page, and due to the credibility (# of reviews up-votes on reviews) of the reviewer, this bad review always showed up as the first review on its page. This restaurant owner called us up and proposed a significant sum of money as advertising fee if we took the review down. Needless to say, we did not do that. We face such (or similar) problems more than twice every week. Now let's get to the end result of both these things. The success of our restaurant guide, driven by the mood based themes, something unique in the market - proved our hypothesis. Customers love the selection in the guide and have sent us emails on how different and better we are than the other print food guides in the market. This is a much bigger win than revenue. Here, advertising revenue is getting more than balanced by the actual sales figures. Which is what we value much more than anything else. We have had umpteen restaurants over time offering money to take a review down. I can vouch that most of these restaurant owners who have tried to offer us money for reviews have seen their business shut down in the next 3-6 months. Lesson: ruining Zomato’s reputation for short term money makes zero long term sense. There is a positive side to the whole picture. A lot of young entrepreneurs are opening up restaurants. They run businesses which take negative feedback in their stride, improve their food/service and if required, reinvent themselves to survive. We love working with such restaurant owners – these are people who believe in creating good products. So far, maintaining our stance of editorial integrity has paid off very well – both tangibly and intangibly. And luckily for us, there is a sizable number of restaurant owners we would love to work with. Still, we face a problem of spam ratings and reviews by restaurant owners on their restaurants and competing restaurants. And we work our asses off to keep that under control. But that is a story for another day.
Building brand ambassadors for your company
The key to creating a powerful brand is having very vocal brand ambassadors for your company. Looking at it from a traditional marketer’s point of view, this is one of the toughest things to achieve. Well, that is what formal education does to you. We, at Zomato, have a good number of loyal customers who talk about us whenever there is a conversation around food and restaurants. To create such a brand, we have made our fair share of mistakes, but have learned quite a bit about the best practices to get it done. And none of us here have any marketing background, we are all engineers who tell it like it is. There are four ways in which you can create powerful associations with your customers:
Put customers first
A lot of times, under various pressures, we make changes to our product/service which are not received well by our customers. For all these changes, always measure the short term gain vs. the long term loss that you will incur. Most of the times, the potential loss will be bigger than gain. In all such cases, put the customer in the middle of your decision making process and then take a call. Here at Zomato, there is a constant tug of war going on between the sales team and the product team. The sales team wants to plaster advertisements all over the website. The product team doesn’t, and it always wins.
Get personal with feedback
Feedback is give by those who care. So please don’t insult them with automated email replies. So, when a customer writes in to your company for feedback, have a real person write back, saying that you value their feedback and also tell the customer whether or not you are going to address what they suggested. All this while, do remember that the customer is always right. And end the email with a thank you like you mean it (you should!). Lazy marketers always come up with an excuse that they cannot handle all the volume of feedback/queries that they get. The truth is that they just don’t care.
Treat customer service as your core strength
Great customer service builds the strongest brand ambassadors. Make sure that you put your best foot forward while creating the customer service department. We, at Zomato, did this top down. For the first month, all our business heads were taking care of all emails/queries directly. Understanding the effort and business intelligence that goes behind customer service, they now have their best people manning the department. And they still get copied on each and every email that goes out to any customers. We all really love our customers, and can clearly see that they love us back.
Be emotional
Your customers will only care for your product if you do. Show people that you love your product from the way you create your product as well as market it. For example, in your product’s tagline, simply saying what your product does will not muster any support for you. You have to tell people why you created what you created. If that resonates with someone, you have created a loyal user before that person even uses your product. This is something we believe in very strongly. To this effect, we changed our product tagline from “India’s #1 online restaurant guide” to “Discover more places to eat around you”. No one must have visited our website by learning that we are India’s biggest online restaurant guide. But a lot of users must have used our product to discover more places to eat around them. Which is why we built it in the first place. What do you think? Anything we can add here?
Zomato's Guide to Awesome Marketing Techniques
Today, we will share our learnings on how to be a pain in the a**e of your customers. After all, your brand is above all and no matter how much your customers resist, you must shove your brand down their throat. It is imperative that you prove your worth as an MBA by suggesting and implementing marketing techniques that irritate the hell out of the very people who are the reason for your survival.
Technique 1: SMS Blast
This is by far the most effective marketing technique to harass your customers. When done strategically (i.e. 6 smses per day for 30 days as prescribed by Dr Butt-ra), it ensures that your target of making 6 Lac impressions has been met. It is immaterial whether the sms-es are being deleted without being read – it is still counted as an impression thus contributing to your KRAs. In fact, your efforts, combined with that of the banks and telecom companies, ensure that all sms-es starting with AD-, TM-, etc reach your customers inbox by the dozen and they are prompted to activate DND. Irrespective of the result of this activity, you will sleep peacefully with a sense of accomplishment.
Technique 2: E-mail Blast
This technique is not as effective as the SMS Blast since the number of internet users (using e-mail) in India is much less than mobile subscribers. However, this technique is normally used to reach out to the “corporates” and quite rightly so. The average IQ of a corporate office-goer is less than Paris Hilton’s and they clearly have no sense of segregating spam from genuine mails. Also, Google’s algorithm is outdated and cannot differentiate between the two. While you, the marketing stalwart, would normally delete promotional e-mails from unknown parties promptly from your inbox, you are right in assuming that the dumber ones out there don’t do so. Here are the results of a survey we conducted: 1. 95% of respondents devote 1 hour at tea-time specifically browsing, categorizing, archiving and sharing all the promotional mails sent by you and several other brands. 72% of them are also willing to sacrifice their personal time for this activity. 2. 87% said that they can’t figure out from the sender’s name and subject that the mail is promotional in nature. 3. 79% said that they do not know how to “Report Spam”. They have been trying to trace the button for ages but haven’t been able to do so. Clearly, people love your e-mail blasts. Continue the good work.
Technique 3: Weekly Newsletters
This marketing technique is used more as an engagement tool. It also serves as a reminder that the brand exists. Most of the content in such newsletters revolves around how to plan your weekend, best shopping deals, etc. Clearly, people out there have no idea on how to plan their weekends. What would they do without your newsletters? It makes perfect business sense to hire 3 people to create a newsletter which has an average impression time of 0.2 seconds per viewer. An additional recommendation from our side: Please hire 1 techie to create a force field around the newsletter which can penetrate spam blockers. It will ensure that the balance 90% users also get to see the newsletter. In fact, you along with other “weekend guides” offer multiple ways to plan weekends and it offers your users a gamut of choices to select the one that will go to the Trash Folder.
Technique 4: Pamphlets
This technique should be used so that we do not lose touch with our Indian Culture. It is important to continue certain traditions so that our coming generations can see how marketing was done before the internet came into being. People love collecting pamphlets. In fact, our survey revealed that more than 90% of people actually stack them in their living room to show-off to their guests. To our surprise, we also discovered that in 80% of these households, the homemaker or the housemaids were running a conspiracy to hide the pamphlets before they reach the reader terming them as trash. We interviewed few of them and they admitted that these pamphlets usually slipped out of the newspapers and fell on the ground where the sweeper would simply sweep them away. The ones who did get these pamphlets, would throw away the poor quality ones in the trash and save the ones which looked attractive. However, after a few hours, they could not recall where they had kept the piece of paper! And this is the most shocking result of the survey – 76% percent of male respondents said that they hide the pamphlets before it reaches their wives because most of them carry attractive shopping offers! We’ve only listed a few of the techniques which will help you gain stardom. Please feel free to add to this list so that us marketers can achieve marketing nirvana. [For the clueless, this post is pure sarcasm ;-)]
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Who Cares?
Seriously? You’ve been droning on for what feels like an hour. That person really doesn’t want to hear any more about how wonderful your company is. Haven’t you ever heard of WIIFM? You know – the old acronym, where the letters stand for: What’s In It For Me?
You gotta remember your customer. Who are you talking to? Why should they care?
It’s Time to Differentiate. What are the benefits to your prospect? What makes you different than the other guys offering a similar service?
Never mind the list of thirty features. Don’t want to hear it.
If you want to get your prospects and customers to listen, think about it another way. Pretend you’re the customer for a second. Figure out the answer the WIIFM question … and then cut out the rest of the spiel.
 -- Jill Kemp
CRM Encompasses Everything
I'm currently studying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and it has significantly altered my perspective on business operations. Marketing is no longer a silo, it's simply one branch of CRM. Engineering is another branch. Accounting another.Â
It's critical to keep in mind that every single thing a business does should revolve around the customer (or, stated more accurately, everything revolves around the direct & indirect beneficiaries, including vendors, partners, shareholders, etc.).Â
If you keep this perspective, then the strategic decisions evolve much more organically and you don't have to pay as much attention to what your competitors are doing because you're focused on serving your customers.Â
Stop and think, "What value does accounting add to the customer experience? What value do the programmers add? What value do the salespeople add?"
