January 2019

I think most of us in this networked world are part of one WhatsApp group or another and I bet all of us crib most of the time being the part of those groups.

Few years’ back I had written an article on LinkedIn titled “7 To-Do List for Creating Meaningful WhatsApp group”. Idea to write that article originated from my disenchantment with a WhatsApp group of my old colleagues from one organization we worked.

You can find that article here:7 To Do list for creating Meaningful WhatsApp Group
 

As a quick recap, I am listing out the points which I had mentioned in the article:

1)Don’t create a group when your objective is not clear

2)Don’t assume; ask

3)Group must have some degree of homogeneity

4)Don’t create a group which you can’t control and lead

5)Consider the limitation of the platform while creating the group

6)Do lots of research to be admin of the group and earn respect

7)Have the ability to break the monotony and generate interest

Now, along with above mentioned points, I have few more to add which I learnt from more groups I have been part of after that either created by me or someone else.

1)What is there for me: No one will do anything without the sight of tangible or intangible outcome and benefit. No result will come without a preceding corresponding action and when there is an action, it is bound to bring out the result; positive or negative and that’s the rule. If you have added someone in the group and asking him/her for something, even to read what you have written, you must show and prove that he/she has something to gain from it. No one works for free. Even charity is done for supposed better afterlife, whether it exists or not can be debated. So, if your group members have nothing to gain from your group, then either they will sit dull or they will exit.

2)Don’t involve monetary transactions if you haven’t built a team of evangelists of your cause: If any of your message/post ideates about monetary transaction, then the first point will come very strongly in force. People will start asking multiple questions to justify the value of money they are being asked to spend. Many more dimensions will come to complicate the matter even more. So, don’t bring out any proposal which involves money without being sure of loyalty and devotion of group members.

3)Agree to MVP: If you are looking for 100% participation in your proposal, then you are looking at and lurking around impossible, which will not happen. So, agree with Minimum Value Proposition of your proposal and Minimum Viable Participation to make your proposal successful.

I will keep repurposing these points as the time progresses to make it more meaningful to the readers. In the meantime, you can interact with me for personal branding services and inbound marketing at mukul.bhartiya@reviewboard.in .

Few days back I was pleasantly surprised to see someone with blue knapsack on his back and “Ecom Express” written on it, riding the bike on the dusty roads of my village in Madhubani district of Bihar, near to Nepal border and around 200 Kilometers away from state capital Patna.

I know for the fact that e-commerce is rapidly reaching out to every nook and corner of the country, but I was considering it still an urban and semi-urban phenomenon but thankfully my unfounded perception got corrected.

Courier business is still a semi-skilled low paying hard labor job, which involves carrying huge knapsacks filled with merchandise and riding bikes, earlier it was riding bicycle. It needs to change now and change for good before it becomes one of biggest bottleneck for the growth of e-commerce in India. Despite all the hype around AI, assortment, merchandise mix and marketing, e-commerce’s success boils down on completion of the transaction which means delivery of merchandise to end consumer, collection of payment and repatriation of collected amount to company’s account. If this last part is not good, note worthy, pleasant and successful then entire operation done before it is a big failure. Different estimates put India’s e-commerce retail sales in the bracket of USD 30-35 Billion in 2017 and expect it to grow to USD 200 Billion by 2016.

So, one can imagine how much pressure will be the team which has to make the final closure of the deal. So, the person who brings your merchandise to your home is no more a delivery boy of erstwhile courier era. Now he is a salesman, a cashier an accountant and the storekeeper; not only he brings your order to you, but collects the cash and maintains the account of collected cash as well. And completion of transaction and satisfaction of consumer out of completed transaction depends on him only.

Two years back, I had purchased a mobile phone from a leading e-commerce site which was to be delivered at Madhubani district. Delivery boy asked me to give him tip of Rs.100/- because I had made a purchase of Rs.15,000/- and I should be feeling happy about it. Moreover I had to literally make several calls to him to deliver the mobile phone which I was excited to hold in my hands. His insistence for the tip annoyed me and I had decided then to report the incidence to the retailer. Somehow I forgot to write to the retailer but I didn’t purchase anything from them for almost a year. We all must have seen few incidences of wrong/damaged product or sometime brick/stone/soap reaching to customers. So, goodwill of any e-commerce company depends on their tail of the value chain, the “delivery boys”, as they are popularly known.

So, the companies should:

1)Treat them as salesman, not the delivery boy
2)Train them as salesman, cashier, accountant and marketer
3)Use them for up selling with digital devices in their hand ( He is the person who can drop a hint about matching product or any product complementing the purchase or what the community is buying to the buyer and his recommendation will carry more value than the online recommendation).

Rest everything can be automated. AI can do the merchandising, Natural Language Generators can write tag lines and blogs, programmed drones can take pictures which can be directly collected from them, so on and so forth.

Now, time has come to see the role of delivery boys in different light, in shinier and brighter light. They are most crucial part of value chain of an e-commerce company and they will remain so for long because now customers have become very demanding and will not accept any inefficiency in any of the operation.