Happy (Not) to Help!

Happy to Help...yes the age of customer pampering and retention, You might as well take a dip into your pockets to fish out some extra pennies in order to meet your customers expectations rather than disappoint even one single fish out in the sea.

With technology evolving, so are people in the areas they have up there (their brains!, for the non-obvious thinkers). With all the sophistication going on, the age of CSR couldn't have picked a worser time to arrive. In fact, the evolution of technology was aimed at an equally sophisticated user for whom great things were made and further upgraded.

Now why am I giving all this gyaan over something that I don't even want to talk about? I don't know, but the deal is that customer service has become expensive, complicated and stupid.

Just the other day, I was trying to call customer care to deactivate a service on my mobile...this was easier said than done, I had to call customer care only to be stuck with this really irritating IVR which kept asking me to keep pressing buttons after buttons after buttons (now I would have been happier if that were a song by Nicole Scherzinger). Most of the times, it doesn't even give you the information you're looking for and god forbid you have the craving to talk to a customer service representative...because you'll end up spending eons trying to figure out which option leads you to talk to a real life human!

One fine day, I managed to get connected to customer care, now connected means that i got the option. Then I had to wait for another half century to get to talk to a representative...I waited and waited and waited...in between they (the IVR) have the audacity to tell me that I will get charged 0.50 paise for 3 minutes. Imagine that! calling customer care and paying for it!

Well so they decided to get their money's worth out of it and made me wait for something close to 20 minutes...after which I lost the patience and hung up (i had the patience to stay online for 20 minutes in the first place! beat that!).

By chance you happen to get connected to a human being, the amount of questions that the person bombards at you, whilst answering all those questions and confirmations you somewhere down the lane forget the query you had for the executive in the first place!

When Customer Care starts getting so complicated, I would suggest that people start honing their technical skills further and solve all the problems themselves.

The next time you see a television commercial with a cute little pug following a little girl around and saying Happy to Help!...know this...the girl grew up and the dog got tired of following her around!

The Google class

There was light, there was the wheel and then, one fine day there was Google!

"To search (something) on the Google search engine,", oh yes, it even has a definition on Dictionary.com. What I’m trying to say is that Google’s been the grand daddy of the Digital Marketing age we live in today and I’m pretty sure a lot of businesses wouldn’t have learned to mint money online without it.

The sessions by Mr. Zaeem Mirza, which were held over 6 sessions, were the talk of the campus. Mr. Mirza was also however soon known for his likeness towards punctuality where students tried entering the classroom late (for some, late was defined as close to 2 minutes), they were not allowed inside for what we may now call one of the most interesting classes that the students attended since a long time.

I, being a victim of such a case, was unable to attend Mr. Mirza’s first two classes (for which I deeply regretted for the remainder of the week). However, I made it to his third session on the second day and needless to say by now, I was quite impressed with the kind of information the man was churning out, some of which I had an idea about earlier but was crystal clear about it after the sessions. But for the most part, I found it extremely intriguing to know about all the tools one could use to keep a track on their earnings online.

The few sessions that I attended threw some light on tools like Analytics, AdWords, Insights amongst other topics which discussed how marketers make money online.

Analytics was explained as a tool that is used to track and generate data based on the users that visit a particular web page or site. Everything, from demographic data to traffic patterns could be ascertained by using this super cool tool.

As seen above, Analytics let’s one measure their advertisement or website over a desired period of time with various aspects such as the ethnicity of the user, the type of computer he/she has been using, the time he/she spent on the site or viewing an advertisement and so on. All this data, can be tabulated as per one’s requirement and better strategic plans may be devised through the help of Analytics.

Google Insights was a more or less similar tool that was used specifically for measuring popularity and effectiveness of Search terms coming in from different geographic locations and through different cultures.

AdWords was taught using examples through Linkedin.com where we took this phone (Nokia N94i in our case) as our product to sell online and made a page for it. This is where we got down to business and talked about how companies and Google do business with one another. CTR, CPM and CPC were taught in detail. Further, Google keywords helped us in finding appropriate search related keywords for a particular brand or product so that it makes the user’s search more easier when he/she tries to get more information online.

Digital Media. A new platform which not only is opening new avenues but is also bringing the people of the world closer to each other, now one wouldn’t even start to imagine in how many ways. Social Networking was probably the ultimate breakthrough in the digital space during the past decade with popular websites like Facebook and

Twitter taking the lead. You know that there’s bound to be big business involved when there’s a fresh industry out there which has the potential of attracting sellers, consumers and marketers all on to a single podium. It is evident that marketers will shift focus on to this arena because look around, you want to convey your message to people and where are all the people? You find no one, because all of them are online! That’s the place to be and make your voice heard. 90% of Internet friendly citizens around the globe use online channels to compare and find the best prices of a product before purchasing it. This is what Branding is coming down to, Differentiation - as in the actual sense, no other medium offers the power to analyze and educate yourself about the differences between competing brands as much as the online consortium does.

And that my friends, is just a glimpse of the glimpse (because I missed a few sessions) I got into the world of Digital marketing as taught by Mr. Mirza. Now, I seriously don’t mind getting into the company where he works in and get to learn a lot much more :P

What is Second Life?

Second Life is my new Blog, created with the aim of posting some professional type reviews, news and opinions on technology.

Why another blog? Well, because my other blog's got too much info on my life and people would obviously lose focus and get entranced with all the cool stuff that happens to me.

So, anyway...Second Life, all of us have two lives now - The real one and the virtual one. This part of the Internet would be focusing on the latter and expect some good stuff here that would also be fun to read.

I shall start this off by posting one of my assignments as my first article (now, you wonder if whatever I've said is credible or not ;) ).

Behold ------------ randum2d.blogspot.com