Electric Vehicle for Indian conditions

Widening of roads is not possible in most of the cities and towns in India. Public transportation can carry traffic only to a certain capacity. Traffic management and common sense would certainly help a lot but does  not take away the traffic woes completely.  No doubt, better roads would be required for efficient and safe travel. One of the striking characteristics in Indian traffic is diversity in vehicles. Autos and taxis are essential and cannot be replaced. If we look at the other vehicles, most of the four-wheelers are self driven and has no other passengers. Sitting comfort, AC and closed cabin are mostly the reasons to adopt this mode of transfer. Two-wheeler has discomfort of continuous balancing in busy traffic and hot sun in Indian climate always makes riders sweat unnecessarily. 

Someone could invent an electric vehicle which considers size, cost, efficiency and comfort of travellers by picking the best of attributes from two-wheeler and four-wheeler.

The vehicle should have two thick tyres and it should be self balancing. It's width  cannot be wider than half that of Maruti 800. It should have seating capacity for only two people - front and back - and a complete covering on the head. The closed cabin should be air conditioned. Vehicle should be fitted with solar panels to charge the batteries. Otherwise, there should be provision to charge the vehicle using regular electricity through sockets. 

It should come in different colours and  should go for at least 200 km with full charge. There should be a mobile app which shows how much charge is left and how many more kilometres can be covered. The app should also capture travel information and show analytics around it. Cost of the vehicle should not be more than INR 75k. Insurance should be given for three years.

This vehicle should help avoid using fossil fuels, produce no pollution and mostly standardise the smaller size of vehicle on the road. The last aspect should help streamline the traffic and also make the roads less congested. 

Is it really feasible to make everyone buy this vehicle? What happens to all the existing ones? Well, we had tape-recorders and VCD players once. Where have they gone?!

Innovation and patterns around Internet

When I started using a smartphone, I was interested in only two things – the first one being the display of all contact information of a person in an organized manner and the second is the display of SMS messages in a window, neatly showing the threaded discussion.

The availability of camera in smartphone caught my attention due to arrival of my daughter into our family at that time. Ability to capture moments overpowered the disappointment of grainy photos. This phase was followed with adoption of productivity tools like gmail and search. I played some games too.

I browse for various kinds of information over Internet and my interests include news, technology, business, movies and blog articles on diverse topics. While I was using browser on Laptop earlier, I tend to consume more information through mobile these days. I find InShorts and Flipboard to be very helpful here.

I took to buying things online easily as I was a credit-card user from early employment days. The likes of Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon opened my world to quite a few books, couple of mobiles, computer accessories like USB-drives and SD-cards and a few miscellaneous items. But it was my wife’s easy adoption of apps to ‘request for offline services online’ that fascinated me. That brought to my attention about a hundred miscellaneous services we would all use at some point in our life – pest control, wedding photographer, yoga trainer, tuition master, gym instructor etc. It has given me a new perspective outside the tech world too.

I leverage google maps for navigation, while moving around the city and also in new places. Owing to my interest in movies and music, I happen to consume multimedia content through a wide variety of apps.

I got an account with Facebook and was accessing it once in a while. Realized soon that there were very few contributors to content and it has become another entertainment channel.  Twitter was fascinating for some time but the noise was too much to handle for me. I never had interest to follow any celebrity on Instagram. WhatsApp is one app which I use regularly as it offers personal or group communication by choice, which suits me. I was willing to pay 1 USD fee to access the same and still would, if required.

After I got into Familybirdz, I downloaded a variety of mobile applications and experimented. The number of applications and categories of applications are overwhelming. While the tech industry is buzzing with new opportunities and billion dollar companies, the app landscape is getting cluttered. The fact that consumers phones have limited resources and typically a user would not access more than ten applications on regular basis (and another 10 rarely) is a point worth keeping in mind. While everyone strives to remain among top 10 in user’s minds and phones, the competition would only get intense. Though there are lot of standalone apps in the market, the apps needing access to back-end servers are not less. These are realization of business models with front-end as apps. As we have been seeing, the innovation can happen in technology or business models.

Driving innovation in the future needs understanding of these models at the highest level possible and one way to do that would be with the help of usage-patterns of Internet as a platform. The following are those usage-patterns, from my point of view, and they are applicable independently or in combinations. 

1.       Communication

(email, enterprise messaging, personal social network (relationships, messaging), social media (brand & customer, celebrity & fan, leader & follower), audio / video calls)

2.       Buy / sell THINGS

(books, clothes, groceries, provisions, etc)

3.       Buy / sell SERVICE

(buy insurance policy, reserve a table, book a movie or event ticket, rent a movie etc)

4.       Requesting for a doorstep SERVICE online

(hail a taxi, order food, photographer, plumber, electrician etc)

5.       Execute business PROCESS

(finance approval, content publish workflow, auction etc)

6.       Access CONTENT

(text & multimedia - static or personalized (login), search, browse)

7.       Games

8.       Digital payments

9.       Advertisements

10.   Connecting machines to each other or to people

If a new idea is floated, it can be mapped on to these patterns. If there is potential in the idea, it would follow one of the existing patterns, but with clear differentiation. If it’s an idea outside the purview of these patterns, it ought to be an innovation in new dimension and can creat new markets. Disruption could be caused either way, depending on the impact of idea. If we look back and think about the times when each of the above patterns were introduced, we can understand the disruption these trends have caused in many sectors.

The end-goal of all apps is to provide convenience to the user, increase efficiency of operations, provide entertainment, enhance knowledge or keep informed. Some of the interesting questions to think are – how will it be, when EVERYONE (adults amongst 7+ billion population) in the world has access to ALL 10 patterns mentioned above through Internet? Would there be enough peace and harmony across the globe? Where are we headed with technology?

E-Commerce India - Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer is the King or Queen. That is even more so in this Internet Age where customer experience can get shared easily using social media. The establishment of relationship with the customer starts the moment he includes a few items in his shopping cart of the e-commerce store.

Once the customer selects items and make payment, the order is supposed to have been captured. The order details along with items purchased, quantity, delivery address and any special instructions like gift wrapping or pre-defined time of delivery are to be provided to the fulfillment team. Based on the type of payment - cash on delivery or pre-paid - the process differs for delivery of items purchased.

The moment order is placed, the customer would be keen to receive them as per the delivery dates promised by the vendor. There must be a provision for the customer to track his orders on the e-commerce site where he purchased the items. Sites like Flipkart, owing to their own delivery services, provides that mechanism on their site itself. In cases like Indiatimes Shopping, the delivery status can be verified by using the tracking number associated with the 3rd party courier service (like Bluedart or Dhelivery) mentioned in the Order. For a customer, it does not matter how the delivery happens as long as it happens in time. For e-commerce companies, the operations to support delivery forms the backbone.

Whether the customer experience has been good or bad, it must be captured in a system for critical analysis later. The issues could be about payments, shipping or the item itself. Any immediate problems must be addressed with a sense of urgency. Customers in India (not sure about global space) are sensitive about payment issues, even if the amount involved is small. So issues like double charge for the same Order, refund of money in case of credit-card payments for Order cancellations or issues related to discount must be addressed immediately. Otherwise, the risk of losing that customer and hence his entire network of online buying family and friends looms large at the e-commerce vendor. My bad experience in shopping with Indiatimes was effectively addressed by the company.

Once the customer is happy with his overall experience on an e-commerce store, he is going to come back again. The entire e-commerce business hinges on acquiring large numbers of such customers, who provide repeat business. Hence, it is very important to keep track of such customers and provide benefits to them for their loyalty.  I have not seen any e-commerce store in India offering any substantial loyalty services. Or maybe I have not come across one so far.

But, information about new products, special discounts, pre-launch offers and clearance sales needs to be dispatched to all the customers on regular basis to keep the touch-point with them alive.

Needless to say, e-commerce companies must rely on information technology for all the above CRM needs. Customer, order, shipping, payment and feedback information gets stored in appropriate database. Huge amounts of this data can be moved to data warehouses and analyzed for business insights.

E-mail, Chat and Voice Support are the primary channels through which customer communicates with the e-commerce company. One key aspect in providing support to the end-customers is to integrate all these channels at the back-end. Irrespective of the channels I use - this could be many for an issue with the same order - to complain about an Order, it must be resolved.

If you are an end-customer - did you get that wonderful experience from that e-commerce store?

If you are an e-commerce company - could you acquire and retain customer and improve the loyalty base over a period of time through CRM?

E-commerce India - Inventory Management, Warehousing and Order Fulfillment

While e-commerce store front (website) provides customer interface on the Internet, good back-end operations lead to customer satisfaction. One of the important back-end operations of e-commerce is inventory management. When the customer browses the site, selects an item and makes payment, the item MUST be shipped to the customer in time. For that the item must be either produced by the e-commerce company itself or procured from a 3rd party.

If the procurement has to happen from a 3rd party, it can be arranged in different ways:

1. Drop-shipping

Items can be bought from the 3rd party just in time and shipped to the end-customer. In this case there must be direct connection for the e-commerce company with the appropriate vendors, dealers or publishers. In cases like Sweets and Snacks this will be the modus operandi, unless the vendor himself manages the e-commerce store.

2. Warehouse-based shipping

Certain quantity of items can be procured up-front, stored in a warehouse and shipped to the customer based on the order.

In the second case, the quantity of inventory that needs to be maintained in the warehouse has to be controlled appropriately. If there is less quantity of inventory then there would be inherent delay in procurement and shipping. If there is more than required quantity, the unnecessary occupancy of the warehouse would lead to financial disadvantage.

The inflow (from the suppliers) and outflow (to the end customers) of goods must be tightly controlled in the warehouse to restrict any damages and pilferage. The orders taken for delivery in a day must be reconciled at the end of the day to match shipments and pending orders.

If the e-commerce company has its own warehouses, the location and number of these should be carefully selected. Any shortages or excesses and wrong locations would drain all financial resources of the company in no time.

One can also outsource the warehouse and order fulfillment operations to a 3rd party. From zappos.com experience (as mentioned in the book by Tony Hsieh), one can understand that it is risky from different perspective to outsource such operations. Needless to say, one needs to be wary about outsourcing such operations.

The last part of order fulfillment involves delivery to the end customer at his premises. This is done by:

1. e-commerce company's own courier service (like in case of Flipkart)

2. Private delivery service center (the likes of DHL, Bluedart…)

3. Government courier service from Post Office
4. Hybrid of all the above modes (typical case)

With Cash-On-Delivery (CoD) becoming an important payment mechanism the delivery person not only has to ship the items, but also collect money from the end customer. There are companies like Gharpay, which specialized in cash collection.

Also, there are local companies which specialize in delivery of certain items and one such company is Delyver in Bangalore.

There is ample scope for companies operating in this domain to expand and increase the scope of their activities. There is also talk about Amazon and Walmart setting up their own courier operations in India and becoming successful Giants in the Indian e-commerce space. Let's wait and watch !