Written by Rohan
In early 2014-2015, things were very different from the way they are now – there was no JIO, and data was expensive. Android penetration was low, and technology adoption was a challenge.
Companies had to invest a lot, and that included providing phones to the users. Hence only large organizations (who would invest millions of dollars) adopted solutions.
In those days, we had to focus on SMEs / MSMEs since Bizom was new & we were still in the brand-building process. Driving these SME / MSMEs was a huge challenge since these were largely promoter-driven, and looked at quick ROI instead of investing in tech and then driving value.
Our focus was to onboard these customers with a small set of users (we didn’t get User Guarantees while we closed) and show them value so that they invest more, and we could onboard more users.
We realized that our rollouts were extremely slow and hence we were losing revenue due to a low user base even though setups/deployments were done successfully. At the same time, if we didn’t scale up quickly, customers were likely to churn. Hence the main problem was to complete rollouts quickly.
Now, one of the biggest problems that our customers were facing was slow adoption rates by the users since these companies didn’t have the know-how on driving adoption.
At that time, I handled the Hunting & Customer Relationship part in Mumbai, and Nilesh handled the customer support from Mumbai (we didn’t have a centralized support team then and regions managed the entire onboarding & customer support).
We had onboarded a client in the food industry and were struggling to drive adoption due to which the customer was on churn risk. We were discussing this issue when Nilesh suggested that we drive this adoption problem ourselves. I agreed, but the important question was – how do we drive it? And more importantly, how do we manage expectations?
We analyzed some data to find out the root cause of complaints since owners came back most of the time saying things like, “Bizom was not working”, and to those, we found the following:
- “Data not getting uploaded” -> Most of the cases, the internet pack was exhausted and users didn’t know about this. Hence there were complaints of Bizom not working
- “Beat is not visible” -> In these cases, the data shared by the manager was wrong
- “Users can use Bizom & enter data” -> The knowledge issue was on using Bizom
There was a common trend, and we realized that most of these issues were unrelated to Bizom and could be solved easily. The problem was that these issues weren’t proactively reported, and at the end of the month, promoters saw just the usage. When this happened, managers said that the problem was that “Bizom doesn’t work.”
Nilesh and I thought of changing the support model and making it proactive by calling users since this issue seemed simple to solve. We decided to drive adoption ourselves, and in turn push for more users to roll out and get some additional revenue for this service.
At that time, I was interacting with a few consulting firms & found their pricing model was KRA-driven. I thought it would be easy for us to go to the Customer and sell this as a KRA-driven service. So, we jotted down the KRAs that would help manage customer expectations, improve adoption, and also those that are easy to execute to get more revenue. We came up with parameters such as:
- Geotagged Outlets in a beat / Universe tagged
- Attendance
- PJP Adherence
- TC per day
- Time in market
I created the pricing with a base price to drive 100 users & additional incentives basis KRA achievement for slabs 70% -120% & got it approved internally.
We wanted a good name for this service. We checked with different people, and finally, with help of Shree’s suggestion we named it – “Evangelization Service.”
We went to the aforementioned client and got them to agree on this pricing. Nilesh drove this service brilliantly, and we not only saved the account from churn but increased the MRR to 50k in 4 months (50k was huge in those days 🙂 ). We did this for many more accounts after making minor refinements. That gave us an edge over the competition as well.
(Check out the video –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlN_Z5lBJ5A)
Today, Evangelization Service continues to be used and is a standard model followed as a part of onboarding. The seed we had sown in 2016 has, somewhere along the line, made us realize that “Adoption is key” as a part of customer execution is a key matrix / KRA for Sales & Customer Delight.
