If a business is a rainbow, ‘challenges’ can be simply termed as its color red. I’ve worked with 12+ startups and out of the many challenges I worked on, I have two instances to share; both encountered, solved & settled while I was working as Sr. Manager – MarComm at HappyLocate.
Challenge 1: Customers Just Don’t Take Calls.
It’s not just you or me. It’s with everyone. The modern-day lifestyle is busy to its core and everyone is trying to save every inch of bandwidth. And while this happens, people tend to ignore calls that they think are not important for them. Try being a little pushy and you will be marked as a SPAMMER in user-driven directories like Truecaller and Yellowpages. This is hurtful to brands like us which try to connect with customers a) on their request b) to schedule deliveries and pickups or c) to resolve their concerns. There were uncountable instances when users were not very happy with our ways of communication even when we tried reaching them on emails and calls multiple times.
Our Solution: From the second half of 2018, HappyLocate has been working with Truecaller to rightly identify important calls as ‘priority calls’. In fact, HappyLocate was one of the first brands that partnered with Truecaller for their priority identification. To put this into perspective, here is how it looks for us and for others:
Did it help us? Oh yes, it did. Our customers were 60% more likely to pick important calls. Critical communication now went through. Issues were resolved in time. Customers were happy. We were being referred. Fresh customers were now seeking our services majorly due to the experience we had on offer. Have a glimpse of it on HappyLocate’s public review page here.
Challenge 2: Trust Is Important, Unavoidable & Elusive
Despite having one of the best ratings in the industry, customers are never easy to convince. You are constantly being compared to industry leaders, old players, and even local movers because they offer cheap prices. And that also makes it obvious why even the known players are always actively compared with a lot of the movers in the market.
Users want trust, right under their budget. The brand that appears to solve the problem most effectively at the cheapest possible rates, will generally be the most trustworthy one. While not much can necessarily be done about the prices, a lot can be done about gaining trust. Here is what we did about it:
Our Solution: In association with Zoko, we got ourselves verified with WhatsApp. Here is how a standard WhatsApp chat of HappyLocate looks like:
This added layer of trust of the green tick (which is, by the way, achieved via an extensive verification process done exclusively by FB) reassured our customers about our authenticity.
We did not stop there. We optimized our automated notifications, feedback loop, and agent communications to ensure that we stay transparent and knowledgeable about our customers’ needs.
Remember our challenge one? WhatsApp is a user-centric way of talking to your customers. Our users can now maintain and address the communication in the way they like, and the way they cherish interacting with it.
Do connect at linkedin.com/in/anuragsayshi for more such brand stories.