How the clever paanwallah sold cricket scores
By Valerie Rozycki Wagoner Founder and CEO, ZipDial Our company ZipDial is fundamentally about recording customer experience and providing various services – all on the basis of missed calls. Customers from any part of the country can give a missed call to our toll-free number to report their experience. The ZipDial platform is 100 per cent accessible to the mass market, and all the effort one has to put in is dial a number. Among various services introduced at ZipDial, we have a facility where users from all over the country can give us a missed call and get the score of an ongoing cricket match by SMS. Once the match is over, we routinely make calls to groups of randomly selected users of ZipDial to get customer feedback and ask them how they came to know of the service and what they thought of it. It helps us to enrich and better the customer experience. During one such feedback session, we called a randomly selected user who was based in a village close to Chandigarh. We asked him how he got to know about ZipDial, its benefits and how he used the service. His was one of the most interesting accounts that we have ever got from a ZipDial user. The man turned out to be a paanwallah living in this little village near Chandigarh, who had come to know of ZipDial through word of mouth. He told us that he regularly used the live cricket score number from ZipDial as a means to increase sales at his paan shop! What he did was simple, yet effective. When anyone came to him to enquire about the score of an ongoing cricket match, he would tell them that the score was not for free, but had to be bought. Each customer had to buy paan first in order to get the latest score. While people wondered where he got the scores from and, in fact, one customer even asked him if he resorted to magic, all he did was give a missed call on the ZipDial number and receive the score on his mobile phone! Cleverly, he used the number as a value-added service to sell his paan. The story goes to show and emphasise the mass market nature of our company, and how it breaks barriers of all kinds to reach out to consumers in India in an easy way. It also highlights that an innovative idea must be kept simple for it to appeal to the masses. The USP of our approach is missed calls, which is the particularly Indian characteristic of the market of our company. Missed calls are free and thus work well with Indian people. A combination of it with cricket and paan made it a great entrepreneurial opportunity for the enterprising paanwallah. This also emphasises ZipDial’s value to small businesses, which can use it in new and unheard of ways to rope in customers. Every such experience is enlightening and rewarding for us. Feedback: valerie@zipdial.com
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