Consumer Encounters | Mobile Banking

When I went to the bank today to hotlist my ATM card, I realized how vast an opportunity is lying for grabs and has caught no one's attention till date.

Most of the service providers have been talking about mobile banking for long, and has been advertising their products with great marketing budgets. Kudos !!. But none of these ever realized the prime spot / target to hit. The customer is still wary of internet banking gateway and has lots and lots of doubts that remain unanswered when it comes to mobile banking. Most of the consumer queries revolve around the process and security concerns for the same. It is not easy to come up with a strategy to counter this, but the least of consumer queries should be handled through the marketing and advertisements themselves so as to establish a relationship of trust with the consumer, which is the most important parameter for any product / service provider today.

Now, establishing the relationship of trust within an Indian consumer is still somewhat tricky but not entirely unaccomplishable for any product / serive provider.

To advertise mobile banking / m commerce, one has to keep in mind the following things discreetly:

• Secure gateway transaction

• Consumer secure mindset patterns

• Proper channelizing
• Consumer frame of reference understanding

This is not that difficult as it sounds. It's just a process of connecting back to the consumer to the very basic of their needs when it comes to monetary transactions. It's about providing the same security level as provided by a cheque or cash or ATM for that matter. The provider must understand why a consumer is so much in sync with these services and feels secure about them. And the most important question, why is not the same with mobile banking. You achieve this and you achieve the heart of a consumer, and gateway to a successful m-banking business marketing & distribution model.

Another key point here is about your key audience. Elderly might not specifically find this service too attractive for them because of the visual / accessibility problems with the device. This also provides with an opportunity window in a totally different arena: accessibility in a device. These two can be effectively combined to launch a competitive service model.

Feel free to engage with me on building the same !!

Available on these service apps now !!

Consumer Encounters | Mobile Service Apps. Ideas 1

i was at my doctor’s today, and it was a total chaos there. i happen to engage a discussion amongst the patients waiting over there and what came out of the discussion was a pretty obvious picture for most of the health service centers in india.

highlighted by:

/heavy rush

/chaos at the counter

/irritated patients

/irritated staff

/exhausted doctors

/time mismanagement

out of this obvious discussion what came out clearly was the mismanagement in terms of patient time table.

average patient - doctor interaction time = 15 minutes

average patient stay at the hospital = 5 hours

now, thinking logically its a clear mismatch and what is needed here is like a time table application for patient doctor which regularly update patients about their appointment timings and updates the doctor too, hence avoiding chaos as is there already.

patients are also wary of the fact that there are people who use their social networks to meet the doctors ahead of their time and hence delaying normal patients.

an update time table application for doctor-patient will benefit both in terms of managing their times, and some patients won’t even have to visit their doctors ever again in a health center when all of this could be easily achieved sitting comfortably at their homes.

i am working on such an application and its features. buzz me with ideas and doubts to make this place a better place to live in :)

Oasis - Stop Crying Your Heart Out

Free Economy -> Hacking Lifestyles -> Future Scenarios

Consumers these days are changing rapidly in terms of their product / service demands & usage. It seems consumer intelligence as a term is taking a totally different notion altogether. It is turning more into an Intelligent Ingenious Hacker Consumer who understands how to use more & more of free products / services and shares this knowledge onto a bigger social / professional networking platforms. On one hand, MNC'S are in a die hard situation to launch the right product / service for their valued consumers……on the other hand, these consumers are trying die hard to crack these products / services for a free usage.

Take the latest example of windows 7, MS Office 2010………..great products, great price value. But these are available and being used free of cost in most of the parts of the world. I especially dedicate this usage to sites like holyplanets, deviantart, torrents and similar portals for providing a shared consumer case of HACKER CONSUMERS.

Trying to install any paid software version, just type install software name and crack on youtube and you will have n number of video tutorials as to how to accomplish the task. These types of consumers are increasing day by day exponentially.

Now the bigger question arises, what do the companies do now? If they are exhausted with paid products / services………..there are two sets of variables here. One can be listed as an uncertainty which is increase or decrease of hacked services. The other can be easily termed as a certainty which is the demand for space. By space I mean the space to keep these products / services. Depending on the equation, the space can be a hard disk drive or a virtual cyber space which many of the sites like adrive are providing these days. Plotting these two, uncertainty and the certainty on a graph, the future scenarios may look like in the following picture: 

Scenario for Free Economy Companies

Now the way things are going on the official future will be seeing a lot of people looking for hacked products / services and online space. The only thing they will be willing to pay for is the security of their data. Hence, security in an online environment and virtual space will be the top most priorities when it comes to paid services in the future.

This will also result in changing business and revenue models for majority of companies. More and more companies will be landing themselves in the services domain rather than product domains, since the services will be what the consumer will be willing to pay for.

It's a high risk situation and not the ideal scenario for companies. The ideal scenario is listed somewhere in quadrant 4 where the anti-hacking systems rule and consumers will be willing to pay for the products / services they subscribe to. Well, as humans and as loyal consumers we all may agree that this ain't gonna happen in any future.

It's a choice for the companies which future they chose practically and design their strategy for.

Living in Fear or Faith??

 

It's the most important question of our lives that we never face out of the possible answers that we already know in our conscious. We, as humans, and as responsible members of society have learned to hide the truth and keep living in fear without a rationale.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the biggest faith system on this planet. We all call it GOD. Some of the research questions worth asking here are as follows:

/who is God?

/why do we believe in God?

The answer that we all deny and are terrified is that God finds its origin from the fear within ourselves. And God itself is a systematic fear within us. The fear that something bad will happen if we don't do things according to what is prescribed by his agents, priests or others. Most of us want to please God by being at its place, temple, church, mosque or Gurudwara.

Lets create a hypothetical situation to understand God better. For every good thing, there is an equal amount of bad thing. If there is God, there is the Devil. And both of them are equally powerful. For if God is more, then it will reign and there will be no bad influences or people. If Devil is more powerful, then Devil will reign. So we agree that both are equally powerful. If they are equally powerful, then why place our belief in God, why not in Devil. As God tests us, but Devil's test is easy to pass and you will be rewarded wonderfully. Confused !!..................do not try to deny the argument without thinking it over.

Its our culturally built system that automatically denies anything being said against so called God.

There is God and there is Devil, but they reside within our mind and within our thoughts. They don't need a separate temple or place of worship. Your conscious is your God, or it can be your Devil depending on the choices you make. We all reap fruits of our own doings. God is neither a forgiver nor a punisher. It won't punish you and it won't reward / forgive you either. If that was the case, every terrorist, rapist, criminal will be the biggest worshippers. You just pray a million times to be forgiven for a murder, a rape or any crime.

Think again about what you believe in and what's your belief system. Don't believe in anything without a rationale. Believe in God is not bad, until it reaches the point of superstition and denial of the logic. No belief system or faith system guides you when you don't believe in it but fear it. Do not be fearful, be rational and faithful.