Information matters - Vol 5 by ScreenRoot Technologies Private Limited

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VOLUME 5

ISSUE 1

www.informationmatters.in The Journal of Information in Business

www.informationmatters.in

1005862_CV_IM.pdf

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MARKET

DESIGN 04

PROCESS

DASHBOARD

LAUNCH

Information Matters Volume 5 | Issue 1 Publisher Gourav Jaswal

BRANDING

EXPERIENCE

Editor Gulnar Joshi Layout Aparna Ranjan

WEBSITE

ENGAGE

COMMUNICATE

SOCIAL MEDIA

CHANGE

MOBILE WEB

SIMPLIFY

INTRANET

CONNECT

Monte Carlo, La Citadel Colony Dona Paula, Goa, India 403 004 Tel: (+91-832) 245 3230 / 245 3328

05 Information in A pixel is not a little square. A pixel is the new data packet. A slew of emerging technologies encode information in pixels which when used to tag or label objects, make them searchable and traceable, transmitting information about us and storing information for us. A pixel is also a bridge between the physical and the digital worlds. In this issue of Information Matters, we have used the Quick Response or QR code, a two-dimensional barcode that turns text into a jumble of pixels that can be scanned by your smartphone, to connect to our online presence. First designed for the automotive industry by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994, the popularity of QR code surged because of fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code patterns can now be seen on images in newspapers, magazines or business cards. Marketing and communications professionals are using QR codes to effectively capture the intended audience at the peak of interest.

CONNECT TO IM: All the case studies and articles featured in this issue of Information Matters, are available on our website www.informationmatters.in. Scan the QR code on the back cover with your smartphone and instantly connect with Information Matters.

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FASTER, BETTER VOLUME 05 ISSUE 01

The Journal of Information in Business

TAXI

DESIGN

Faster, Better Taxi Service Meru Cabs reworks booking process and redesigns website to counter long call waiting times

SERVICE 12

Top View

Business leaders at a top-tier telecommunications company get a dashboard to help them interpret quarterly data

bs solves04the problem of long call-waiting time king its booking process d moving a big chunk of bookings to the Web

Wealthy meet Wise on the Web

Thethe newlargest website Kotak Mahindra Wealth Cabs is perhaps andofmost Management Services popular radio taxi service in India. Ittreats every customer as king operates over 5,000 cabs in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and The New RoadMap Bengaluru and transports over a million passengers a month.

MERU

Redesigned IDG portals use intelligent SEO and better A fast-growing company, Meru Cabs feeling strain of UI was to get morethe traffic increasing popularity—their call centres were overwhelmed with booking requests and enquiries; waiting time on incoming customer calls was going up and customers were 15to starting to get impatient… Meru Cabs had to find a way address the situation. Fast.

DESIGN | EXPERIENCE

WEALTHY

Expanding the call centre was one option that had been tried out in the past, but the demand always preceded expansion and it was not a very pragmatic option considering the ever growing investments in office space, training of personnel and efforts to retain personnel.

MEET

WISE

However, Meru saw an opportunity in a) improving the Call Center backend application and, b) shifting a big chunk of bookings now coming through the call centre to the website. We proposed a two-phased process of bring about change in Meru Cabs booking process.

on the web

S | VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1

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The new website of Kotak Mahindra’s Wealth Management Services treats every customer as king

THE

financial services market in India offers

little INFORMATION MATTERS | VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1 variation to customers in terms

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of product features or schemes. Most communication centers around services offered and is presented in a uniform, clinical style.

To achieve the communication objectives, we suggested a theme-based website that would emphasise the importance of wealth management services in a way that was informative yet memorable.

Customer is King!

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MARKET 24

Your Office is Where YOU Are Microsoft’s innovative pre-launch campaign for Office 2010 creates millions of experiences

From Farm to Fork TERI plans an experiment that uses marketing to eliminate the middle man MARKET | BRANDING

COMMUNICATE

mangoes 39 farm from to fork

TERI plans an experiment that uses marketing to eliminate the middle man

First Impressions

When Change Came to Stay Forever

CONNECT42 | SOCIAL MEDIA

The Goa Office of The Environment Research Institute (TERI), India’s premier environmental research organisation, through funding from the Toyota Foundation initiated a project that aimed to help farmers realise higher value on their produce by eliminating the middle men and reaching consumers directly.

Riverine island village of Chorao was chosen as the site of the project. Chorao Island Farmers Club, set up in 2008, is a group of few like-minded farmers, who were just about gaining traction in Goa through their first branded product —a traditional red rice variety that grows well in saline water. INFORMATION MATTERS

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| VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1

A multi-media campaign helps HP engage its Volume Channel Partners around the launch of its low CPP-based printer

Business leaders at a top-tier telecommunications company get a dashboard to help them interpret quarterly data

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As Easy as 1-2-3 The new website of Kotak Mahindra Wealth Management Services treats every customer as king

CONNECT 58

Every Trip has a Purpose

Going Mobile

Cleartrip extends its TV campaign to Online media

A few tricks to make your website mobile-friendly

Intranet for Landmark Landmark Groups has a new intranet that connects its employees spread in 12 countries INFORMATION MATTERS

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DESIGN | PROCESS

FASTER, BETTER

TAXI

SERVICE

Meru Cabs solves the problem of long call-waiting time by reworking its booking process and moving a big chunk of bookings to the Web

MERU

Cabs is perhaps the largest and most popular radio taxi service in India. It operates over 5,000 cabs in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru and transports over a million passengers a month.

A fast-growing company, Meru Cabs was feeling the strain of increasing popularityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their call centres were overwhelmed with booking requests and enquiries; waiting time on incoming customer calls was going up and customers were starting to get impatientâ&#x20AC;Ś Meru Cabs had to find a way to address the situation. Fast. Expanding the call centre was one option that had been tried out in the past, but the demand always preceded expansion and it was not a very pragmatic option considering the ever growing investments in office space, training of personnel and efforts to retain personnel.

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HERE IS HOW THE

OLD SYSTEM

WORKED: redesign of merucabs.com has been termed one of the best it

There were four types of calls that came in–Booking requests, enquiries, cancellations /cab status and feedback. For each of these, a different mini-application had to launched based on the nature of the call.

In parallel, every time a customer called the call centre, personnel would refer to a browser-based application called Advanced Booking Cab Display (ABCD) to ascertain cab availability for the requested time and location, come back to TDS and process the request.

Likewise for a fare enquiry for going from point A to Point B, the call centre executive would need to switch to an Excel sheet for the approximate fare.

implementations this year

PHASE 1: Optimising the Call Center Application Chinks in the Old System Meru had a custom-built call centre for attending to incoming booking requests. The advisors punched the booking details into this proprietary system to determine the availability of cabs in the requested area at the desired time. However, this process required human intervention for switching between various reference points in the system and made the booking process rather tedious, which in turn made the call duration longer.

STATS SAID: Every day 11 hours were wasted on calls that could not be serviced

NEW INTEGRATED SYSTEM

Booking Screen

Meru was in the process of building a new dispatch system in-house and approached DotAhead to help with designing the user interface for the call centre application.

The way the system was designed, the call centre could accept booking for only up to 24 hours after the call request. Beyond 24 hours, the company could not guarantee if a cab would be available in a certain area. About 20 per cent of the calls coming into the call centre were requests for cabs beyond that time frame.

We spent a week at Meru’s call centre observing the way each booking was handled. It was evident that switching between various systems (see box, ‘Here is how the old system worked’) and manual intervention was resulting in a lot of time being wasted while a customer was on a call. We re-designed the call centre application to integrate these various systems into one single interface. The new interface enabled the call enter employee to use tabs to move through different applications. After combining the systems in a single place, we optimised the screens themselves.

In the earlier format of the booking screen, the call centre personnel would enter the details of the bookings into the screen and then realise that the cab required was for a time frame exceeding 24 hours. This resulted in them having to cancel the booking. On an average, 11 hours of call centre time daily were being wasted on such calls. We made five changes to the booking screen (on the following page) to enhance the experience of logging a booking request. These changes also reduced the time required to do make a booking. INFORMATION MATTERS

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TODAY/TOMORROW DROPDOWN: We made a few simple changes to the booking screen. First, we changed the date picker from a calendar format to a simple ‘today’/’tomorrow’ dropdown. And more importantly, we prominently displayed time selection on top of the screen. The rest of the screen was disabled till this information was entered, forcing the call centre personnel to ask this as a first question.

ADDRESS: The right panel on the booking screen displayed the past pickup addresses for the customer. One of these addresses could be automatically filled in by clicking on ‘from here’ button next to the desired address. We also introduced the concept of ‘home’ and ‘office’ tags for pick up addresses. Once a customer identified his ‘home address’ and ‘office address’, for subsequent bookings, clicking on the home or office icon would automatically fill these addresses in the pickup address field.

FARE: This screen also included information about the approximate journey distance and cost. This eliminated the need to refer to the Excel sheet for rates and fares. If there was a toll bridge in-between the pickup and destination points, this information flashed on the screen enabling the call centre personnel to inform the customer of the applicable charges.

REJECT BOOKING: Previously, if for any reason, the booking had to be cancelled during the booking process (for eg. if there were no cabs available), then the call centre advisor would have to close the booking screen, copy paste the booking details into another system and enter the reason for the cancellation. We eliminated this by introducing a ‘Reject booking’ Feature at the bottom left of the screen where this information could be entered without having to go elsewhere. All the key fields on the screen were enabled for navigation through the keyboard, ensuring minimum time wastage in using the mouse.

CALL DURATION: To enhance efficiency, the booking screen indicated the total call time at the bottom right so that the call centre personnel would be aware if the call was getting too long. This button would start flashing and change colour if a call went over 60 seconds.

New integrated booking interface: Booking process was simplified and made faster by minimising the number of clicks and interactions required

Similar enhancements and improvements were implemented for other functions of a call centre advisor including cab status, enquiry and feedbacks. As a result of this redesign and streamlining exercise, the average call time came down by 30%. In quantitative terms, this resulted in the call centre being 43% more efficient. More importantly, in qualitative terms, it made the call centre advisors’ roles less stressful by reducing repetitive and tedious tasks.

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PHASE 2: Redesign of the Website Even though the call centre was now more efficient and could handle more calls, the supply-demand ratio was still skewed and other means of booking had to be explored. This is when Meru Cabs looked at optimising other channels—the web, mobile and SMS—that allowed customers to book cabs. More than 90 per cent of the customers of Meru Cabs fall under Sec A and B category— a demographic that typically has mid to high internet penetration—and this made focusing and expanding on online bookings stand out as the most logical step. Nilesh Sangoi, CTO of Meru Cabs approached DotAhead with a brief to considerably increase cab bookings through the Web. Online bookings were a tiny fraction of the booking requests coming in through the call centre. The website had a booking form which sent an email featuring a request to the call centre. This was a very unreliable process prone to human error. Many times the mails would get lost. In some cases, even out-bound calls had to be made to clarify details. Here was a great opportunity to exploit the web in a more efficient and effective way to reduce the load on the call centre. The greater challenge was in integrating the cab dispatch system directly with the online booking process, thus eliminating human intervention. And this is exactly what we set out to do.

The old Meru Cabs homepage

RESEARCH As a first step, we collected data spanning a few months of operations to analyse customer request patterns. This included data from the call centre and bookings made online or via SMS. We also did a detailed study of the best practices followed by similar established service companies in the West and observed that some of the most competitive radio cab services in Singapore, New Zealand, USA, Australia and France offered online bookings. Most popular online booking services had a prominent and easyto-use booking form that minimised the time required to make a booking online. Before we redesigned the user experience online, we decided to validate our findings from the statistical analysis by interviewing existing users of the site. An online survey asked users about their booking habits, frequency of bookings and overall experience on the existing Meru site. This helped us gauge user expectations from the website, enabling us to better answer their needs. Further information about the demography of the target audience confirmed that most were, as expected, avid internet users. The processes of data analysis, study of best practices and the online survey reaffirmed that the key reason for users to visit the Meru website was to book cabs. We had to redesign the website to give prominence to the booking process on the homepage. INFORMATION MATTERS

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EXECUTION / MOCK-UPS HOME PAGE: We designed two versions of the site— a stark minimalist one and another extensive one with supporting information and a comprehensive navigation on the home page. In the minimalist version, the home page had little information. To avoid distraction, the main focus was on the booking function. The second version displayed a whole host of links such as fares, services, customer support, in addition to the booking form. The novelty in the second approach was a collapsible booking form present on all pages above the primary navigation (except the homepage which already contained an elaborate booking form), again addressing the fundamental need of booking cabs.

Out of the two approaches presented, the first ‘less is more’ approach was unanimously chosen by the management team. We then further refined the design and optimised it. We even borrowed certain helpful features from the design of the earlier call center application interface like disabling the form till the user provided the critical ‘time selection’ information.

NAVIGATION: The website navigation was in the following order: login info, pickup date time, pickup address details and destination area. To simplify the overall page, the navigation was minimised to the two main reasons why Meru customers called: bookings and fare inquiries. All the supporting information about the service, the company, advertising, etc. was compressed and put under a dropdown called ‘More’.

Home Page Option 2: The focus was still on bookings, however other links such as fares, services, customer support, etc, were visible as were testimonials and an elaborate footer

Home Page Option 1: We proposed that the focus be squarely on bookings

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We recommended a Booking widget on every inside page (shown collapsed and expanded)

9 The final home page was refreshingly simple. It addressed two most common customer needs—booking a taxi and getting to know about fares. Those interested in anything else could click on the dropdown ‘More’ INFORMATION MATTERS

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Redesigning the Booking Experience

CONFIRM BOOKING

The next step involved redesign of the booking experience. The new homepage successfully cued the user to book a cab. We now had to ensure that the same elegance and ease-of-use flowed through the entire process. So we set about making the entire life cycle of the booking request simple, intuitive and quick. We first ensured that the number of steps in the process was kept to a minimum. The screen after the booking request form (homepage) asked the visitor to review the bookings. Since the redesigned website was connected to the cab dispatch system, the rest of the process took the user through the steps that happened in the backend.

Confirmation screen allows the user to check details entered

A ‘waiting screen’ appeared while the system checked for cab availability. At this point the user could minimise the site and wander away. The results were communicated via an email and SMS. In case the user chose to stay on to the website, the results were shown in the next screen. On the last ‘confirmation screen’ , the user could tag the pickup address that he just used as ‘home’ or ‘office’ for a faster booking the next time.

LOOKING FOR CABS

A waiting screen appeared while the system checked for cab availability

BOOKING CONFIRMED

“In typical application or web development, usability is often paid little attention. While redesigning Meru Cabs site, we learnt that adequate thrust on Usability Engineering leads to high returns and customer delight. DotAhead did a fantastic job of blending functionality with attractive look and feel.”

Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs

On this screen, the user could tag the pickup address that he just used as ‘home’ or ‘office’ INFORMATION MATTERS | VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1

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Track Bookings Online: A user account page that showed pending journeys

Value-Added Services We then proceeded to provide some value adds for the online customer as incentive to book a cab on the site. Therse were: the ability to track the status of the booking, to book (for frequent travellers on the same route) the pickup location in a single click.

FAVORITE LOCATIONS: We offered registered customers the ability to pick up locations from pre-entered addresses. The users could set one address as ‘work’ and another as ‘home’

TRACK YOUR CAB: Meru customers could track their cab with a map widget using Google maps. This enabed them to get an idea of when the cab was going to reach the pickup point

The Launch

Finally, the Success

It was decided to launch the new website in two phases. A beta site was made open to regular users of the Meru service with an aim of getting initial feedback to iron out any issues that may arise due to bugs. Selected users were sent a mailer that invited them to sample the beta site and report errors and bugs.

The new website attracted over 20,000 new registered users within two weeks of launch. With the new platform, the web bookings for MeruCabs went up by 49% by the end of the first 2 weeks and were up by 700% by the end of the first 3 months.

After a couple of weeks of the beta phase, the new website was made open on merucabs.com. A customised email announcing the change was sent to existing Meru customers. The email also detailed the features of the site and how they could avail the new service online.

The web bookings also started contributing 15% of the overall bookings by the end of the first 3 months as opposed to 2% before. [Project Team: Gurpreet Singh, Piyush Goel, Dileepan Ramanan, Raghunath Maikkara]

11 Related Article: Case study: Mobile website for Meru Cabs on Page 66

INFORMATION MATTERS

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DESIGN | DASHBOARD

T P VIEW

The top 150-leaders at a top-tier telecommunications company get a collective, comprehensive view into their quarterly data

THE

Top management at a telecommunications company with offices in multiple countries faced a formidable task every quarter. They had to review reports from multiple segments and divisions within the company, check if the financials were in order and the projects on track. Course-corrections, if required, had to be taken up immediately.

Reports originated in different divisions across countries and were in multiple formats [Excel, graphs, PDFs and PPTs]. They had to be collated, compiled and presented in a standard, easy-to-understand format. The final output was a PDF document with graphs and data spread over many pages. The disparate nature of input formats made this routine activity very time consuming.

When Dygnos was presented with the problem, it looked at two aspects: j Reducing the time spent on creating reports j Making the reports so visually-engaging and rich, that analysis and insights were evident Dygnos, then, worked on creating dashboards for three main areas for the company: Finance, Products and Services. To simplify things, we approached each area as a separate module.

1. FINANCE MODULE Dygnos started with the Finance Module, a critical piece of analytics for the leadership team in the company. Since the project aimed at reducing the effort and time spent on generating reports, there were multiple challenges. First and foremost was the fact that much of the data was in an Excel spreadsheet which was not a standardised document. Columns were added each month (a standard template would typically have one column for month) and data was grouped both across rows as well as columns. At the same time, it was assumed that every quarter the data fields would change. Parsing such an Excel sheet was a big stumbling block. One had to ensure that not only was the data imported correctly, but it was correctly updated to the Financial head. At the same time, since the data in Excel sheets had a high number of decimal places, it was critical that floating point calculations did not result in errors. Specific care had to be taken while displaying data, to ensure that rounding off errors didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t occur.

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The finance module gives a clear overview of the profit & loss as well as revenue by different Lines of Business (LOBs)

The waterfall chart gave a perspective on which product was contributing to the gain or loss

Drill-downs From the visual perspective, since the leadership team was comfortable with numbers, the design was structured in two partsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one, a tabular look at the data and second, a graphical representation of key figures. Appropriate filters were set so that the same data could be viewed in multiple ways. If at one level we had the revenue (gross and net) for different figures, then in another view you had comparison of actual revenue versus the target set. Of particular importance was the waterfall chart (see visual on right) that clearly indicated which product segment was causing the shortfall or increase in revenue. Other graphs allow the leaders to view the change in expenses or revenues on a quarter-by-quarter basis and for sub-categories or each expense head as well. This was quite helpful in analysing which cost heads were increasing at a higher pace.

Instant Generation In developing and designing the module, Dygnos looked at many interesting graphs that were not necessarily possible in traditional programming. Specifically for this, Dygnos looked at Fusion Charts, a specialised third-party charting tool, that allowed us to generate interesting charts and could easily be embedded and customised in any development framework. At the same time, to ensure that charts do not take long to load, Ajax scripts were deployed so that data for different parameters was instantly available without the need to refresh the page or fetch data. All the data, including drill-downs, was on one single page and allowed the Team Leaders to get a complete financial picture at a glance. [The visuals on this page have been blurred to protect client confidentiality]

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2. PRODUCTS MODULE The products module was closely linked to the Financial Module, in that, it looked at the financials for the product, and it was a closer view that went into product subcategories. The challenge here was to ensure the product hierarchies were maintained and the values rolled-up from the lowest category to the highest one.

Designing the Pyramid In designing the Products Module, we looked at an inverse pyramid. All the product categories were displayed as layers in the pyramid and their data points made visible in a single view. And when a layer was clicked, it expanded to show comparative graphs on revenue by source, by region, and comparison against target. This could be done for any product at any level (refer to visuals on next page).

This ensured a simplified drill-down view while providing almost all the data. INFORMATION MATTERS

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PRODUCTS MODULE 1

1 Using a drill-down method, the top level view showed the main products and their revenue from different sources

2 Clicking on any of the products allowed

a visual comparison across months and quarters on different parameters

3. SERVICES MODULE One of the most interesting modules from the dashboards point of view was the Services Module. Here multiple service parameters were tracked against a benchmark. For example, billing cycle, or time to resolve a problem were service parameters that had pre-set benchmarks. The actual performance on a month-on-month basis, was compared against these.

Slice and Dice

SERVICES MODULE 3

The key was not to just compare and see whether a data point is good or bad, but normalise the data so that you could compare across categories to get a better idea. Since numbers by themselves do not mean much, a scale was invented to classify numbers as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In this module, we had a set template for the data and also allowed for comments against each particular number or graph, so the project manager or divisional head could insert comments about why that particular value was high or low for that month. This gave a context to the data and offered a better view into the operations.

From an administrative point of view, an Upload feature was incorporated in all the modules so that every month data could easily incorporated into the system with just an Excel sheet. An authenticated login ensured that only authorised personnel could view this information. The internal technology team also incorporated features such as Chat wherein users could ask the CEO for more details. All this data and charts were also backed by a presentation that was uploaded to the portal by the internal IT team.

3 Service parameters were not only shown as

achievement against target but best and worst performing months were also highlighted

By normalising data using percentages, comparisons between different parameters was possible

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With the dashboards now complete and in use, the focus within the company is now on popularising the reports, and making them available down the line. [Project Team: Mohan Krishnan, Niju Mohan]

[The visuals on this page have been blurred to protect client confidentiality]

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DESIGN | EXPERIENCE

WEALTHY MEET

WISE on the web

The new website of Kotak Mahindra’s Wealth Management Services treats every customer as king

THE

financial services market in India offers little variation to customers in terms of product features or schemes. Most communication centers around services offered and is presented in a uniform, clinical style.

In a departure from the norm, Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Wealth Management team aimed to communicate financial advisory services as a MUST for the wealthy in India. As one creative execution, they wanted to redesign their existing website in a way that exuded affluence and also positioned the Kotak Mahindra Wealth Management team as competent wealth advisors. Their existing website had also become a magnet for spam leads making it difficult to get to the right customers. The new website was thus expected to have some mechanism to correct the problems of unwanted queries. For DotAhead, this translated into an opportunity of combining sharper web technologies and a unique communication style.

To achieve the communication objectives, we suggested a theme-based website that would emphasise the importance of wealth management services in a way that was informative yet memorable.

Customer is King! We suggested the theme of royalty and trusted advisors. The client was compared to kings of yore who relied on trusted advisors in matters of governance. We positioned the Kotak Wealth Management team as trusted advisors in matters of wealth conservation and growth. The approach and the tone of website was informative and educational. The visual style emerged from Malaysian shadow puppets. We used illustrations that conveyed prosperity. The site included quotes from the ‘Arthashastra’ to reiterate the ‘Indian’ image of the Kotak Group in a market dominated by foreign banks. The overall look of the site also aimed to create an experience of exclusivity and implied wealth, in order to reduce leads from customers looking to meet personal investment needs of less value. INFORMATION MATTERS

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Different layouts were explored in keeping with the theme

DESIGNING THE WEBPAGES 1. HOMEPAGE Titled ‘The Discipline of Wealth’, the homepage had five panels that visually depicted key services: Risk Assessment, Portfolio Management, Wealth Advisory, Asset Management and Estate Planning. The tone was instructional all through. The page also positioned select wealth management advisors as the ‘Think Tank’ available to the clients. Instead of using photos, we used illustrations to relate the advisors with the metaphor created on the homepage.

The final layout presented the five services linked to the inside pages

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2.INSIDE PAGES: Inside pages were simple and webfriendly. For each service, lucid infographics were used. Pages featuring Kotak advisors had articles on wealth management authored by them to establish their competence in the field.

Each inside page had an infographic to explain the concept and a contact form

3. NAVIGATION: The navigation menu was relooked to offer more information. It also carried forward the same visual style of the site. The animation and design presented an instructional style aimed at ‘guiding’ users.

Rich navigation menu with images and narratives

4. CONTACT FORM: The problem of spam leads was solved by emphasising the exclusivity of the wealth management services. The contact form design included a line about ‘minimum investment limit’ required to request Kotak’s wealth management services. Designed in the form of a visiting card, it was placed on every page.

17 The visiting card contact form emphasised the eligibility criterion

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INFOGRAPHICS STYLE The website used rich graphical content to simplify complex aspects of their financial product. For instance, a table showing different asset types and their performance was enlivened by the use of of water colours. For showing the investment process and other diagrams we used a visual style that was consistent with the website design. Richer and more informational video content (see box: Ek tha Raja) was created to explain some key services in a storytelling mode. Bubble chart showing how asset classes perform was made visually attractive

The infographics were presented in a visual style that echoed the website design

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THA RAJA...

Visual Juju, our in-house video and animation company, took up the task of extending the concept Estate Planning. The client’s brief was: The concept is complex; use video to simplify it for the viewer. The videos was expected to be no longer than 60-90 seconds. The story’s context was set and the Team began with the challenge of explaining the ideas in a simple, yet complete manner. The video was called “Leave behind a Legacy, not Worries”. It uses the story of a king, his kingdom and his wealth to effectively illustrate Estate Planning and how it helps preserve and manage your assets.

A 90-second video echoed the ornate rich representational style used in the website. Metaphors like a sapling growing into a tree and the distribution of fruit, were used to simplify the concept. These were animated in a puppet style and brought to life with voice over and music. The Visual Juju Team was then commissioned a second video focussed on Family Office services. Titled “Your goals. Your family. Your office.”, this video showed two contrasting scenarios; one in which the customer spends his own time and attention to manage his wealth and the other when a trusted institution manages it for him effectively. Both the videos can be viewed on the website: http://wealthmanagement.kotak.com/

THE RESULT: “Synapse created a wonderful video that gave the required information in an easy to understand, succinct audiovisual format. The video is engaging, well made and of the right length to captivate the listener. Gautami Gavankar – Principle Advisor, Kotak Mahindra Trusteeship Services Ltd.

Though Wealth management is a service that is predominantly driven by offline relationship management, the information-intensive website is showing healthy signs of adoption. The first 6 months showed a steep drop of 25 percent in spam queries, enabling higher quality leads. The sign up rate of 26 percent has also improved against 3.4 percent in the previous year. [Project Team: Udaya Lakshmi, Dileepan Ramanan, Fatema Barot, Srinivasan Somasundaram]

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DESIGN | WEBSITE

THE NEW ROADMAP Redesigned portals of IDG’s flagship publications combine intelligent SEO and design to get more traffic

Website

Showcase what Matters to your Audience

“

Visual hierarchy helps ensure this. The masthead is analogous to signposts above the aisles inside a big supermarket. To engage visitors the first scroll should showcase the most important content of the site and give a sense of the depth and structure.

design means more than creating an aesthetically pleasant site. For business websites one big requirement is getting the right visitor and then actively engaging the visitor to ensure that he has a satisfying experience. While redesigning portals CIO.in and PCWorld.in, for IDG (a leading technology publisher) we studied audience profiles to create an appealing user experience. At the same time we introduced their content team to search engine friendly writing techniques to bring the right visitors to the site.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs, 2003

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”

Research on reaction times on the web* shows that a website has less than 1/20th of a second to create an impact. The decision to stay on the site is influenced by a combination of how attractive the site looks visually and how relevant the content is to the user. This means the user should be able to identify with two or three things on the page at the first glance!

DotAhead used SEO, visual hierarchy and content design to ensure that the right visitors come to CIO.in and PCworld. in and find what they are looking for. * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4616700.stm

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CIO.in homepage dispalyed links to the content in the first scroll but also made use of the long scroll to showcase the content

CIO’s connect to one another The portal CIO.in is primarily aimed at the CIO’s and those aspiring to be CIOs. It is a a trusted, interactive, community destination for Indian CIOs and high-level IT executives to connect on key issues and business challenges. The redesigned homepage for CIO.in sports a primary navigation with links in the decreasing order of relevance. Below the primary navigation are the snippets of three most visited/accessed sections of the site which generate the most traffic for the portal—case studies, featured articles and latest news. And as a user scrolls down, the rest of the content unfolds. This enables a visitor of the site to quickly get a sense of what type of content he is most likely to find on the site as soon as he lands there.

Visually the page also features a lot of people images to create a sense of community to the portal. The focus here is not so much on traffic as it is on community-building. INFORMATION MATTERS

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PCWorld.in homepage also showcased most important content upfront and provided further links to inside content. The story headlines were re-written and made search engine friendly

PCWorld brings you the latest Unlike CIO.in, PCWorld.in is in the consumer space and is fierce about page views.

The homepage of this portal sports a clear positioning around news, reviews and downloads, which is ostensibly reflected in the primary navigation as well as the first scroll of the website. INFORMATION MATTERS | VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1

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“Build it, and they will come. Theodore Roosevelt

Become Search Engine friendly

”

Much of the writing techniques that work well in print don’t particularly work as well on the web. For instance, consider the article headline “Line of control” from CIO magazine, which talks about how Indian Railways used data to identify inefficiencies in their system and used IT to automate their processes. This title along with an interesting graphic may work very well when one comes across it in a magazine.

We also talked about various elements on the webpage— the URL shown in the address bar, the number of times a word is mentioned on the page, image names, meta data visible only to the search engine robots. The way all these elements come together to determine how relevant the search engine considers the page for a particular search term was also explained.

However, this headline fails to give the search engine any clue about the content. And unless the search engine knows what the article is about, it will not show up for someone who is looking for a case study on Indian Railways’ IT efforts.

Enriched with an understanding of user experience and SEO, we launched the redesigned PCWorld.in website in April 2010. By end of 2010, the traffic on the site grew ten fold surpassing their Australian and British counterparts. Most of the new traffic came from Google search results for latest gadgets and Google News India, thus being a testimony to the SEO measures put in place on the site.

Thus, different metrics and considerations come into play when writing for the web. We conducted a two-day training session for the Editorial teams of CIO magazine, PCWorld, ComputerWorld and ChannelWorld on how writing for web is different. Conducted at IDG’s office in Bangalore, the two-day immersive worshop also included sessions on search engine optimisation and talked about keyword density on a page, page title and the need to place emphasis on key components of the article with the help of lists, bold letters, headings, etc.

IMPACT

Since revamp, the traffic on of CIO.in has doubled. Bounce rate (percentage of people who land on the site and leave it without interacting) has decreased by nearly 40%. This indicates that the visitors are getting a more satisfying experience on the site that motivates them to click and delve deeper. [Project Team: Piyush Goel, Gurpreet Singh, Dileepan Ramanan]

PCWorld growth in 8 months following the launch of the new website. Traffic grew 10-fold.

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MARKET | LAUNCH

YOUR

OFFICE IS

WHERE YOU ARE GETTING OUT OF THE BOX WITH OFFICE 2010 Microsoft’s innovative pre-launch campaign for Office 2010 creates millions of experiences

Product

launches at Microsoft India tend to focus on a big launch event to establish brand visibility and recall with key customers. But the 6-month period between the beta availability of Microsoft Office 2010 and the General Availability ‘official’ launch in June 2010 presented Microsoft India an opportunity to do something different and over a longer duration of time.

The desired outcome of this long-term activity was to ensure that all Microsoft Office 2010 products gain traction among home consumers, business customers and the partner ecosystem. For Microsoft Office, company’s flagship product, any ‘information user’ is

part of the audience. An integrated marketing campaign announcing Office 2010 was designed around the audience spectrum roughly consisting of the following five segments: Working Professionals: Information Workers, IT Professionals, Developers Home and Academic users: Students, Teachers, Mothers Business Customers: CXOs and IT heads who influence the purchase Partners: System Integrators and OEM partners who ensure deployment Employees: 5000+ employees of Microsoft India who could become passionate champions of Office 2010

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Teaser eDM and announcement of campaign within Microsoft.

The marketing objectives identified for the campaign were:

Create Awareness: Establish Microsoft Office 2010 as a key productivity tool, by getting through to new influencers; leverage opinion leaders, media, and communities in the online space Showcase Innovation: Empower industry at large and drive adoption in Business organisations in the enterprise space Evaluate and Deploy: Drive downloads and trials for the Beta, especially by early adopters through the stages of recommendations, consideration, evaluation and deployment Reach: Engage the community and drive enthusiasm to upgrade by involving Microsoft India employees and the partner community to participate and actively showcase Office 2010

Based on the campaign objectives, we identified the following opportunities: Availability of the Beta version of Office 2010 for free download would give us a 6-month window to drive experiences and build sustained engagement Given that Microsoft Office, along with Windows, is a widely used software in India, we had a chance of driving usage across all audiences The functional usability of Office 2010 now working from the mobile phone and in the web browser brought the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;3 screens and a cloudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to life for the average Office user. We were convinced that the user experience of Office 2010 Beta was good enough to make it into a habit. Synapse along with Microsoft created a 360-degree campaign which included a targeted online campaign along with the usual communication collateral like print ads, eDMs etc. We present 10 select examples of the pre-launch campaign. INFORMATION MATTERS

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YOUR OFFICE IS WHERE YOU ARE We began by developing an audience-focused core proposition that derived from a product reality and matched existing user habits. Studying the product ourselves, we identified its main differentiating feature: The ability to work across three screens: the PC, the phone (with Office Mobile) and the web browser (with Office Web Apps). This matched perfectly with the nature of fast-evolving work environment in India’s big cities: The Mobile Workplace: From a fixed 9-to-5 job in a single location to ‘always on’—while travelling, outside the office or on the phone Working in Real-time: Working with different teams across geographies / time zones—often resulting in ‘lack of time’ and not being able to do the things you want Abundance of Technology: Need to simplify access and have a single platform across multiple devices, reducing the learning curve. Changing Workplace Practices: The Indian work culture is in a state of flux. Companies are actively considering and adopting new practices like working from home, extended maternity leave, empowering sales force with mobile phones, increasing diversity ratio etc.

Teaser eDMs and announcement of campaign within Microsoft. Some of the collateral featured Microsoft employees as ‘models’

Ability to work from hitherto ‘impossible’ locations and situations using Office 2010 was the starting point of the creative execution. We aimed to showcase the working professional caught in ‘impossible work situations’ arising in the ‘always on’ workplace.

The answer: ‘Your Office is where YOU are’.

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Making a Conversation Starter

Ambassadors send their photos in outdoor locations to a designated email ID

A personalised card with a relevant slogan and the picture is made. The back of the card contains the usual details.

Your Office is A GREAT CONVERSATION STARTER With the objective of making the 5,000strong Microsoft India employees into brand ambassadors among customers and partners, the first initiatives involved using the employees as models. Employees were asked to submit photos pursuing their interests outside office. These photos were then converted to personalised business cards with a customised quirky messaging, driving home the ‘My Office is Where I Am’ message. These Limited Edition cards served as effective conversation starters around Office 2010 when meeting customers or partners.

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The card, given to customers or partners at the right time, never fails to arouse curiosity and prompt a question: “What’s this about?!”

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Your Office is PERSONAL Keeping it personal, we decided against using stock photos of models for this section of the campaign. Photo shoots were also organised within the Microsoft India offices—employees became models and were featured in posters, brochures and print ads. Reallife interests and habits were showcased as everyday usage scenarios. Featured alongside is Hitu Chawla, a Microsoft employee and an avid salsa dancer post-work. She says, “For months after the Office 2010 posters came out, I had partners and employees I didn’t recognise call me by name!” A true testimonial of brand recall!

A real-life waiting problem of delayed flights in Delhi winters became a poster concept for Alka Kaul

Tarun Malik’s favourite SUV was the subject of another poster INFORMATION MATTERS | VOLUME 5-ISSUE 1

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Your Office is ON THE STREETS OF MUMBAI A vox-pop video shot in the streets of Mumbai asking people where their Office is and then building on the proposition—“Your office is where you are” underlined the ability to work and collaborate from anywhere. Our camera travelled to various places in Mumbai— railway stations, corporate parks, the chai tapris, the stock bazaar and wada pav thelas. The anchor would approach people at random and ask, “Where is your Office”, followed by, “Where is your office right now?” to which we got startled expressions, dismissals and reactions like “Same place, no?” Those who had the patience to stay were further probed, “Where was it 10 minutes back? “What if you could work from here only?” as the last question only got surprise, wonder and “That is not possible.” as reactions. How

could anybody have worked from a rickshaw, the footpath or a paan stall? The video ends with a simple statement: “Your New Office is where You are.” A very fast cut and crisp edit of humourous answers and expressions from various real people caught in real places was very effective. This 2.5 min video was screened at Microsoft and its resounding popularity internally made us feel confident of broadcasting. A shorter 45 sec version was created and was screened as in-flight content on the Air India flights, again carefully choosing a contextual medium where information workers are on the move away from their offices and desks.

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YOUR OFFICE IS A TRAVELING ROADSHOW To highlight other new features of Office 2010 to employees, city-specific Roadshow events were organised in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Innovative team building activities like a jigsaw puzzle featuring employees in different locations and a quiz (with boxing gloves!) helped drive excitement and ensure high recall.

A 5-picture jigsaw puzzle activity was done internally to drive home the message

30 An interactive’Office quiz’ had seniour managers mock boxing it to win

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YOUR OFFICE IS ALSO INSIDE YOUR OFFICE! Along with posters, ambient media featuring contextspecific messages were placed at various pointsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;cafeteria, cubicle walls and conference roomsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;within the Microsoft India offices. In common areas like the Reception, largerthan-life installations were placed to attract attention. Branded laptop stickers and laptop bags were distributed to help drive home the message of working from locations other than the four walls of your office. A Laptop bag sticker that also became functional on the move

Model of the installation placed in the reception areas

A series of transparent stickers was designed to be used in cafeterias or windows of highrise office buildings. The arrows pointed to random locations in the city

In-office signage to be used outside an occupied conference room INFORMATION MATTERS

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2 1

Your Office is IN PRINT Instead of a regular print campaign, we opted to distribute a Beta version of Office 2010 and all its other productsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Project, Visio and SharePointâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as Cover DVDs with a variety of publications.

A well-researched media plan ensured that we reached a wide spectrum of users spanning techies (Digit, PCQuest, T3), business users (CTOForum Magazine, BusinessWorld), home users (People, Femina), academically-oriented (Competition Success Review), travel enthusiasts (Lonely Planet), car enthusiasts (Top Gear, Overdrive), etc. A reverse-gatefold print ad placed in 4 publications provided additional visibility to the Office

1 Beta versions given as Covermount DVDs 2 A double spread ad that accompanied the DVD 3 Interface of the DVD

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THE BUZZ Links to the latest press and media releases

AT WORK Highlighting testimonials from customers and partners using Office 2010

IN FOCUS Frequently updated videos hosted through Microsoft Showcase

WHAT’S NEW Live Twitter feed from www.twitter.com/office

Your Office is A LIVE NEWS HUB For the early adopters of Office 2010, we provided fresh updates on the latest on Office 2010. The homepage of the product website (www.microsoft.com/india/office) featured 4 sections that provided real-time updates on Office 2010.

Banners on Microsoft websites led to the Office website

In addition, the website featured the ‘Download Office 2010’ as a prominent call to action and featured links to individual product sites. This was further driven by a Digital campaign comprising online and video banners and Facebook applications. Targeted eDMs were sent to IT Professionals and Microsoft customers as well. INFORMATION MATTERS

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Your Office THINKS OUT OF THE BOX Get ‘Out of the Box with Office 2010’ social media micro site: Linked to Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook Comments and posts updated in real-time Moderated by dedicated community manager for the duration of the contest

To sustain engagement after Beta downloads, a digital destination called “outofbox” was created for early adopters to share their experiences. Building on the thought that Office 2010 helps users work from any location, a contest called ‘Get Out of the Box with Office 2010’ was developed. The contest was unique because people could participate on 4 different social community forums (on dedicated Office 2010 communities): Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. By giving multiple ways to share their experiences—sharing photos, videos, tweets or wall posts—the barrier for entry was greatly reduced.

PHOTO: Post your photo in locations out of the box

VIDEO: Shoot a product demo or tell us how you use Office 2010

TWEETS: Share your ‘out of the box’ ideas in less than 140 characters

34 WALL POSTS: Spread the word and connect with other Office 2010 fans

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SPREADING AWARENESS FOR ‘OUT OF THE BOX’ Display banners on Microsoft.com

Your Office is Where YOU Are

SNAP

Are YO OUT U OF TH BOX yeEt?

a photo of you outside your office. Remember to mark your photos as Public so everyone can see them! POST on www.flickr.com/groups/myoffice2010

TWEET about how you use Office 2010 to work from anywhere. Remember to become a follower to get the latest on all things Office! TWEET NOW on www.twitter.com/mynewoffice2010

SHOOT

Here are 5 Ways to tell the world

about your 'OUT OF THE BOX' experience

a video testimonial or demo of your favourite Office 2010 feature. You can use your webcam, phone or screencapture to create videos! POST YOUR VIDEO on www.youtube.com/myoffice2010

BECOME A FAN on Facebook and post on the Wall or share a photo. You can also register for upcoming events and meet other fans. LOG ON to the Facebook community at http://tinyurl.com/offoutofbox

If you are already on Microsoft Office 2010, you would have no doubt discovered how it helps you to work from anywhere with your PC, mobile phone or the Internet browser.

us your text entry, photo or video directly at In2010@microsoft.com You can participate in the contest even if you are not a member of these social networks!

WIN TING EXCIZES PRIERY EV EEK W

Find out more about the New Office at www.microsoft.com/india/office

Share your Out of the Box Experience using Office 2010 at www.microsoft.com/india/office/outofbox

Synapse|www.informationmatters.in

Your Office is Where YOU Are

Print ad (Double spread with covermount Beta DVD)

131 members | 128 user photos 4 discussions

Internal mail sent to all employees for contributions

64 Mn Exposures | 130K Initial Respones | 74K visits to homepage (57% of total viewers) 13K Beta Downloads |5 contest winners

tweets:

388 Followers | 400 Tweets | 500+ Total tweets

1508 fans | 70% Post Quality | 500+ Attendees for Webcasts from 9 past events shared | 74 fan-created photos 50+ links shared

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Your Office IS AN EVENT TO BEHOLD The digital campaign was also backed by a strong on-ground outreach to spread awareness among various audiences: FIRST LOOK CLINICS: For Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio to Students, IT Professionals & Developers. These clinics were conducted across 185 centers in 80 cities and attracted close to 20,000 participants

TECH-ED INDIA: Presence through sponsorship, key note sessions and trials at major tech events and education forums like TechEd India and at IHEC eventâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Gurukul Contest EDU 2010

Onsite Productivity Sessions in Customer offices with Office 2010 Collateral and video testimonials recorded after sessions

Reaching out to CIOs, CXOs through events like Microsoft Productivity Conference, attended by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Edu 2010 Campus Event & Dreamspark Yatra Reached thousands of students in major campuses. Covered about 100 cities across India

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LEARNINGS from the Office 2010 campaign One for all: Identifying a universal insight about what people want (to manage work-life balance) and what people are doing (working more and more outside the traditional cubicle) helped create a central theme around ‘Your Office is Where You Are’ Make employees your biggest fans: Employees can become great brand ambassadors – and models too! Involving them right from the beginning ensured a successful engagement to customers and partners. Look closer: Touch-points like personalised business cards, derived from existing business practices, and formats like quiz shows and jigsaw puzzles are low-cost and effective formats to demonstrate the brand promise. Go where your users are: The Office 2010 social media campaign heard and encouraged user experiences on social networks like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. They also offered a live resource of evidence and helped connect to new users. Start early and keep going: Developing a campaign around a free trial can work wonders if sustained through conversations and engagements

Over 1.1 Million Beta experiences | 24,000+ partners across 7,000+ organisations | Over 80,000+ IT Pros reached

TOTAL IMPACT: The impact from this campaign was over 1.1 Million Beta experiences. The campaign to download the Office 2010 connected over 106K students, 122K developers, 43K Information Workers, 30K influencers and 22K architects. A targeted online campaign drove over 126K downloads.

All in all, a successful launch and a plaque from Microsoft India to celebrate it! [Project Team: Advait Ubhayakar. Mohan Krishnan, Arun Mota, Umesh Chavan, Piyush Goel, Fatema Barot] INFORMATION MATTERS

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MARKET | BRANDING

mangoes from farm to fork

TERI plans an experiment that uses marketing to eliminate the middle man

the world, Goa is all about beaches and tourism, but like most other states of India, Goa is a land of villages, each with a distinct identity and unique heritage. About 60 per cent of Goa’s population is engaged in some form of agri-related activity for their livelihood. The Goa Office of The Environment Research Institute (TERI), India’s premier environmental research organisation, through funding from the Toyota Foundation initiated a project that aimed to help farmers realise higher value on their produce by eliminating the middle men and reaching consumers directly.

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TERI believed that collectively the farmers could achieve more than each individual trying to get the best price for their produce, so it was keen to help farmers sell mangoes under their own brand. TERI also wanted to establish that through significantly improved marketing, some of the unique advantages of this Island could be translated into an engaging marketing proposition. They turned to Synapse to create a marketing proposition as well as collateral to enable this.

Aamcho Aam The first step was to “brand” the product. As the ‘Farmers Club’ itself, is a relatively new entity we did not want to create a differentiated brand name for the mangoes. We also wanted to mention the ‘geographical location’ of the mango variety and establish that as unique in the mind of the customer.

FRESH OUT OF A BOX

We chose to call the mangos ‘Aamcho’ (‘ours’ in Konkani). This name also included local word for mango ‘aam’ into it. Considering the unique origin theory, developing the marketing proposition was easy. We decided to

anchor the communication around “Direct from Farmers in Chorao”. This marketing proposition had three

advantages:

1 2 3

It strengthened the proposition of being ‘ours’, meaning this product is from Goa and grown by Goans In a commodity market, this also allowed us to build a ‘story’ around the Island itself and the people farming there It communicated that the price being charged is finally going to the farmer, and not to some middle-man

In the initial run, the Farmers Club decided to sell 300 boxes of mangoes within Goa. Keeping the logistics of home delivery in mind, the delivery of mangoes was limited to areas in and around Panjim. A unique phone number was taken by the Club and the people could call this number to place an order.

The design deliverables for the brand had two components, the packaging and a lead generation pamphlet

The BOX: We decided to use a corrugated cardboard box for packaging the mangoes. These boxes are cheap and easy to procure in Goa, and provide enough space to create a compelling visual story. They also ensure that mangoes do not get damaged in transit. We placed the branding on two sides in a big bold typeface. We extended the ‘direct from farmer’ proposition to the packaging by providing a blank space that would have the name of the farmer from whose orchard the mangos in the box were picked. Then we decided to make the box itself interesting, as it was the lowest cost ‘branding’ device available. We sprinkled mango-related fun facts, trivia and quotes all over the box and made it stand out visually.

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Sweet Returns for Farmers… The experiment was a big success. Earlier the small farmers of Chorao, for the lack of manpower, would hand over their produce-laden trees to contractors who would pay them a rock bottom price of Rs 4-5 per mango. With the success of creating an alternative sales channel these farmers were now realising Rs 15 or more per mango. An example is the farmer Mr N. Pai, a member of the Farmers Club, whose earnings from his mango crop used to be Rs 15,000 per annum and after this program he realised close to Rs 60,000. Even large farmers who typically depend on contractors and middle men, are increasing the quantum of their produce being sold through the Famers Club. Mangos are seasonal and prone to supply inconsistencies and have traditionally seen very high prices in the beginning of the season and gradually declining over a period of time. Since we were marketed under a “brand name” it was important that the price remain constant through the season.

“A branding and marketing exercise where farmers ‘hire’ skills (brand development, communication design, marketing etc...), increases probability of success in collaborative activities.” Yogita Mehra, TERI

One concern was the customers who bought Aamcho at the beginning of the season got a price advantage, and those who bought it towards the latter half of the season ended up paying higher than market. We found that this had no impact on the sales, and demand continued to be strong after the initial lot of 300 ran out. The entire experiment had left a positive impression in the minds of customers, many of whom started booking mangoes early in the following year. In 2011, the Chorao Island Farmers Club repeated the exercise and this time 700 boxes of mangoes went directly from farm to fork, in four weeks. [Project Team: Sirish Nimmagadda, Shyam Bandekar]

The FLYER: The lead generation pamphlet had five key components: 1. The story of Mancurad mangoes and the significance of Chorao Mancurad 2. Introduction to the Chorao Island Farmers Club 3. Call to Action: Price of the produce and the telephone number to call for Free Home Delivery 4. The process involved in ensuring best quality mangos reach each customer 5. And most importantly the heroes of our story – the actual farmers from Chorao. Around 1000 of these leaflets were printed, and their circulation was carefully targeted. This activity created a cascading word-of-mouth publicity and target number of boxes (300 in 2010) were sold in less than four weeks.

Lead generation pamphlet: front and back

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COMMUNICATE | ENGAGE

First

IMPRESSIONS: Designing, delivering and tracking Communication

HP creates a multi-media campaign to engage its partners around the launch of its low CPP-based printer

IN THE

last quarter of 2010, HP revamped its product portfolio for the Indian market to include a series of low CPP (cost per page) based printers. These printers are reasonably priced (starting as low as Rs 2,040) and have a low running costâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; replacement cartridges is priced at Rs 425.

The launch of these printers in the Indian market was expected to significantly alter the dynamics of owning and operating printers in homes and small offices.

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The Challenge: With its unique selling proposition of value-buy, HP looked at many marketing channels to communicate the message to its consumers. In the sale cycle however, it is the authorised partners that represent HP. Called as Volume Channel Partners (VCP), these representatives are the final point in the distribution cycle, before the product reaches retail stores that dot Nehru Place in Delhi, Lamington Road in Mumbai, SP Road in Bangalore and other such retail hubs of computing products. Getting attention of these partners is tough. They are busy sales people, with a clear view of what will sell and a shrewd eye on the margins. To support the launch of these low CPP-based printers, HP conceived a communication exercise that would create product launch awareness among VCPs and also train them to pitch the product to the retailers. The challenge was to do it in an engaging manner.

Campaign Guideline: Break the Stereotype Most channel communication is drab and uninspiring. So, the first guideline we put in place was: No dull, uninspiring, stereotypical communication. The most commonly used route to reach the VCPs is a sales meet or via collateral, like posters and leaflets. Though painstakingly made, these often end up in some dusty corner of their office. Here again, we put in a guideline for the campaign: No posters, banners or brochures. We decided to useâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Direct mailers, eDMs, Microsite and Videoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;media that reach VCPs directly and engages them. The third challenge was to create an informative but engaging message. Discarding the usual route of long and staid presentations and information-dense leaflets, we opted to use Pitch cards and objection handling tools. We also suggested a short presentation highlighting audience category sketches mapped to product benefits.

Guideline 1: No dull, uninspiring, communication

Guideline 2:

NO Posters, BanNers or Boring LEAFLETS

Guideline 3:

NO STAID PRESENTATIONS or INFO-DENSE collateral

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Product information leaflet was colourful and used unconventional styling

1: The Launch Communication

HP was on the verge of launching a customer-facing campaign backed with a huge media spend; so it made sense to ride on the campaign concept to have guaranteed visibility.

Next we created a product information leaflet and pitch card which would outline the competitive advantages offered by the HP Deskjet 1050, thus equipping the feet-on-street.

However, we also decided to integrate into the campaign, information about the features of HP Deskjet 1050 and how it would affect the segment sales, hence benefitting the partners.

We focused on highlighting product benefits in a memorable manner in order to effectively seed product information in the minds of the partners. We also hoped to get them interested in the product by pinpointing monetary benefit for them (increased sales by volume).

We began with a direct marketing campaign which consisted of a set of DMs being mailed to the database of the VCPs. These DMs lead to an online resource centre that provided more product information tools.

The final eDM stated the benefit to the partner (More customers, More Business, etc) and once again led to the resource centre created for this campaign.

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flet

EDm campaign accompanying the launch of HP 1050

THE RESOURCE CENTRE The Resource Centre, called www.MoreAtLess.in, mirrored the peppy, informative and fun look of the campaign. It also featured a lively video that served as a product demo

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2: Sales Tools Most sales tools make heavy reading due to charts of technical information and specifications. As a change, we suggested creating sales tools that capture the necessary product information in an easy-to-understand manner and help influence recall. The sales tools created for HP consisted of a pitch card, a product information leaflet and a presentation.

THE PITCH CARD covered questions likely to be asked by a prospective buyer, it also compared the HP product and competition on various data points to establish a better product perception.

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The reference leaflet was created as a tool a sales person could refer to just before he walked into the retail store for a pitch.

The Presentation was not about features of the product, but an exercise to make the sales person understand various customer profiles and to use the product information to address their needs.

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3: THE VIDEO In keeping with the informal fun tone of the campaign, we suggested a ‘Demo’ video that would not have long verbose explanations, lectures or classroom type of voiceover. We also suggested not using the product as the central point. We proposed that the video should communicate the advantages of the HP 1050 through words of its user ‘written on PRINT OUTS’.

{

Stop-motion is a technique achieved by viewing a series of still images in rapid succession often edited to match a music beat

}

The PLAN: We envisioned using different representative users of the printer—students, housewives, businessmen, designers, etc. to communicate the message:

rinter I use my P easily te a c i n u m to com ! and freely

The individual flavour of the different language styles would be captured through distinct type usage. To get the feeling of rapid messages appearing on print we planned to shoot the sequence in real time live-action. We used stop-motion to best execute the idea. We shared the concept and the treatment proposal. To this, the client added a valuable input—also show the expressions of the users. This was something we had not planned. However, including the expressions of the cast, made the video more lively.

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Shooting the demo: The Visual Juju team finalised the facts to be communicated and identified actions for the actors as well as the messages to appear on the print-outs. Along with the script, a storyboard was created to serve as reference while shooting. Every action and sequence was planned in detail. With the pre-production in place, a photo studio was booked for a day. Considering the modest budget, we recruited our colleagues to model as ‘Users’. All the sequences were shot in order; mixing and matching the faces as we proceeded. The actors were directed to hold blank sheets of paper and give the expression as per the storyboard. A good planned sequence helped us wrap up the shoot in a couple of hours, the actors feeling very satisfied with their performances.

The EDIT: The edit was a huge challenge. All the still images (about 900 of them) were colour corrected. The corrected frames were then lined up in the professional

editing software. On another layer, messages that appeared in every frame were manually created and placed (12 frames to each second). The message positions were carefully matched to the actor’s action in the frame. We timed the speed and duration counting on time required for the viewer to read and register the small sentences clearly. Another dimension that directed the beat of edit was the music. We found suitable stock music that synched well with our timing and gave the video the expected personality. Product reveal was another tricky part. We didn’t want to use a staid product shot, instead we shot the product from the top. And showed the last frame of the stopmotion sequence coming out of the printer as print-outs, thereby suggesting, that the printer is where all papers in the previous frames came from. INFORMATION MATTERS

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“Synapse took an email brief and made a fabulous video without any face-to-face interaction with us. There is a newness and freshness in their work. That’s why I love going back to Synapse.” Manisha Juneja, Channel and Trade Marketing Manager, Consumer IPG Business, HP

4: METRICS TOOL The client had set out to break a few conventions on this project. For starters, they had decided NOT to relegate the communication to the domain of dull and dreary. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Would the eDMs get served correctly? How many partners would actually view it? Would a campaign consisting of four creatives served in the short interval of 3 days be an overkill? Would they even watch the video that had been so painstakingly made? The only way to test this out was to run it through a tool that measures the response to each communication. Here we used a campaign monitor product ,EmGuage, developed by Dygnos, our sister company. According to EmGauge, the first eDM in the campaign received an open rate of more than 10%, a very high success rate for communication of such nature.

EmGauge helped us measure the effectiveness of the campaign

The entire campaign clocked a consistent open rate of 11%, a number that our client was very happy with. [Project Team: Fatema Barot, Srinivasan Somasundaram, Ravi Shankar, Arun Mota]

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COMMUNICATE | CHANGE

When

CHANGE

came to stay, Forever

CRY thanks its stakeholders for helping it make a lasting change

FOR

an organisation in the social sector, keeping donors and volunteers updated about the ways in which they can participate is almost as important as letting them know the impact of their participation. Not knowing the difference their contribution makes on-ground may turn the participants indifferent to further appeal for the same cause.

to design tangible, evidence-based communication centred on Change. ‘Change is good, when it is for good’ was the core message we aimed to show. We proposed highlighting stories of human triumph aided by the far-sighted efforts of a community of believers, thus reinforcing the core proposition that every individual’s contribution matters.

CRY as an NGO is one of the first and oldest advocating the cause of children in India. Their approach towards child rights is aimed at establishing a lasting change and differentiates them from the rest in the same space.

And we did not have to look very far.

To meaningfully engage and communicate to the stakeholder the impact of their contribution, we opted

30 years of untiring efforts at building the foundation for child rights had yielded stories capable of turning the most cynical into a believer, while giving the real heroes —the donors, volunteers, partners and employees—a sense of achievement and pride.

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Out of home campaign focussed on education

Ad on health for a print publication

Series of Campaign posters

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This direct mailer to a base of 80,000 got about Rs 30 lakhs as donation to CRY

Article as

appeared

in the Mint

(www.livem int.co

Age 8 - Picking up garbage

ish Age 12 - Picking up Engl

COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVE The challenge was to create communication that was relevant to current as well as prospective donors without deviating from the approach of showcasing the extent of change brought about by various CRY-supported projects. Two broad campaign categories were designed, one aimed at existing CRY supporters and the other at the prospects.

Campaign 1: Talking to the Uninitiated In reaching out to the fence-sitters and non-believers, we aimed to educate and set the context of CRY’s approach. Many people want to do their bit for children; but find it difficult to create a sustainable support system of providing relief to children in a country as large, diverse and challenging as India. We emphasised a collective effort. ‘Make Change that Stays’ became the campaign to create a larger support base that believes in CRY’s approach to create sustainable and long-lasting change.

Campaign 2: Thanking the Convert ‘Change you made, stayed’ became the sign-off line for the Lasting Change campaign that highighted the results of the participant’s belief and support. Anecdotal evidence and real photos were used to show how the lives of children had changed. The expectation from this part of the campaign was to catalyse a sense of renewed belief and vigour among the donors and volunteers. The overall goal proposed for the campaign was to:

1 2 3 4

Use stories to showcase the tangible impact CRY has made in the lives of children, hence addressing one of the key drivers for people to donate, i.e. My money is well spent if it can transform someone’s life Create a groundswell of support for sustainable change Address some of the misperceptions people have about CRY and motivate them to view the organisation and its way of working in a new light Encourage people to get involved with the organisation monetarily and non-monetarily

e, Stayed ’s life has now You Mad Changeher waste, Asmina CRY’s childhood sorting Vikas Dhara,

odds, Bal From wasting f). Today, for good. Fighting story overlea in her turned around her into school (read full English teacher put partner NGO wants to be an purpose and she beams with to thank. We have you the real father’s village. that lasts by tackling Keep about change rights. You help us bring children from getting theirfor good. issues that prevent can keep working we r togethe supporting us,

Reply included a Business3651/ 06 to CRY we have for you to donatecall Kavita Srivastava at 91-22-23 To make it easy tion il.org more informa ivastava@cryma Envelope. For is the email her at kavita.sr as donating online 2309 6845 or at www.cry.org to donate online raise funds. to But we urge you method for CRY most effective

DONATE Online at www.cry.org SMS <CRY> to 58558 Via cheque or DD

CRY - Child protection, Rights and You is their parentdevelopment and an Indian NGO that partici s and comm believes every unities to pation - thus a childhood. child regardless make this of For over a reality. 30 years, gender, caste or CRY has economic partnered status grassroots-le has the right to surviv vel NGOs al, working with childre n,

IMPACT A research conducted by CRY to validate their communication approaches and also to understand the donors psyche, gave us immense satisfaction at having hit the right chord with the audience. Here are some excerpts of individual interactions during the research:

“ “ “ “ “

“It does create an impression by giving an example that they are broadly tracking the change that they are trying to bring.” “The fact that even one life is being touched is good. It reassures me that the money is being put to some good use.” “I think it’s highly impressive. I think it’s exactly what I would want to see to believe in the NGO and be a part of it. Just what I have been looking for. Excellent.” “Inspiring to see a lot more kids out there who are working towards achieving their goal.” “The change that has been bought specially knowing by CRY builds a lasting impression which is a lot credible and builds respect for such an organization to a very large extent and encourages you to be a part of such a cause and make a difference in somebody’s life.”

However, the real results lie in the financial figures. While we wait to know the donation figures at the end of the financial year, we do know that we have a client who is understandably happy that the challenge of communicating the correct message has started on the right note. [Project Team: Anurashi Shetty, Dhrubajit Goswami, Smriti Chaudhary] INFORMATION MATTERS

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COMMUNICATE | Simplify

AS EASY AS

Tata Communications and the Kotak Group simplify company finances for all stakeholders

Professionals

Working with these two companies gave us an opportunity to develop differentiated and engaging routes to share critical financial information, with all people in the company. While Kotak Group started this series of internal communication during the good times when there was a boom in the financial markets, for Tata Communications’ the time and need was different. This difference manifested itself in the design approach and the tone of communication we took for each company.

In an effort to promote a culture of transparency, many employers now regularly share the financial performance indicators with the staff.

The first mailers sent out in both companies were long explanatory pieces which set the tone of the communication, and established the basic vocabulary of financial understanding. The subsequent mailers followed a ‘template’ sustained over the series, and the focus instead was on communication relevant for that quarter. Even though crafted out of a basic template, each mailer had a unique identity.

across the world are increasingly working in large and very large enterprises with thousands of employees and locations spanning many countries and time zones. The proliferation in the company size, increasing complexity in business, combined with revenue figures that run into billions of dollars sometimes makes it difficult for all employees to see the big picture.

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The Numbers KRAISE Dipak Gupta, the Executive Director of the Kotak Mahindra Group, who spearheaded this project for them set the light tone of the communication by actually making himself a ‘mascot’ who would appear on all mailers. Each edition was carefully crafted to reflect the message the company wanted to put out. Every quarterly issue, would carry a new caricature of Gupta in a funny exaggeration of the message the company intended. In the same light tone, the communication for the Kotak Group was called ‘KRAISE’ expanding to Kotak Results Analysed In Simple English.

KRAISE edms were very effective; in 2011 Kotak Group also experimented with a print version (see picture on the left) of an edm

The Kotak Mahindra mailers turned out to be prescient in their tone. The year 2008 was quite telling—it began with Dipak Gupta being portrayed as a Roman Emperor, and after recession hit he was portrayed as a coal miner in search of elusive opportunities. Each edition of KRAISE reflected the overall mood of the company based on their performance, market forces and other factors

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The first edition of UFO: The tone was educational, and the content featured short explanations on ‘key terms’ that appear in most financial statements

UFO in your Inbox

TATA

Communications is a global enterprise telecom company, whose cycle of investments to returns is significantly longer than other industries. The company had been investing heavily in infrastructure development, and was planning to continue to do so in the coming years. The need of the communication was to provide the stakeholders a longterm gain view of the investments, which seemed to be eating to the profitability of the on-going financial year. The idea was to consistently communicate that such investments were part of a larger plan and the ‘fruit’ was expected in a few years.

Tata Communications called the campaign UFO “Understanding the Finances of the Organization”. Here the mailers followed a different pattern; we used analogies to explain investment cycles, and how the returns take time. The first comparison explored was with an Orange farm. The subsequent versions had much more direct correlation with Tata Communications’ business and hence found much better traction within the company.

One successful analogy we used was of a shipping company investing in vessels, but not having enough customers to ply them profitably, yet. The word “yet” was a key in terms of its import, because the top management at TCL were confident that the current performance has been factored in while making the business plan and that over a period of time they will be able to recoup the value of the investments made in their network infrastructure as well as mergers and acquisitions.

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The two subsequent editions of UFO, featuring a simplified approach to sharing the numbers. The focus was on key aspects, instead of incorporating the details

Impact Communicating financial performance to all the people in a company builds a greater degree of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;unityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. There is a sense of a shared purpose, of being in it together. On the back of this degree of transparency, it is easier for companies to cascade motivational as well behavioural communication. Also this form of financial information sharing helps people understand the larger picture, of what their effort adds up to.

[Project Team: Sirish Nimmagadda, Vivek Chugh, Shyam Bandekar ]

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CONNECT | SOCIAL MEDIA

Cleartrip extends its TV campaign to Online media

TOWARDS

the end of 2010, Cleartrip, a leading online travel portal and also our client for over two years, approached us with a brief to extend their TV campaign to online media.

When they approached us, Cleartrip was 12 days away from the launch of their biggest brand campaign yet. Without wasting any time, we got on a conference call with them to understand the key message of the campaign. Since the TVCs were still being edited, they were unavailable for viewing for another week. However, after a 15-minute conversation with the client we had understood the thought behind the campaign message: Every trip has a purpose.

Sons and daughters travel home to visit their parents. Businessmen fly to sign important deals. Newly-weds take off to share a special moment. Wanderers travel thousands of miles just to find themselves. Indeed, every trip has a purpose. And using that message, Cleartrip had shot 70, unscripted, 10-second films at five different locations and captured real travelers and their purpose of travel to that particular destination. The campaign was to go live in 12 days. We had a very short deadline and no clue about where to go with the brief.

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The home page was kept simple, with clean design and minimal fields. Contest prizes were also shown upfront. A live user feed made the site dynamic and explained the incentive

Brief to ‘Concept’ in 1 night A message of ‘free dinner in exchange for ideas’ relayed on our office intranet magically got us a bunch of bright minds for some post-office hours brainstorming. And the results were amazing. By the of end three hours, we had many good ideas to work with. Many ideas were considered and discarded before we agreed on creating a microsite that effectively used these three catalysts of user engagement: Social Media, UserGenerated content and Contests. The TV campaign “Every trip has a purpose”, captured real people’s reasons for visiting a destination. We expected the microsite to establish a clear, focused and standard message for the brand. It was to focus on getting people to share with us the purpose of their travel, and if possible, upload a photo of their trip. And for every action, we envisaged benefits to ensure participation.

Building an ‘Engaging’ Microsite

Cleartrip. The ones with most number of ‘Likes’ for the entire duration of 6 weeks were given free travel worth Rs. 1,00,000. The idea behind having so many prizes was to make sure that there was enough incentive at every level to make people want to participate. We consciously prescribed the use of minimal content and the inclusion of only 2 fields above the fold.

1.The Home Page: The home page had to be engaging enough to ensure that a visitor to the microsite keyed in a ‘destination’ and a ‘reason’ as soon as he came to the microsite. The second objective was to get the visitor to submit a photo of the trip. To fulfill these objectives, we incorporated two things on the home page: 1. A prominent call-to-action 2. A strong incentive for the visitors Every person who shared his ‘purpose’ was assured a prize in the form of a travel voucher for Rs 150 from Cleartrip. Those who engaged further and uploaded a photo from the trip, were offered a choice between a customized photo mug or calendar worth Rs. 250 from Zoomin. We also planned to tie in Social Media to the microsite. The ‘purpose’ and the ‘picture’ that got the most number of ‘Likes’ in one week was given a free air ticket from

The campaign message was established with a 6-frame flash unit that concluded by driving home the incentive for participation—A free holiday worth Rs. 1,00,000 from Cleartrip. Below the Flash unit we placed a form, which had 2 fields and one submit ‘Enter the Contest now’ button. Further below on the home page, we placed details about the contest, a live feed of most recent submissions and a link to the TVC itself.

{

The term ‘Above the Fold’ owes its origin to newspaper design and was space reserved for the most important stories. In case of a website, it refers to portions of a webpage that are visible without having to scroll.

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2. User’s Journey Users who entered the contest were led to another page, which we designed to communicate three things:

1 2 3

Tell the user that he had won a gift voucher worth Rs150 from Cleartrip.com Get him to upload a photo and get the incentive tied to it Establish where the user was in the process life cycle

A process-design flow, clean layout and just the right amount of text helped us achieve all three.

‘WHERE’ for your

‘WHY’

One of the options we envisioned for the activity was a unique microsite that would enable a user to search for travel like never before. Called “Travel by Purpose” we proposed a website that says: “Give us a purpose of travel and we’ll give you a place to go to fulfill it”.

Using pre-collected data, a search widget would throw up recommendations. For instance, if a user keyed in “To bungee jump”, results like Cape Town, New Zealand, etc with average flight and hotel prices would be thrown up. Likewise, if a person keyed in “To beach-bum”, all popular beach destinations with average flight prices and hotel prices would show up. However, we soon realised that the launch was too near for for us to first gather enough data to support a powerful search engine and then to promote it. So, this concept was rejected in favour of “Every Trip as a Purpose” microsite.

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Each photo uploaded by a user generated a unique page where people could say ‘like’ or leave comments

3. User’s Very Own Page Once a user keyed in his purpose and uploaded a photo, a dedicated page was created for him. If a user participated multiple times in the contest, multiple pages were created. Each page essentially contained his purpose of travel and the photo uploaded. To enhance engagement with user pages, we integrated the infamous “Like” button on the pages along with a Facebook

comments box. This effectively meant that random visitors could comment or ‘Like’ someone else’s purpose of travel. The one with the most likes at the end of the contest won free travel worth Rs. 1,00,000 from Cleartrip.com. We also wanted people to get other people to like their pages. So a ‘share’ button was integrated at this stage.

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Display banners created to drive traffic to the microsite

Facebook banners focussed on small and large incentives to generate interest

Driving Traffic and Impact Since this concept was heavily dependent on traffic generation, we created a bunch of facebook ads, regular flash banners and a specific banner to run on Youtube. We also tried to use various touch points on Cleartrip.com. The Cleartrip home page, all unanimously agreed, was a brilliant channel to a reach 1,50,000 unique visitors a day and to seed participation.

Banner created for YouTube integrates the TVC and the contest form

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;MyPurpose translated the vox populi format of our TVC to online media in an extremely engaging manner. The social media integration & frictional user-flows were very effective. We saved a mini-fortune on paid media due to the referral traffic from social networks. The journey of co-creating this with Synapse in 12 days was a trip in its own right. Brilliant work!â&#x20AC;? Saurabh Nanda , Head-Online Marketing, Cleartip.com

Search results pages and the booking confirmation page, were also used as touchpoints for the campaign

140,000 41,033 5 5 7.08

Visits to the microsite: Photo submissions: Average stickiness:

minutes

seconds

Average page views per user:

Other touch points included the search results page, the booking confirmation page and the e-ticket. The campaign ran for six weeks and was a big success.

[Project Team: Vivek Chugh, Sirish Nimmagadda, Shyam Bandekar]

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CONNECT | MOBILE WEB

Going Mobile Tricks to make your website mobile-friendly

MOBILE

web is the term used to describe the experience of a user when he tries to access your website through a mobile phone. The screen size is limited; hence certain design principles need to be followed to ensure that the mobile visitor feels welcome.

Let’s take the example of the Toyota Etios launch in India in early 2011. Heavy marketing generated a huge number of searches on Google. Google Keyword Tool reveals that 8% to 10% of the total searches were initiated through a mobile device. However, the customer who searches for a product using his mobile phone does not often have a very welcoming experience. Those who accessed www.toyotaetios.in using their mobile phone would have encountered a Flashbased home page which fails to load on most mobile phones. To ensure optimum viewing experience for such visitors your site needs to be mobile-friendly. A quick test to see if you need a mobile website is to check the number of searches for your brand initiated from a mobile device. After that you can decide if you want an app or a mobile site.

To ‘App’ or to Re-create? An App is a piece of software that a user has to install on her phone. To the customer, an app is a utility. Swayed by

hype, a customer might install a certain app, but if the app is not getting used it will soon be replaced with another once the excitement dies out. The only apps that get used are utilities that solve a problem or answer an obvious need. Some examples: Facebook: Helps be in touch with friends during the daily commute Shazam: Check out the cool song playing at the club FourSquare: For discounts at restaurants & bars Instagram: Share a quirky picture you just clicked Google Sky: Find out what is the brightest star in the sky Angry Birds: Kill time while waiting at the dentists Only if you wish to provide a utility to the customer should you consider designing an app. Even then, first build a mobile-friendly website because: Mobile sites are lower on the hierarchy of needs. Only evolved and extremely loyal customers will download and use your app. Anyone googling you from the phone needs a decent experience. Apps are fragmented and hence difficult to maintain. The two dominant platforms in iOS and Android cannot be ignored. But then nor can Blackberry and Nokia. Let’s not even start on non-smart phones. Apps are difficult to update. You don’t have to worry about ‘adoption’ when you upgrade your website. You will have to, when you upgrade your apps.

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Planning your mobile site Here are a few things that you need to know before you implement a mobile site.

1. Multiple screen sizes – The biggest challenge on the mobile web is the diversity of screen sizes. One obviously cannot design for 20 different screen sizes, hence the best way is to cluster them. Typically, we design one version for screens less than 320px width, and the other for screens larger than 320px (iPhone 3Gs upwards). Usually, phones with screens larger than 320px come with browsers that can handle Javascript, which allows for a much better experience on the phone. Most well done commercial sites with lots of functionality maintain two versions of the mobile site, however, there are also ways to work around that. New advances in CSS technologies allow you to create websites that are responsive across different screen sizes.

2. Planning the content – While a website meant for consumption on a computer aims for comprehensiveness, doing the same on the mobile can be lethal for the user experience. When designing a mobile site, ask yourself why a person would want to come there from a mobile phone. Answer will usually fall into three broad motivations. urgent now: Someone looking for your company’s phone number or address desperately Repetitive now: Cricket score, stock market updates Bored now: Bollywood wallpapers, ringtones

Visual showing screen size variations for mobile phones

Cleartrip.com rendered on a 200px phone versus a bigger phone

3. Redirecting to the mobile version – Once you have a mobile version of your site, you will need to provide the user a clean way to access it. Usually, websites create a new domain like m.rediff.com for the mobile site. But a customer might not remember this. It is always good practice to set up certain redirects on server such that a user visiting your site through a mobile phone automatically gets redirected to the mobile version of the site.

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CASE-STUDY: Mobile site for Meru After the success of the web-based booking platform, (see page 4), Meru Cabs wanted to offer the same simple booking option for its ‘on the go’ customers. So a mobile version of the site was planned. This mobile version was also expected to integrate with the same cab dispatch system that powered the phone and the web bookings making it a completely automated mobile booking process. Here is how we went about adapting the site for mobile:

Stick to functionality: Keeping the limited screen size and the low bandwidth of the mobile networks we designed a slim mobile experience. We decided to limit this only to a ‘booking a cab’ feature.

Leverage responsiveness: Many smart phones do not support advanced browser features such as javascript. This meant that we had to break the booking form into multiple pages.

Major impact of this was on the ‘area selection’ field. Each city comprises a few hundred areas allowing user to select the pick up point accurately. On the desktop website, the system makes automatic suggestions for area names based as the user types. This allows the user to select the actual area name from the suggestions that spring up. This option was not possible on the mobile site due to the absence of Javascript, so we implemented an intelligent search algorithm. This required the user to enter first 3 or more characters of the area name. Then the system would bring back a list of possible area names from which a selection could be made.

Same URL: We set up redirects on the server which ensured that users visiting the site through a mobile phone automatically directed to the mobile version.

{

Javascript allows for making collapsible boxes, funky overlays and other effects in the browser without having to refresh the page

}

Area AUTO suggest on the full version site.

Area field suggestion on the mobile site.

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3 2

MOBILE BOOKING PROCESS 1. Select Pick-up Area 2. Select Drop Area 3. Confirm Booking 4. Confirmation message 5. Account Area

To generate traffic, registered website users were sent this mailer

Launch and Outcome The mobile offering became a popular channel through which Meru fans could avail themselves of the service. Within the first 4 weeks of launch, over 7,500 bookings had been made through the mobile site and the popularity has been on an increase ever since. [Project Team: Piyush Goel, Gurpreet Singh, Dileepan Ramanan, Raghunath Maikkara]

67 Related Article: Faster, Better Taxi Service on Page 04

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CONNECT | INTRANET

INTRANET

for Landmark

The Landmark Group connects its employees across 12 countries

LETâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

face itâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;An Intranet is a cost centre for a company with its limited direct correlation to real business goals like revenue and profitability. Even more so, if the organisation in question is not in a knowledge capital business.

Landmark Group, the Dubai-based, $3 billion retail giant with brands like Lifestyle, Home Center and Max engaged DotAhead to revamp their Intranet. Since the Intranet was a cost centre for Landmark Group (LMG), we had to make sure that we understood the employee needs very well before we designed the Intranet to ensure that it becomes effective efficiency enhancement and networking tool for the employees.

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STAGE 1: DEFINE At the first stage of the project, we worked on defining what the Intranet for LMG should be. We asked many questions as a part of a blueprint study and extensively researched the intranet space to understand best practices. We poured over research reports, case studies on intranets set up in big multinational organisations, and talked to the potential users to understand the pulse of the company and the organisational demands from the Intranet.

INTRANET

HOW IS AN DIFFERENT FROM A

WEBSITE ?

Organisational Objectives If the Intranet does not directly help an organisation earn more revenue, what should it do? Research suggests that most successful Intranet deployments in the world fulfil broadly nine objectives: 1. Functional 2. Motivational 3. Reinforcement 4. Respite 5. Socialisation 6. Debates and Discussion 7. Education 8. Culture Promotion 9. Integration This helped us establish content guidelines for the LMG intranet.

We also wanted the Intranet to become a destination that resonates with the pulse of LMG. To achieve this, we used a look and functionality very similar to that of Facebook. Features like status updates and daily feed were added to make this possible. To introduce the Intranet to the community, we also needed a strong communication plan to ensure that people sat up and took notice. We proposed a multi-layered communication plan to launch the Intranet internally and to drive traffic.

Control over the Access Environment: You have a better understanding of the usage environment. You know for which browsers and resolutions you need to design. Security and authorisation levels can also be controlled in a much more granular fashion. It is possible to keep certain information hidden from certain grades of employees.

Creating Interest Research indicates that killer apps work well to draw people to the Intranet. One useful app clearly was the organisation-wide directory with contacts of employees. Other useful apps like conference room booking facility and leave application templates were planned, but could not be implemented due to process limitations.

Control over the Audience: You have a better understanding of the audience demographic of an Intranet allowing you for more efficient design. Usage can also be mandated; some companies mandate that employees use the company intranet as the default home page.

Technology implementation: It is possible to have controlled integration with key systems in the organisation which make the Intranet much more useful. In many companies , the Intranet forms a major platform for peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. Dashboards of key performance indicators can make the Intranet much more useful.

Content control: You have far greater editorial control; distributed editorial panels are a possibility. Social features can ensure that user generated content is rich. Since the users are employees of an organisation, moderation is a far milder concern than a regular website.

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STAGE 2: DESIGN With the functionality established, we started the process of designing the Intranet. A detailed IA document captured the organisation of information, unique features of the LMG Intranet, and various navigation design options. An important criterion while designing the look of the product was the fact that people would visit the Intranet every day. So the Intranet needed to look like an interesting and pleasant ‘utility’ that one uses daily. This meant that the ‘design’ had to be in the background; it needed to follow function and not overwhelm. Also, during the course of our research we found that most successful intranets in the world looked like utilities.

STAGE 3: DEVELOP

Intranet launch announcement emailer

A few points were crucial at the development stage to ensure success. The previous Intranet was accessible only within the Dubai office, but Landmark had expanded since then to 12 countries. The need of the hour was for the Intranet to be globally accessible. Also, the usage was expected to spike around certain activities (company parties, launches, etc.). To accommodate this, we chose to host the Intranet on a cloud server from Rackspace. The Intranet was also integrated closely with the HRMS system powering the HR department at LMG. A weekly data sync (which in later iterations was made into a fully automated daily process) was put in place to ensure that new recruits are on the Intranet quickly and upon exit the access of ex-employees is curbed. An internal file sharing system allowed people to share interesting files, like presentations and documents with others in the company. A feature, called Dropbox, was incorporated to send large files. This helped the remote marketing departments to upload and download files easily.

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The look of the LMG Intranet followed function

EDMs highlighting specific features (news, status updates) and how to use them were sent to employees

Launch Communication It was clear the new Intranet needed new respect in the organisation and for that reason a strong launch campaign was a must. A combination of email communication and ambient communication was used to realise this dream.

[Project Team: Gurpreet Singh, Piyush Goel, Raghunath Maikkara]

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