Power of customer engagement

In present times companies have only one option - 'customer engagement' to remain competitive and profitable! The term 'engagement' has been around for a while now with various meanings.

Customer engagement (CE) refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer- or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline.

Engagement is all about being involved with customers. Involvement goes beyond a handshake  it's about genuine interest in what your customers feel, say and think about your company, products and market. It is about having mutual understanding between a customer and a vendor.

Engagement is about supporting customers in their buying decisions. In the end, the relationship between your company and customers makes up for a business relationship. As in any good relationship, both the parties will be benefitted from a healthy relationship. Besides, customers have demands and seek solutions by using your products or services and as a company you want to sell solutions to generate additional revenue.

Engagement is about looking after a network of people. In today's world of social media, people seek help and support to get information about new products and services. Engagement takes into account that each individual customer has not only a whole network of family, friends and colleagues, but also Twitter followers, blog readers and visitors, who are influenced by what customers have to say about your company.

Target markets

From a historical perspective, it makes sense to define target markets that can be reached with a specific marketing campaign. In fact, it's the only logical way to do so, as there is no other cost-effective way to differentiate within target groups. Get an advertisement printed in a magazine and then this magazine is mainly read by a certain audience. As a marketer, you want the audience to learn more about your products, so you use this magazine to reach an individual by means of reaching to an entire group of people. Of course there would be a group of non-interested readers as well, but it is the best you can do.

From market-driven to customer-driven

Customer engagement transforms companies from being market-driven to being customer-driven and changes the way they communicate. Market-driven companies, as the word implies, see the market as leading all activities. Such a company does not look at a single customer, but rather divides the market into homogeneous target groups. A target group represents a market segment with similar demographic characteristics, which respond in the same manner to a specific market stimulus. It disregards the needs and uniqueness of a customer, simply because the word 'market' means trade and revenue.

Being customer-driven, however, requires an entirely different attitude. It demands that organisations make a customer the starting point of all their processes instead of results. Customer-driven companies seek long-term customer relationships. From company's viewpoint, a customer relationship is regarded as the most important asset. Customer lifetime value, calculated as the net present value of all cash flows attributed to a relationship with a customer, emphasise on customer service and long-term customer satisfaction, rather than on maximising short-term sales.

Real-time dynamic segmentation

This transition from being market-driven to customer-driven requires a much more fine-grained marketing approach. Instead of looking at large group of similar customers, a marketer looks at an individual customer's needs and wants and tries to fulfill them. It will no longer suffice to segment customers prior to a marketing campaign. Rather, as a marketer you let customers dynamically segment themselves in real time, as they express their needs to you. This segmentation is based not only on demographics, but also on individual characteristics like interests, needs and online behaviour. This way segments become areas of interest rather than a collection of people with a similar demographic profile.

Be context-sensitive

Being customer-driven also depends on anticipating customer needs and fulfilling them. This needs listening to and properly understanding a customer at one hand and quickly responding to customer's needs on the other hand. This is different from traditional push marketing, where pushing the right content on a website was the king. A marketer decided on what message would fit best for his target audience and published this on his channel(s). In today's world, it's about pull marketing, where a marketer tries to 'pull' the needs, wants and desires of a customer, in order to know better what to offer him at the right time and at the right place.

Benefits of customer engagement

Being customer-driven automatically increases the engagement level a customer experiences with a company. This customer-driven engagement may require initial investment. However, research shows that engaged customers on an average offer 23 per cent premium in terms of wallet share, profitability, revenues and relationship growth.

Besides extra money, an engaged customer is willing to spend and engagement helps in improving customer loyalty. Loyalty leads to a more reliable, constant revenue stream at a low cost. As loyal customers require less marketing, promotion and sales efforts, the total cost-of-sales will be significantly less for a new customer.

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Women empowerment

Role of women in this modern world and India especially is a real paradox. On one hand she has reached unattained heights of success in terms of profession, entrepreneurship, social status and education, while on the other she has become a vulnerable target of violence from the society including her own family members.
The modern Indian women have honed their skills and jumped into a battlefield of life fighting against social restrictions, emotional ties, religious boundaries and cultural clutches.
She can now be seen working on par with men in every field be it media, information technology, medicine, astronomy, aeronautics, and what not. Just name them and you would find her working as part of a team or heading a team as do the many celebrity CEO’s of popular companies and heads of business firms.
As women are gaining momentum to join the mainstream men their troubles too are growing exponentially. Many complicated and totally unpredictable facets of impediments face her in every juncture of modern Indian women.
In those days women faced many Social Problems like Dowry ,Child Marriages ,Death During Childbirth ,Neglect During Early Childhood,sati   and many social problem against women but nowadays the status of women in India has been subject to many great changes over the past few millennia. From equal status with men in ancient times through the low points of the medieval period, to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers, the history of women in India has been eventful. In modern India, women have adorned high offices in India including that of the President, Prime minister, Speaker of the Lok Sabha and Leader of the Opposition. As of 2011, the President of India, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha (Lower House of the parliament) are all women. However, women in India generally are still exposed to numerous social issues. According to a global study conducted by Thomson Reuters, India is the "fourth most...

What is more important Money or Job......

Most people have some sort of bias against money, thinking that everything linked to money, no matter what the thing is, is evil. If money is really evil in itself, it must follow that money should never be a consideration in choosing a job. The validity of this argument, however, is seldom questioned. Only when we notice that money is merely a means of exchange and does not lead to any moral judgement in itself, we can then study the issue impartially.

The crux of the issue here is why we should take any job at all. Surely there are many reasons for taking a job, such as for professional respect, for the passion to serve the society, for some kind of social status—and, for money. In very rare cases do people ever choose their jobs for merely one of these reasons. Most of the times people work because they want to achieve a number of their personal goals. The most important aspect of their jobs will hence vary from person to person. Of course it is perfectly possible that a person may choose a job largely because of the generous pay that the employer offers. Everyone has to get enough money to survive. Hence if a person is currently living in a miserable condition and, out of his desperate desire for money, he accepts a job offer, the most important aspect of his job is most probably the money. And there is nothing morally wrong with that. The demand for money should surely prevail in this case.

However the need for certain minimum level of salary is only one of the considerations that people make when choosing jobs. It is hence also possible that the person is already rather rich even without a job, but he chooses to work to make himself happier. The pleasures of his career life may emerge from his passion for the profession or the social recognition he may get thereby, but no matter why he feels happy after taking the job, in this case money may only play an insignificant role, if any, in his job.

What have now been presented can actually be seen as the two extreme ends of the issue. Most likely is still that a person works both for his basic needs and for the pleasure specifically derived from the career life. Whether money will come out as the single most important determinant is hence depended on the various possible cases, more particularly, on the importance of the wages to his living standard. It is therefore rather ridiculous to give a general yes-or-no response to this question and it takes person judicious considerations before he decides to take a job.

Is Innovation the key to Surpass the Chinese Economy?

If one were to Google a comparison of Indian and Chinese Economy with a search term"india and china economic comparison",it would end up in  30,900,000 results.
Everyone seems to have fallen in love with this comparison between the two Asian Giants.

Looking at official chinese dailies,I came across one such  article to seemed to be of Great personal Interest to me.The article titled "The economic gap between China and India"predicts the Indian Economy surpassing that of China in the near future.The reason the article suggests is that India's businesses and firms heavily rest on Innovation and that while Chinese economic growth is majorly Government Backed,The story of India's economic success is more about the success of small and medium sized private Enterprises and the
"Low cost,high Innovation"principle that they apply.

The article also talks about the success of India's IT and Knowledge revolution and gives Indian Institutions like Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Home Grown talent as the major fuel for what is sustaining India's Economic Growth.

One could however easily Question if Innovation could be the one key masterstroke that would one day take us ahead of the Dragon.The answer I believe,lies primarily in how we approach the puzzle.When comparing two big economies as large as China and India,It would be rather inappropriate to base calculations on just a few factors.

The bigger Question One need to ask is "How India answers its own Economic Issues,one major being High Fiscal Deficit primarily caused by Subsidies."A recently submitted report by the Kelkar commitee has reasoned that Indian Government needs to reduce its expenditure on Subsidies which now account for as high as 2.6% of the GDP so that we do not face an 1991 like crisis again.

Based on the article :The economic gap between China and India and Kelkar committee reports

Written by Anupam Dubey

"India,Hazare and civil society- A Wave of change"

A true democracy is one when  leaders emerge from the masses and for the masses.It was Jaiprakash narayan who took the battle with Indira gandhi to the streets of Janpath from a small village in rohtas,bihar for civil liberties and another movement is shaping up yet again,The Anna Hazare movement,named after its leader.

"Who is Anna Hazare?" Is he just a mortal in flesh and blood like any of us are?Is he "THE MAHATMA" that some of 

us have made him.Anna hazare or Kisan baburao hazare,a 
man from a very humble background caught attention of the 
nation with his "fast unto death" againt corruption that has crept 
into the very social fabric of our nation.When write this piece of 
editorial on him,my sense of purpose is not the larger issue of 
corruption,or the glorification of the man called "Anna hazare",all I wish to understand is why this movement become 
such a mass movement and why is it ultimately dying a slow 
yet painful death.

Fasting as a method of protest is not a new concept in India

and has been put to good use even before Anna hazare sat in 

the ramlila maidan blowing trumpets against the United progressive alliance government in power at the centre.

The biggest reason, most people feel,gave this movement life were the Youth of the nation.India is fortunate to have a very young population and the youth of today wants a greater say in the way this country is being run today.I had a personal feel of the first edition of the Anna hazare movement against corruption when i walked the length and breadth of Ramlila maidan asking people why they were there and if they felt if a change was really coming?

As a young Indian,change is something that always catches 

my eye,and i witnessed a change when thousands of people 

thronged outside the jail premises when Anna Hazare had 

been kept and i also saw a government bow to the wishes of 

its people.

Reading through recent media reports criticising Anna Hazare's team and the civil society members for being 

unable to keep the moverment alive,I believe most people 

missed a point.It was right in front for all to see,yet,we missed 

it.

We failed to observe that the movement was fuelled by media 

and social networking sites,which can only go as far as 

bringing people to the change.The crowds did gather at 

Ramlila maidan but most of us who went there, knew the 

crowd wasn't one that would stay.

Most of the youth were college students or freshers working for multi nationals in and around delhi and social networking sites are popular in this section of the youth.The bigger population of youth across India in colleges and cities of the rural diaspora remained largely aloof of the movement.

All major political parties capture and target this youth of rural India through their youth wings,but Anna hazare or the "INDIA AGAINST CORRUPTION" movement lacked this intitiative.The movement will not reach the desired effect unless these people are joined to the main stream of the movement.

MOM : Next to God

 Mother is the ultimate word all human can trust on after God. A human who has the power to bring another human in this world. It’s like a human who feeds and foster the other human. Mother is the carrier of the human race. Who not just produces but also take care without any pay.

I was alone in the room and that was a gloomy evening. Lights were off balcony doors open and I was standing in the balcony to enjoy the evening and to forget some bad thoughts. Soon darkness slowly rose and the stars , the moon and the clouds come into view and it gave me an idea of a family together in the sky. It seemed no one was alone and everybody was in the happy company of its family members.

At that moment I was missing home and specially my mother very much. I still remember how I use to dump all my problems on her shoulders an get relieved. I missed her cooked food, her disciplined home, her commands to keep everything in place, her glittering eyes to see me happy. She taught me to be a human being. It’s my mom who taught me the art of living in any condition and situation.

My mother is disciplined, neatness & tidiness her success mantra. She follows Hitler’s rule: No argument, I am always right, follow me , what so ever my child has done nothing wrong and for me “you never need to worry when I there”.

What so ever we do in life we will never be able to pay back to our parents and specially mom. I am more attached to my Papa but more often I share my secrets and problems with my mother . I know she is the best women to discuss secrets with as she will take care of it.

I can’t even tell how many times I have missed her presence. There are times when friends are not enough to share everything and then she is required here. There is no one to take care of us and no one to see to our needs. Then I understand why we call woman next to God, she takes care of everyone and make this human race a worth presentable.

Womanhood is a blessing and becoming a mother is a boon.  I respect the woman in my life and call her my MOTHER and love her till I shall be alive.  She is most worth it. She has been my maker.

Twinkle Twinkle - A New Planet

A new planet has been discovered by scientists whose surface is supposed to be covered by diamonds .
The planet - called 55 Cancri e - has radius double the size of Earths and weighs eight times more . As we know the surface of earth is covered with water and graphite , 55 - cancri e - is supposed to be covered with diamonds and graphite .

It orbit at hyper speed - its year lasts just 18 hrs in contrast to earths 365 days and a temperature of 3,900F
The star is visible through naked eyes but for better vision use  binoculars .

Research suggests that the planet has no water at all and appears to be composed mainly of carbon ,iron ,silicon carbide and possibly some silicate .

Overview of Diamonds :

The name is derived from an ancient Greek (adamas) , "proper" , "unbreakable".Diamonds are thought to have been first recognized and mined in India , where significant alluvial deposits of the stone could be found many centuries ago along the rivers Penner , Krishna and Godavari .

Diamond is an allotrope of Carbon .It has remarkable optical characteristics , beacause of its extremely rigid lattice , it can be contaminated by very few types of impurities , such as boron & nitrogen .

But how many knows Diamonds are actually nothing as they are materials that can be produced in a special oven easily unlike Gold . And just in Earth there's enough supply of Diamonds rocks to last tens of thousands of years.

Fig: 55 - Cancri e



Sources : You news  

IILM GSM IN PICTURES

Morning @ IILM - GSM

LIGHTING LIVES IN SILENCE-HUSK POWER SYSTEMS

"Lighting lives with silence"

Mr Rambalak yadav has lived his life in a village "Tamkuha"(literally meaning Fog of Darkness) in the infamous Dhanaha region (often called the university for kidnappers) of West Champaran district in the state of Bihar.

Recently he experienced electricity for the first time in 60 years of this Country's Independence.

Mr. Yadav, a local teacher, shared his  reaction on the occasion "After sixty independent years, we have found freedom from Darkness".

One might speculate as to Who lighted his life?Well not the Indian Government I must hint you.

In a country with a Celebrity obessesed media and a Government Failing to ensure basic amenities to citizens,a new story is unfolding in Bihar thanks to Samta Samriddhi Foundation, an NGO setup by two childhood friends Gyanesh Pandey and Ratnesh Yadav.

This story has not been told much In India sadly with only The times group Covering it,However the development has been widely celebrated in the West with BBC,New York times and many more sharing the success story of these two friends.

Husk power systems,the venture they have established has taken the task of Setting biomass based power plants to light the villages of Bihar. Since 2008, HPS has successfully installed more than 80 plants in Bihar, providing electricity to over 200,000 people across 300 villages and hamlets.

Their Vision -"Power to empower millions of people – from darkness to light."

What they have achieved so far is commendable to say the least,From A grant of 90,000 euros from the Alstom foundation to upgrade 65 power plants to Saving 9,244,800 Liters of kerosene and touching  the lives of 200,000 people,Husk Power systems and people like Gyanesh Pandey and Ratnesh Yadav Are perhaps the “Business Visionaries” as I Do call them who could fill in the gaps between a very progressive IT India and a sluggishly growing ,government apathy stricken Rural India.

Source: HUSK POWER SYSTEMS WEBSITE

Written by:Anupam Dubey

ARE HUMAN BEINGS, MASTERS OR SLAVES?

In today’s fast paced world, everybody wants the best things in their life be a sprawling home, the most technologically advanced car,  latest gadgets and many more to make their life simple and AUTOMATED!!. Everything in our life from the smallest of things to the International Space Station is made up of technology  which makes our all tedious tasks (as we say in our times), simpler or to be said again, AUTOMATED! 

But really are we are the masters of our own willfully created technology or  have we just become  slaves to our own creations?

 People often make mistakes by relating technology to  computer related stuff  like hardware, software,or to mundane lines of codes, but it is for sure that the area we think about today is TECHNOLOGY, perhaps the last two decades in our country has been a  TECHNOLOGICALLY driven one

.And to become more advanced nations, every country in the world is trying to better their results in technological usage by simply upgrading it, making it work faster, finding ways to make the same technology work in different ways but to get the same outcome or result…or to say INNOVATING.

From the beginning, the advancement of  human race is  technology driven. For e.g. The spark created by banging two stones, using them as weapons, round stones as wheels and the list goes on and on.

There is a  saying  “NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF ALL INVENTIONS” which compels human beings to find out ways to overcome  obstacles laid down during evolution, but why has this saying  always been connected to technology?

 Why is  “technology” the driving force of our entire species?

Technology simplifies our lives, our day-to-day work and keeps us safely away from the mundane tasks that we dread, but does it imply that Technology makes us more intelligent by not doing the things which were supposed to be done by us, which might bring out new ways to do it and also new outcomes or to use a better word for it, is RESULT, might be achieved.

But we let the “set things” or say “tech” to do it just for the ease of not doing it ourselves , or to say not wasting our “precious” time on it by doing it.

Really?Our time is wasted in doing the things which could be done by a machine more efficiently and in small span of time. Alright, I also give in to the point that some things are more efficiently done by a machine than a human, but what the heck, humans again has created that machine giving in countless time just to make it functional and bringing it out to the whole species to make use of it so that the countless hours required to that piece of work can be reduced. But does this indicate that doing that piece of work, has to be done the same manner or the way the machine does it?  Or are there other alternate ways to do that kind or work which might lead to different outcomes or results.

Sadly, this has become the way of our life that we don’t bother to look upon the steps of doing a piece or work rather than focus on an outcome or better to say RESULT. If the desired result is achieved then everything’s fine and if not then we try it again and again and don’t see what’s actually going wrong in there. We don’t even try to take up that task, as it is mundane (our perception) for us and work it out in a different way to achieve the result which might be better or effective than the previous one. We just sit there blindly, helplessly and wait for the technology to solve that for us.

Have we not become the slaves of the technology that we have created to simplify our lives?

Have we become too dependent on technology that we can’t move a bit without it?

Have we become too blunt, dull, helpless, lazy and blind, that we can’t survive without it?

YES WE HAVE!

Because we need technology to get us the information we need, when we need it. Over the years, we have blended or to say moulded our lifestyles around technology that it cannot be removed or extracted out of our way of living. We do numerous tasks everyday be it very tiny, negligible or very important but without technology at our disposal we are just helpless beings. We do a lot of things like making calls, texting; video calling, internet surfing etc. and we do in manner that we have put in an auto-pilot mode!

Automating things and forgetting about is one different thing but to make our life more and more simple, we are giving the power of our minds to the machines so that, it might work in the way we want it to work. But will it really work in the way we want it to be or will it think in its own way like a sentient species of its kind. As we humans wage wars overs petty differences and kill thousands of ourselves just to make ourselves right….In our own way?  Will this self –conscious piece of tech might become our greatest threat as we have given it power of the human mind which in-turn make human kind its slave or wipe out completely. Numerous movies and video games have been made to give human beings the hint of the horror of what lies beyond!!

Aren’t we ourselves becoming or have become cyborgs in first place?

My idea of writing this article was  to explain that we make use of the technology as a stepping stone, like a side assistant and not as the crutch to the human kind to discover new and unique ways to enhance technology and human kind. Or keeping it in simple words “STAYING HUMAN”

Compiled and written by:-

Aditya chaturvedi

THE IILM GSM ADVANTAGE

 A DAY AT  IILM-GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

   A normal day At IILM GSM  is full of activity,be it Academics,Club activities, Guest lectures,Industrial visits or Company Workshops. Walking across the Campus,one gets consumed by its vibrance.

   The 26 clubs here engage students on all aspects of Personality building be it the Bloggers club,Marketing club,Eco green Environment club,It club,Finance club,The Film and media club,Drama club,Debate club and many more.There is a plethora of activities IILM GSM organises for student engagement.

   The Student Commitee of placements makes students a part of the placement team where a selected few Students,get a chance to communicate,organise and assist in the larger issues of Placement activities,Guest lectures and Industrial visits to the Placement Team of IGSM.

   Here Students are not Just Students,They are club office bearers,members of various teams,or interns of Reputed firms on the one hand and future managers,visionaries and entrepreneurs on the other.Such a rare mix of So much talent and so much activity  YOU can find only in IILM GSM.

   So the next time you are wondering as to where to go talent shopping,come right to Plot 16,knowledge park II,Greater Noida.

  And for those wondering,why we call it a knowledge park,Well IILM GSM is not the stones,or the crafty buildings and big infrastructure,it is knowledge 

The Brand IGSM, as I should say being a marketing guy is a brand of Promise, A Promise of a Great future.