Better Customer Retention with Zoho Creator and LetterMeLater
posted by gabriel in Business Improvement, Zoho Creator, Zoho Creator Depot, small business- 601 views
- 2 comments
Jon Udell recently wrote an interesting blog “Where can I subscribe to a running-shoe-replacement service ? “ which as I see it amounts to a simple way of fostering Customer Retention.
This is a business opportunity. If you’re a runner, spending $100 every six (or even three) months is infinitely preferable to injury. You’d think that shoe sellers would make it easy to do that, but they don’t. I’d happily authorize regular replacements, but nobody’s ever offered me that option.
His idea is applicable not only to athletic shoes, but to many other products and/or services that you just don’t keep track of and would gladly address when your provider sent you a friendly reminder. I can think of most of the house work I don’t do myself like termite treatment, gutter cleaning or air conditioning maintenance.
Jon writes again in Missing the cluetrain emphasizing the technology shortcomings of small businesses, so we decided to develop a solution to his problem (which I’ve captured with the cool online comic Pixton tool here) with Zoho Creator and LetterMeLater.
If you want to try it, here’s the link: Running Shoe Reminder . Be sure to sign up in LetterMeLater. This app will use the email you have associated with your Zoho Id to my gmail account to relay the message to LetterMeLater, which then forwards the message:
to the email you’ve specified in the form. It is currently set up to notify you 1 minute after you’ve entered the data, but surely you can envision this working at different intervals.
This is the type of application we want to showcase in the Zoho Creator Depot.
This might work as long as you can get an appropriate discount from the retailer/vendor so that the client will not “see” the markup as significant. The market is continually seeking to reduce the costs of “middlemen/ware” and transaction costs, etc. I can see a small fee on the order of $1-3 per month and they would want a number of products across a number of categories. SB could benefit for sure, but the issue for those organizations is cash flow, especially in these more turbulent times. The key will probably be ZOHO being free to the public users, which may happen.
Neil,
I think you make a good point and hit upon perhaps the most difficult challenge in carrying out successful customer interaction, namely discerning what a customer says they want vs. what they really need.
In your example the small businesses’ main goal to reduce middleware costs probably means we haven’t (yet?) demonstrated enough value in using these kinds of applications.
Show a small business how an app like RSR actually saves/makes them money far beyond buying and implementing the actual web form and maybe we’re onto something…
Add A Comment