Open Coffee Club Delhi - July Edition Vol. 2

In my last post I captured few points discussed by participants during OCC meet. Here are other key points discussed along with my comments :

Hiring & Retention Policy : Most of us think that employee retention is very important. You should have somebody working for you as long as possible. A lot of people tend to forget that the cost of employee becomes fixed-cost once he is associated for longer duration. Also his expectations during appraisals are quite high, if he is staying with the same organization for some time. The productivity of employee also decreases in most of the cases once he becomes complacent. In some cases, companies feel that they made a mistake by hiring wrong person. So, employees should not always be seen as assets and attrition should not have a negative connotation. One specific example of a BPO was given where they hire 100+ people every month. A lot of employees join here at a salary as low as Rs. 4000 and work for 3-4 months before moving to some other organization. But from company's perspective the cost of hiring & training is lower than keeping highly paid long-term employees. Even maintaining a work-force who works for you on part time basis is also a good option for organizations.
So folks, within your organization try to figure out cost of long-term vs. short-term employees before judging whether attrition is good or bad for you.

E-commerce & Mobile Advertising : All of us hear a lot about e-commerce and mobile advertising. The potential for both these technologies is quite huge, but currently it will take some time to pick-up. Few big challenges for e-commerce is establishing credibility and service guarantee. In India still there are only 2.5 Million e-commerce transactions happening. Once everything is in place and people will have good faith e-commerce will pick-up fast. The companies offering their services using e-commerce as a base should be ready for great end-user experience, good supplier network and security of financial information.
Mobile advertising is currently INR 40 Cr. industry and it growing fast. Smaller players are also using these means to touch-base with their customers. Getting a SMS from nearest Mall or restaurant is becoming popular. The only problem is information overload for end-users in long run. Intelligent background study is also required to send relevant messages to right people. The key lies in providing right advertisements to right people at right place and right time.

Need of low-cost solutions for SME's : There are huge number of emerging organizations in India and abroad. There is an urgent need to have customized application packages bundled for Small & Medium Enterprises. These kind of offerings would be priced reasonably,having key features only and easy to use. Think of a strip-down version of ERP software for SME's at reasonable price. The emerging organizations need good system in place to manage their business and technical functions.

Overall the discussion was quite enriching and people who missed out this time should definitely join next time.