IVR, helpdesk, CRM and Customer Service for Dummies

For many small businesses or startups life is all good till it comes to customer service or providing support. When suddenly the volume of calls and emails start going up way more than what a 2-3 person team (usually the business owner or founders) can handle. Suddenly the barrier to increasing scale seems more and more difficult to handle. Thats why a lot of businesses and startups think it is critical have a lot of money upfront or get funding for any idea that is B2C or retail focussed. And till a few years back that was indeed true. All IVR, phone systems and Customer service solutions were targeted towards the big enterprise markets. There were no easy to use yet powerful and scalable solutions for SMBs.

Vegas, Baby!

The guys from Hipmunk not just are focussed on building the most awesome travel site, but also have a little fun here and there. A group of college buddies have been planning to do a Vegas trip for the holidays. I was looking up tickets and when the search came through, instead of mentioning the airport of the location (in this case LAS) Hipmunk had replaced it with 'Vegas, baby!'. Love it when companies have easter eggs in their products. Remember Google Maps' Japan route :)

Why I'm Sticking With Spotify v/s Google Music, iTunes, Rdio and Amazon

Since Spotify launched in the US back in July 2011, I've been a convert and now a devout user of the service. I had managed to get an invite when they launched in private beta and was impressed by the execution of the desktop app. It was slick and simple to use. Of course the most important thing for me was their extensive collection of music. Not only did they have all the popular titles and artists, but they also carried a lot of indie and foreign music. Of special interest to me was their collection of Indian music. Not just Bollywood, but also carnatic, hindustani, pop and regional stuff.

Spotify Desktop App

Fun With Ngrams: Rise and Fall of Keywords

With the Ngram viewer tool from Google, you can create visualizations comparing the usage of words over time. The data comes from the book scanning project by Google. The data is available for anyone to download and analyze. And as they keep scanning more books, they will appending the data. So have fun playing around. Here are a few I did


Rise and Fall of World Powers: