Devon Blog

Tag: connectchief

  • How you can grow your business faster with connectchief

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. How you can grow your business faster with connectchief

    Every business owner knows they need to innovate and grow their business. What isn’t clear is how to methodically go about doing just that…

    Growth comes from recognizing the need for change, effectively adapting to shifts in your environment, having strong customer insights and finally turning this information into better customer experience and service.

    Connectchief helps businesses to better engage with its target customers, improving the effectiveness of their marketing, and enables them to find new ways communicate their value propositions.

    The digital revolution has unleashed rapid and significant changes in how business is done today. A businesses ability to engage customers, understand their changing needs and to keep up with them determines its success and growth rates.

    The connectchief team deeply understands how technology can play a significant role for your business to grow. We’re been rapidly innovating and responding with creative ideas to help small businesses build a competitive edge. With connectchief every small business can –

    + Collaborate with other businesses to promote each other

    Any business can get started with connectchief for free. Once registered, identify and invite other businesses nearby to collaborate with you. Each business can promote coupons & offers form its partner businesses to its own customers. Referred customers are more likely to do business with you over those who were attracted simply through a discount or a one-off advertisement. Referrals can cost almost 10x less than traditional advertisements when it comes to finding new customers.

    + Engage with your customers

    At connectchief, your business receives a personalized QR code which is powered by our platform. We chose QR codes so you do not have to many any investments in buying equipment or other technology to grow your business. A simple QR code puts the power of the entire connectchief platform behind your business. Place that QR code (we call it our Scan & Connect system) within your premises to present customers with promotions, solicit their feedback, showcase your reviews, get customer reviews, make announcements and so much more. Better engagement translates into improved loyalty and more business.

    + Create promotions, discount coupons and vouchers for customers and business partners.

    Through connectchief, every business can also utilize our promoEngine to generate coupons & promotions that can be distributed to visiting customers on your website, in-store or even be distributed via other businesses that collaborate with you (your business ofcourse has to reciprocate with promoting those businesses as well).

    Businesses that use innovative ways to find new customers & to retain existing ones tend to grow faster. Those that continuously learn from customers to provide better service and products discover paths to greater profits and lasting loyalty.

    At connectchief, we’re committed to helping you power up your business with innovative, cost-effective and technology-powered approaches that have been afforded only to big businesses until now.

    Find your path to growth – register for free on connectchief

  • Why we are building promoENGINE?

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    We’re building connectchief to bring the power of technology to small business. See our previous post here.

    In interviewing over a 1000 small to medium sized businesses we learnt that while all businesses want more customers, not everyone understands how to promote themselves.

    In fact, very few business owners were clear on the concept of marketing. Even fewer were able to make a distinction between advertising, branding and promotions. This gave us a clear signal that small businesses can use our assistance and our technology. Our goal with promoENGINE is to help you – the small business owner – to get your message to your target customers at a lower cost.

    promoENGINE brings together a few key concepts – collaboration, connection, promotion & advertising. And it leverages the power of software technology to amplify how small businesses work together to promote themselves.

    Marketing encompasses all the activities a business undertakes to get the message out (about its products or services) to its target customers (with the intent of completing a buy or sell transaction ie. a sale)

    Marketing includes –

    • pricing related activities like discounts or sales or coupons,
    • promotion activities like advertising, publicity or sales promotions,
    • determining the place where to do these activities (online, offline, target customers etc)
    • and figuring out what to market (specific product or service or attribute(s) of product or service)

    At connectchief, we are bringing to you technology that can enable your business to promote your products or services by using the right incentives (discounts/coupons) at places where belive our software and technology can generate a greater return for your investment.

    promoENGINE is a software tool by connectchief that enables small businesses to promote their products and/or services to their target customer audience in method that is more efficient in terms of the overall investment required in time, effort and cost as compared to approaches mostl commonly used by small businesses today.

    Continue to read more about promoENGINE

  • Why did we create trustENGINE?

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    trustENGINE is an online review platform built by connectchief.

    Our vision with trustENGINE is to provide a neutral ground for customers & businesses to interact where customers can provide genuine feedback on thier overall service experiences with that business.

    Why businesses asked us to build trustENGINE?

    + Reduce fake reviews

    User reviews are a great way for consumers to discover good products, services and businesses. However, the democratic voice that reviews give to users is often exploited by those entering fake reviews. This creates a problem for businesses and users alike. Like in any democracy, you cannot eliminate bad actors but one can surely nullify their effect by having all citizens participate. By having all consumers provide a review, good or bad, the effect of fake reviews can be nullified. trustENGINE provides an unbiased platform for providing and collecting reviews. Our software engines are continuously tuned to flag and capture fake reviews. See more about fake reviews and how you can work with us to reduce fake reviews

    + Help proliferate the truth

    By getting reviews for any business or product in one place, one can provide a true representation of users’s feedback about the product or service

    + Accelerate the opportunity to receive feedback & improve

    User reviews are a great way for small businesses to know what’s working and what the business needs to work on to improve its products and services. trustENGINE has built-in data analytic and reporting tools that empower business owners to prioritize their focus on topics that can help them achieve the highest improvements in customer satisfaction and the best returns for the businesses improvement efforts.

    + A single venue for consumers to interact with the business

    There are quite a few social media platforms on the internet, each designed with the motive to build online social interactions. Most those platforms (Facebook by Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Google offer opportunities for consumers to tag a business and put a message. Because their central focus is on social engagement, these platforms do not focus on addressing the consumers & businesses needs to bring a unified view about the business. As entrepreneurs, we ourselves have faced challenges with fake and uncontrolled reviews, a lack of mediation & moderation controls, reviews being scattered across the internet and very limited analytics to help the business owner distill incoming feedback so they can focus on improving where they need to based on consumer feedback.

    + Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Business owners who were fed up with fake reviews preferred if there is a platform where the user can verify their transaction id at the time of entering reviews. This is a great way to build confidence in the overall reviews and ratings for a business. The larger the quantify of verified transaction reviews, the higher the confidence that the reviews reflect reality.

    + Build trust through transparency

    The goal of our platform is to build trust through transparency. Verified transaction reviews is a great way to ensure that real transactions are mapped to incoming reviews. We further enhanced trustENGINE with engines built in to flag and capture reviews that may be added by business owners to promote their self-interest. In addition, to ensure tranparency both consumers & business owners are required to comply with the trustENGINE guidelines to ensure fair, unbiased and transparent information being provided through reviews on the platform.

    What are the key things trustENGINE brings to the table?

    1. A platform that is open to everyone and focuses exclusively on collecting, managing and showcasing consumer feedback about a business
    2. Consumers can provide feedback on any business – at no cost to them or the business.
    3. A transparent scoring methodology where verified reviewers and verified transactions carry greater weight
    4. Artificially intelligent engines that capture and suppress reviews (with full transparency) that seem ingenuine. Our software is designed to fight fake reviews.
    5. trustENGINE puts transparency and open access to information first. Even if a business has a paid account on trustENGINE, they have no control over which reviews must be deleted.

  • How can businesses curb fake reviews

    Fake reviews are a huge problem for businesses.

    However, how can one stop fake reviews from popping up and misguiding our end users. Fake reviews come from many sources – jealous competitors, disgruntled customers or employees or anyone who may have any reason to benefit from your business not doing well. Fake reviews can misinform customers if not handled properly. However, the right attitude and approach to handling fake reviews can make your business shine out better than it would otherwise.

    We all want our customers to be reading the real reviews about our business, its products & services. And we need to know that fake reviews can be reduced but not avoided completely. So its best to remind all genuine users to provide a review, whether good or bad. Because reviews will help us do better and get our business do better over time. See our post here on why its important to get customers to write reviews about you.

    In our experience – there are a few simple steps that every business must take to curb the fake reviews about your services.

    1. Respond to every review

    When you respond to every review, your customers know you genuinely care. Your response needs to focus on the issue not the reviewer and never come across as defensive. Your goal with reviews needs to be to genuinely listen and learn

    2. Follow a good review moderation practice

    Reviews that seem suspect should be dug into. Ask for more context, information that can help you connect the feedback to a real interaction. Always operate from the premise that the review is not fake and make an earnest attempt to help the customer (thats why every business exists, to serve the customers). Requesting for information on things like the name of the person who the customer interacted with, items that were on the order, approximate date and time of the transaction etc can help you demonstrate to the community how genuinely you are interested in supporting customers as a business. With trustENGINE paid plans our team can help with guided mediations (in certain conditions). Our team on an ongoing basis can even flag reviews, reviewers or businesses that appear to be borderline fake / suspect.

    3. Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Try to tie every one of your reviews to a transaction or an interaction between the customer and your business. This practice of connecting most reviews to a valid interaction is ‘worth its weight in gold’. Verified transaction reviews = actual reflection of interactions with the business. trustENGINE can split business ratings to show your rating from verified transactions vs non-verified transactions. Non-verified transaction ratings carry a lower weight towards your overall rating.

    4. Know that you can reduce but cannot eliminate fake reviews

    Its hard to eliminate fake reviews, so its all the more important to ask all your genuine customers to review their interaction with your business. A best practice is to issue an invoice for every transaction. Each invoice must bear a unique interaction number (invoice number, transaction number, order number or other transaction ID that is relevant to your business) and a message to each user to share a review. trustENGINE is built not just to support online businesses but also brick-and-mortar storefronts. Using trustENGINE + connectchief tools you can encourage your users to provide a review or rate their visit experience from within the storefront itself. Reviews captured from within the storefront also carry information on the location where the review was provided (we capture location but do not display it) and further increase the likelihood of that review being tagged as genuine.

    5. Take an unbiased position when hosting your reviews

    In general, reviews that are self-hosted on your own website are not received well by customers. Customers find it to be less trustworthy when a business has full control over which reviews to display vs not on its website. As the saying goes, you can’t trust the fox to guard the henhouse (meaning Don’t assign a job to someone who will then be in a position to exploit it for his own ends.)

    Reviews are best hosted with a third party platform that has proper processes in place to ensure that reviews are unbiased, cannot be tampered with while there exists an opportunity for the business to make amends and improvements when negative feedback is received. The ultimate goal for a open for everyone reviews platform is to build trust through transparency.

  • Why is it important to ask your users for a review

    In this technology driven age of online commerce, we all understand the benefit of product or business reviews. Regardless of whether your business is online or offline, you must focus on getting reviews.

    As a buyer –

    • By reading other customer’s review(s), I can make a more informed decision about the product or business
    • We can discover if people similar to us are happy with the product or business
    • Reviews can help us build confidence that we’re making a good decision
    • Reviews can also help alleviate any concerns we might have about the product or business
    • By reading reviews, a buyer can make a more informed decision that can help the user discover things about the product or business that identify better with the buyer.

    As a business owner –

    • Reviews bring credibility to my business. They help you build trust
    • Reviews can help increase sales – because they can naturally support a customer get comfortable around the idea of doing business with you
    • Consumer reviews build an online reputation for you business
    • Customer reviews can help you build up the SEO you need for your online presence.
    • Reviews provide the (neutral) social proof thats required to influence a new customers behavior
    • Reviews help you improve your product or service. Any aspect of your business that is consistently appreciated (or criticized) is a prime item for you to act upon. Do more of what is appreciated and do better about the things that are being criticized.

    trustENGINE by connectchief helps business owners collect unbiased reviews from their customers online or offline.

    Learn more about trustENGINE

  • Every business should build its ecosystem for growth

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    Every business owner wants their small business to grow into a bigger business. Everyone knows how important customers are to a business but only a few realize how equally important are great partners if you are looking to build an awesome business.

    + Every other business that works with you as a supplier or provider is interested in your growth.
    + Every business that does not compete with you but serves the same set of customers is a potential partner that you need to be collaborating with.

    Most businesses claim spend money on marketing however very few of them actually understand marketing. What most businesses call marketing is really advertising. They buy ads in all kinds of print or online media with the aim of reaching potential customers.

    There are many much cheaper and far more efficient ways of reaching customers. One of them is making friends with those who have already befriended your target customer.

    We call this – A friend to someone I wish to befriend should be my friend. Seems logical when you think of it this way. The connectchief platform enables you to discover and collaborate with businesses which are most likely to already be ‘friends with’ your target customer. If these kinds of businesses exist (and there are many of them out there) then they are most likely also interested only if you are willing to return the favor.

    As long as your businesses are mutually non-competing, they will be willing to introduce you to ‘your target customers’ that they know provided that you will be introducing them to ‘their target customers’ that you know. It sure sounds like a lot of work – unless you have a sophisticated piece of software (ahem…connectchief) that can make it happen for you both.

    Now that we’ve told you about businessconnect, We look forward to telling you more about connectchief … particularly promoENGINE.

  • Are ads a good idea for my business?

    Advertising is a good way to attract new customers and as a by-product also remind existing customers of your presence. However the goal of advertising is to inform the cusotmer of your message.
    The message in ads can be of one of 4 types. See more here

    Ads can be a good idea for your business if you have the following goals

    + You goal is to build brand recall

    Digital display ads are a great tool when your focus is to re-engage with non-returning customers or to build brand recall

    + When ad spend meets a ROI watermark

    We recommend you always have a clear ROI budget before you spend on ads. To achieve the right outcome, its equally important to be able to measure your targeted returns. As an example, if you say we want to get $1 back in revenue for every $1 spent on ads, thats an easy to achieve goal. However, are you measuring and more importantly are you able to reliably measure how much revenue you are generating from those specific ads.
    At connectchief, we often find ourselves saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there” This statement is as true for marketing spend on ads than anything else.

    + You wish to target users at a specific location or in a specific moment

    Running an ad for your ice-cream parlor at or near the campus of a local community college or elementary school is a great way to be in front of your customers when they are most likely to think (students wanting to hang out or families with kids looking for a treat) of a business like yours.

    Advertising a promotion is an even better way to run Ads

    + Promotions can be targeted to different user groups (aka cohorts)

    Promotions give the business a lot of flexibility. You could provide incentives to users for shopping at your store or to buy a certain product or service at an advertised price or to receive a discount for making purchases on a specific day or time. The opportunities are endless and when paired with location targeting can produce phenomenal results

    + Promotions are also a great way to acquire new customers

    Money spent on ads is cash spend. When money is given away through promotions, the spend is in goods or services – each of which have a higher perceived value to the consumer as opposed to the amount they cost you (the business owner to produce). Moreso, a promotion provides the consumer a way to try your product and services at a lower price point. You only spend, if they transact with you.

    + You are looking to engage with customers

    Promotions are generally structured as some benefit that a customer gets in exchange for a certain action. So a call-to-action is always built-into the promotion but it may not be the case for an advertisement. The ad is simply a means of informing the target user of your message.

    Advertising is meant to inform.

    Promotions are meant to engage. Promotions can be advertised too!

    What budget spend should one allocate on marketing activities ?

    This is an age old question. The answer is, it depends. As a thumb rule, if it costs you $x to acquire a custome through ads, are you able to generate 2x or better margin (not revenue) from that engagement? If yes, then the ad was worth it.

    Both ads and promotions are marketing tools. While advertising presents a reason to buy a product, sales promotion offers a short-term incentive to purchase

    The ultimate goal is to
    (1) Either acquire a new customer or
    (2) turn a one-time customer into a returning customer.
    Achieve any of the above and you are it mostly right.

    Any technology platform that offers ads allows you a lot of flexibility to experiment. Digital Ads are generally far more cost-effective over traditional media. They provide you to tune and customize your target audience. And most platforms are flexible where you can start, stop or even adjust your ad budgets at any time. The most important piece for any business (which most seem to forget is to measure if the ad or promotion is actually effective).

    PromoENGINE by connectchief takes a unique approach to promotions and ads. Our tools enable the small business to promote themselves to customers not just at vantage locations but also directly within your storefront (online or offline). Learn more about PromoENGINE and how these tools help you engage better with your target customers.

    How does a business turn a customer into a returning customer?

    Customers only return to businesses they like transacting with. They may find your product or services to be superior to other options. They may return because you are easy to do business with. They may return because your staff is caring and listens to its customers.

    To know if you are doing the right thing, you as a business owner or manager need to be in touch with your customers’ perception of the experience you and your team deliver. In business transactions, particularly service-oriented ones, customer experience issues can occur. However, a business that listens and attempts to make improvements, even if they delivered a poor experience to start, has a way higher chance of the customer returning to them vs one that seem to not care. Coming soon! with VisitXP business owners can get a quick check of their service delivery experience

  • Tagline ideas for connectchief

    We’ve been busy thinking of a befitting tagline for connectchief. Below are a few that we thought of and our reasons on how well each does or does not align with our purpose, mission and vision. We appreciate you sharing your views and thoughts in the comments section below.

    1. ‘Redbull’ for your business

    Just like Redbull energizes the body of the peson who drinks it, ConnectChief adds a jolt of energy to grow in the business that uses ‘connectchief’

    2. Everything big starts out small

    Every micro, small and medium business can grow up to be a big business. connectchief is the tools you need to make that journey smoother, easier and maybe a bit faster. Big businesses have access to significant technology that enables them to automate, get better insights, move reasonably fast, be more efficient and more. Of course, its not cheap to build such high end technology and as a result most smaller businesses never get access to such incredible tools. Team connectchief is hard at work to change just that because we believe in the entpreneurial power of small businesses and we know first hand that everything big starts out small

    3. the operating system for your small business

    An operating system is nothing but a collection of tools that keeps your PC running smoothly. At connectchief we’re continuously working to bring you tools and solutions that bring a technology edge to tasks that your small business needs to perform. Whether it is marketing, branding, customer engagement, repulation management or shaping your business relationships – we’re all ears to hear from you so we can help solve the problems that a face by business owners like you!

    4. Lets grow your business

    We know you work hard every day to nuture and grow your business. We work to bring you access to superb technology that helps you supercharge the various aspects of and day-to-day activities for your business

    5. Supercharge your growth

    6. A discounts & promotions framework to power business

    Well, its nice but doesn’t really fit connectchief. That tagline is too narrow and is a perfect fit for the promoengine tools that are a part of connnectchief. Personally I have worked at a number of organizations – whether direct to consumer, or business to business, selling services or products, storefront or online. The one common attribute across them all was that they needed to continously find ways to promote themselves – through coupons, discounts, loyalty points or simply advertisements. Thats something all businesses need to do but there hardly any tools or software that can help define, manage and execute on a full fledged promotions strategy. Well, thats been true but not any more. With connectchief’s promoengine – any business owner can now create, distribute and redeem promotions / coupons and put out advertisements to get attention from their customers.

    We also went ahead and designed promoengine to be fully developer friendly so that any developer can take advantage of our API (appplication programming interface) and power their entire discounts & promotions infrastructure via our platform. It was simple, if every business owner has to do worry about this why not enable them all to use this scalable platform so they can save time, money and gain efficiency. Futhermore, business owners can use our dataengine tools to draw actionable insights on effectivess of promotions, where and when they get used, which promotions have a higher redemption rate and much more.

    7. Software tools to grow your business. Harness tech like the big guys do

    8. The growth platform that your small business needs

  • Why we’re building connectchief…

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    Every large company was once a small business.

    team connectchief
    • There are an est. 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone — which outnumber large corporations 1162 to 1.
    • 70% of all small businesses are owned and operated by a single person.
    • Most small businesses employee fewer than 25 employees.

    Running a small business is real hard work.

    We asked ourselves, what do small businesses that grow up to be large businesses do differently?

    Of course, they all get access to large amounts of capital that they invest and grow. But before getting that capital, they all have done a great job to attract new customers, retain existing customers and they keep discovering & offering more “things or services” that those customers need.

    Why are these organizations able to do what they do?

    They are always listening – to customers, to employees, to stakeholders and to anyone that is relevant to their business. Now they don’t necessarily listen to everything everyone has to say. They have an ear on the ground so the can hear what their stakeholders say and then do something about the things that matter.

    What we found

    After meeting with and analyzing the journeys of multiple successful businesses we found that the ones that did well where those who engaged with their customers, paid a lot of attention to what their customers were saying (or signaling through their behavior) and had managed to convert a larger than average amount of their visitors into to loyal users.

    Customers exhibit a very interesting (and obvious) behavior – they tend to go back to businesses where they feel heard. Even if a customer didn’t have a great experience with a business at first, they feel comfortable giving that business a second or third chance if they feel that business heard them and is taking steps to do better the next time.

    As a business owner its very important to listen for signals. And its impossible to listen to anything if you aren’t really trying. However, once you make an effort to listen there is an incredible amount of learning that keeps coming from it. Your customers can show you the way to succeed. Companies that are wildly successful have found various ways to engage with their stakeholders, to listen for feedback and they tend to put in the efforts in making continuous improvements along the way.

    An incredible and very commonly known example of such outward focused behavior is Amazon. Amazon has been known to be laser focused on customers. They started out from being an online bookstore and have evolved into a company that disrupts and leads practically any industry vertical they enter. They’ve achieved this through maniacal customer engagement and an action bias driven by data. All this decision is powered through sophisticated technology and data analysis. However, not everyone can afford to do what the likes of Amazon can achieve. At connectchief, we’re focused on bringing to your business the competitive edge and technologies big business has used to GROW.

    So what does connectchief do?

    We build (software) tools that enable businesses to thrive.

    We identified a few signficant needs for most businesses –
    • Every business needs to build and nurture its ecosystem for long term success …learn more about bizz by connectchief
    • Every business needs to promote itself – most people we spoke with do not make much of a difference between marketing, branding and advertising… learn more about PromoENGINE
    • Gain trust & build a reputation … learn about trustENGINE
    • Loyal customers are the lifeblood of growth businesses. …learn about loyaltyENGINE
    • A lot of internet or technology-driven businesses do not have a store front. They need effective ways to work remotely … learn about flexxWORK
    • Engage your audience – not just customers. Be in front of them. Talk to them. Listen to them… we’ll share some things about hearecho soon!

    We built these by listening to you, our target customers. And we plan to keep building more solutions that help your business grow.