Power Ideaz

Manisha is very happy and contented today. When she had dreamt of providing financial security and prosperity to her family, and doing her bit for the wellbeing of her family, her dreams and wishes were waived of by the very members of her family, who depend on her decisions today concerning all matters. Well, achieving this position in a family with a very orthodox and rigid outlook was not an easy game.  As per the family traditions, she had to learn the intricate patterns with needles, and thread and acquired expertise at a very early age due to her creative bent of mind. Well, girls in their community had to know all these work as a part of their natural grooming and training in the society. But taking it up as a business, and competing in the market with men? POOOH!! “This girl must be crazy!” “ She’s building castles in the air! Search for a groom for her.”   These were the comments she always heard whenever she thought of nurturing her dream and giving it a shape in reality.

One day she was sharing her thoughts with Renuka, her friend who was happily married to a businessman .She talked of opening her own business of doing Jardousi work in dress materials and sarees. She admitted that she possessed all the necessary skills, but lacked support from the family, both financially and morally. Renuka gave her two of her own sarees and asked her to do jardousi patterns on them. Manisha was too happy to find a way to vent out her creative urge. She eagerly took up the work and prepared a wonderful demonstration of exquisite jardousi art on the sarees. When she presented the work to her friend Renuka after a short while, she was amazed at the talent of her friend . Renuka decided to back up her friend Manisha both morally and financially. Her husband Vinod lend her full cooperation in this motive , and within a very shortwhile Manisha,s dream got culminated into reality. The two friends opened up a business on boutique work and within a short span of time their products became very popular in the locality. There was no looking back after that, and their partnership firm RM ENTERPRISES is moving ahead at an unbelievable pace with an annual turnover of $174,000!

This is an example of woman entrepreneurship in India, where two women belonging to two different strata of the society join hands to walk towards the path of woman’s emancipation. Economic development in any society advances hand-in-hand with the liberation of the womenfolk from every kind of repression There is strong emergence of women entrepreneurship in India and they have an immense contribution to the national economy of India. Women entrepreneurship should be encouraged for their increased utilization of modern technology, increased investments, finding a niche in the export market, creating a sizable employment for others and setting the trend for other women entrepreneurs in the organized sector.

Although the potentiality in women entrepreneurs have been demonstrated, they are yet to achieve that capability of contributing much more than what they already are. To harness their potential and initiate continued growth and development, necessary and appropriate strategies should be formulated for stimulating, supporting and sustaining their efforts in this direction. Such strategies should be congruent with field realities, and should especially take into account the problems women entrepreneurs face within the current system.

Women entrepreneurs presently comprise about 10% of the total entrepreneurships in India. This percentage is growing every year. With the continuing trends it is most likely that in another five years,  20% of the entrepreneurial force in India will comprise of women. Hence international agencies like ILO are taking initiatives to understand the context of women entrepreneurs in India and evolve appropriate developmental strategies to suit their needs. With appropriate capital and other support through Grameen Bank and other microcredit institutions women , their families and communities flourish.

For the past several centuries, the combination of entrepreneurial culture and Economic Freedom have repeatedly created tremendous wealth, lifted millions of people out of poverty, and fostered profound innovation and evolution of technology, culture, and human capacity for the past several centuries.  FLOW launched an ongoing outreach, education, and engagement program  called EMPOWERING WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS in 2007  to celebrate the role women entrepreneurs play in economic and social development, call attention to the emerging global, women’s economic empowerment system, and facilitate broad-based engagement with the system. In March 2008, the campaign assumed the name Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs.
We envision a world overflowing with peace and prosperity, co-generated through the entrepreneurial energy of women in developing countries, the marketplace, and a conscious culture of communication and collaboration embodied by women and men around the world.

Are you boiling with energy about starting your own website, yet confused about what niche to choose for your site? Making the right choice of niche is important as that is the single factor that stands between failure and success. Let us take a look at the factors that
you should keep in mind while choosing your niche before investing on a website.

1. Stay away from the crowd
Avoid areas where everyone is crowding, as your chances of doing a profitable business
there is slim. If everyone is after ebook sites of ‘get rich easily’ schemes, you should
avoid that, and try to venture other in-demand areas like travel, health, relationship improvement and so on.

2. Be specific
Try to focus on a specific market, and not a very broad market. For example if you are
making a site on music, you have to be specific. There are hundreds of thousands of sites
on music; so your site may have a tough time being popular. If you target specific smaller
interest groups like golden 70s, you are likely to get a much better market from people
who love the music of the 70s.

3. Niche must be in demand
While you have to narrow down to a smaller market, it should not be so small that there
are no buyers. The niche you are choosing should be in high demand. You can check out
the demand of specific items from sites like eBay, Amazon, and Dmoz. If specific items
or subcategories are in high demand there, your site should be in demand too. You can
also get an idea of which keywords are in demand by visiting
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .

4. Passion about the niche
You should not go for a niche that does not interest you, because in the long run you are
likely to lose interest about the site. If you love cars, go for niche like specific car
accessories.

5. Gather niche knowledge
If you have ready knowledge about the niche you are choosing, there is nothing better
than that. If not, do some research about the subject to gather as much knowledge about it as you can; because you are going to need that.

6. Submit your niche to directories
After your site is ready, submit it to as many directories as possible so that there are
enough back-links pointing towards your niche. Here are two lists of several popular
web-directories that you can use: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php , and
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html.

7. Start blogging about your niche

Start your own blog. Wordpress is probably the best option for a blog; but there are other options too. Start writing about your niche and social bookmark them (Digg, Des.icio.us, etc.) . Write at least twice a week…niche specific articles, and within weeks or months you will get noticed as an expert of the niche. So what if you cannot write? Hire a professional writer to help you. Try www.123writer.com.

With all these guidelines you can never go wrong. So stop hesitating and plunge into the
pool. All the best!

by Chitralekha Chakraborty

Customers are left disappointed by the lack of basic knowledge of the goods on sale, lack of initiative and a general failure to ascertain their needs by the customer service providers. Customer satisfaction levels will make or break retailers in the UAE’s new service economy. “The retail sector is fiercely competitive now and will become more so, and it will be service that decides the winners” said Spicer.

Good customer service and retailing need to anticipate customer demands in line with the modern consumer science. “Today’s consumer is more aware than the consumer of five years before, which creates immediate need for staff training and a stronger infrastructure in customer services, which the GCC market really lacks” — Lootah told Gulf News.

Salim Kalsekar Rasasi, perfumes managing director said businesses tend to neglect the fact that they need to maintain “uniform quality across every level of customer service” amid pressures posed by expansion in the retail sector.

“The expansion of the retail sector has put immense pressures on quality of personnel and their attitude management. While it is good to have a fast growing brand, it is equally important to maintain uniform quality across every level of customer service. I think businesses tend to neglect this which undermines their performance in the long run” — Kalsekar said.

Product knowledge and pro-activity levels of staff were relatively low, as 41.0 percent of them did not ask supplementary questions to establish customer needs; 41 percent did not recommend or guide shoppers to a relevant product and 46.2 percent did not check if the customer had the product or information required.

Shoppers reported mixed impressions of staff attitudes, saying 38.1 per cent of the staff did not smile and 22.4 percent were considered unfriendly.

On the bright side, 93.3 percent of the shoppers reported a clean environment and 85.2 percent found the outlet they visited to be clutter-free.

Response times were found to be good, as 71.4 percent of the customers said they were assisted within three minutes of entering an outlet, and 51 percent of those purchasing products were served in less than one minute.

No wonder when you fly on a Chinese airline you will be pampered by flight attendants who look eerily alike. They are young, beautiful and practically the same height. This is not a coffee-tea-or-me stereotype but the result of a rigorous selection process that is more beauty pageant than equal-opportunity job interview.

—    If you are older than 24 don’t bother to apply.
—    If your legs are similar to tree trunks don’t call. Sounds like a throwback to the dark ages of workplace discrimination?
—    In China, the world’s fastest-growing aviation market, entry barriers for flight attendants are not only tolerated – they are flaunted as symbols of excellence.

“A lot of Chinese passengers judge the quality of airlines based on the quality of their flight attendants, meaning, are they pretty or not pretty” Luo Man said, a media director at China Southern, the country’s largest carrier.

Chinese airline officials say their industry is young and that it will take time for the public to move beyond the superficial. Until recently traveling by air was a privilege reserved for government officials and very rich people.

The first flight attendants were picked not so much for their looks as for their political reliability.

But that is changing fast.

As the Chinese get richer, domestic air traffic could soar nearly fivefold in two decades, analysts said. To meet the demand, China will have to buy about 3,400 new aircraft, quadrupling the present fleet and making the nation the second-largest aviation market in the World after the US.

Demand for new flight attendants is so great that a cottage industry of academies promising to produce star-quality cabin crews has emerged. The courses can range from etiquette and psychology to Basic English and geography. Once flight attendants are hired by the airlines, they typically receive additional safety and emergency training.

By Arindam Bhattacharya

What’s the usual turn around time to recover your credit score?
That’s your question…your neighbor’s question and the question of millions around you.
Let me answer honestly…it could take seven long years or even more!!!
You might also do it in a year, if you know the tricks that work.
Before you get those power-packed tips to pick up your credit score, let’s take a quick look on some basics which you must know.

What’s credit score?
Credit score also referred to as FICO score is a number based on how prompt you are in paying back your loans. When you have a high score, it means that you can save more money and the possibility of paying your bills on time is quite high.

What should be your ideal score?
Usually, 620 is the minimum standard score that you must have to secure a loan from a bank. If you have a score above 700, you will get loans at lower rates. When your score crosses 760, you will get loans at the lowest rate. The perfect credit score is 850, whereas the average score is 723.

How do you get your credit report?
According to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, you can get a free copy of your credit report every year from any of the accredited agencies.
To track any change in your credit score, it’s a good idea, if you ask for your report every four months, instead of getting all the three at a time.

Credit bureaus
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion are three foremost credit bureaus.

Top tips to repair your credit:
• Never apply for credit cards when you don’t really need it. This is because a new account lowers your credit score by 10 points, on an average.

You can have credit cards, but make sure you have it when you are debt free. In fact, your credit score gets a boost if you borrow and repay in the very first chance. Remember that if you neither have a credit card nor installment loans, the lenders might find you a bit risky as you have no record of loan repayment.

• Make sure that your bills are paid on time. If you do this, your credit scores would be up by around 20 points in a month. In case you don’t, it would feature in an area called “Adverse Accounts”, which would show up all details like the particular months, period of delays etc. Keep in your mind that such details are normally kept for 7 years.

• Another effective way you can utilize to ensure a high credit score is by keeping your credit card balances at the minimum. That can save you at least 70 points.

• Make sure that you obtain your credit reports from each of the major bureaus. This is important because, you cannot repair your credit, if you do not know the contents of your report.

• Remember that you have the right to remove any incorrect information that you may find in your report. So, take steps to clean up your report to erase out all erroneous facts

• Never apply for more credits while you are in the stage of credit repair. If you do this, it will have an adverse effect on your credit score.

• It’ll be a smart move on your part if you give a call to your creditors and have an open talk with them about the facts. Always bear in your mind that the many lenders who have a provision which would lower your monthly installments till you are back on track.

• It’s always good if you go for professional help. There are lots of resources available to help you out. You can even search a credit counseling agency through the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

• Be tolerant to the situation and keep paying your debts. Remember, repairing your credit is a procedure and that doesn’t happen overnight.

I’m sure with these tips; you can really look forward to get your credit in order within a normal time frame.

 By Pinaki Ghosh

1. Advertisements
It is much easier to get advertisements for your blog today than it was, a few years back.Thanks to Google, and Overture, you no longer have to run from door to door to impress advertisers, and wear off your shoe-sole in the process. Advertising programs like Google
AdSense, Yahoo Publishing Network (YPN), and Microsoft Content Ads, have made earning from advertisements easier than opening your fridge and taking a bite from a piece of cake. To know more about how you can possibly place contextual advertisements and banners on your blog, do visit the following:
• Google AdSense: http://google.com/adsense
• Yahoo Publishing Network / YPN (formerly Overture): http://ypn.yahoo.com/
• Microsoft Content Ads: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoftadcenter/
faqs/content-ads
Your earning comes from the advertisements in two ways.
• Every time someone clicks on the advertisements, you earn.
• You also earn from the number of times people ‘see’ your page (that is, the
advertisements).
As you agree to the terms of any one of the advertising programs, advertisements will
start appearing at various places of your blog, and an account will be maintained that
registers how much you are earning. On reaching the minimum earning, or the pay-date,
they dispatch you your paycheck. Cheers!

2. Affiliate programs
Your blog can get you revenue in one of the most traditional ways on earth; commission
in exchange of business. Hundreds of companies/websites (established brands inclusive),
who pay commission to you for sending them customers. Examples of such are
Commission Junction (http://cj.com) or clickbank (http://clickbank.com). They supply
you with a java code that you have to paste in the HTML of your blog, and their banner
appears. If any reader of your blog clicks these banners and becomes a paid member of
the affiliate site, you get a percentage of the payment. Hey, that’ s not bad at all.

3. Get noticed, get hired
No luck, if you decide to write the type of cliché content that thousands of other bloggers
are writing, but if the content of your blog is unique and style is crispy, you are bound to get noticed and get offers that sound like, “ I like your blog; how much, if you write a
daily blog for me?” I leave the rate part for you to decide. You can easily charge anything
between $15 and $25 for each article you write; and as such can earn around $150 per day.

4. Sell stuff
Set up your virtual store and sell stuff through your blog. It is absolutely free to become a PayPal (http://paypal.com) member and start accepting payments through your blog. You have to decide what you are going to sell. There are some items, that need to be shipped, and other items that have less hassle, and can be straightaway downloaded after a payment (for example, ebooks). This can become big business if you are serious and full hearted in your effort.

5. Become a sponsored blog owner
Things work if you can turn the right key. If you can impress others (read, business
owners) by your writing, it may so happen that they want you to write about their
products, and website through your blog. This is like direct advertising of someone via
your blog. Your articles will also carry links to the site that is selling the products or
service mentioned in the articles. Needless to say, you don’ t do this for free, or as a social service. You will get paid for writing about others’ products in your blog. What, if you aren’ t confident to write? Do you miss all these great scopes of earning? Never! Just go ahead and hire a writer. It is worth, even after paying him/her on per article or per month basis.

6. Promote your other site or service
You can use your blog to write interesting articles that will promote your other
ecommerce-websites, or talk of the services you provide. Thus, by building awareness,
you will get indirect earning from your other sources.

7. Donations
If your blog deals with social issues and charity, you are likely to attract donors who
would be interested to donate for charity. A serious and honest effort is bound to attract
donors.

Will you miss all these wonderful opportunities if you are not a great writer? Never. Just hire a pro blogger to write on your behalf. You can check out the HIRE A PRO BLOGGER scheme of www.123writer.com. For $143 you will get exclusive blog posts thrice a week for a month. Check it out.

By Chitralekha Chakraborty

The world is full of slogans, seminars and books that focus on customer service. We understand that excellent customer service increases customer loyalty, which in turn boosts profitability and drives growth. Then why is customer service so often still so poor? It’s a question of moving from attitude to action. This introductory note stresses some hard facts which probe why customer service is still mediocre at best in so many organizations.

What was your latest customer service mantra?
– “The customer is always right.”
– “The customer comes first.”
– “This is the year of the customer.”

Have you had a recent customer appreciation week, given all employees lapel buttons stating “Yes, I can” to reflect their empowered attitude? Most organizations have involved their employees in a slogan or a customer service seminar. Everyone in management has bought and perhaps read the latest books on service. Most of those books, slogans and seminars seem to create the right attitude, yet no meaningful action follows. Words, including these in this piece, don’t create improvements. Informed action does.

The best people and companies know this. They have come to understand the links, connecting excellent customer service, customer loyalty, organizational growth and profitability. They know that the key to their long-term success is changing the organization’s culture to one that prizes customer loyalty.

Although it’s true that service by itself does not guarantee loyalty, without it you greatly reduce your chances of retaining customers — the basis for building and sustaining growth and prosperity of organizations.

In the United States I see three levels of service being delivered. Those three are rude, indifferent and exceptional. Of these three, which do you mostly receive? “Indifferent” gets my vote.

Here’s one of my recent encounters with indifference. While I was renting a car, the customer service agent folded the rental contract, told me how to find my car and in which space, and then said “Thank you, Ms. Ford?” The misstatement indicated robotic, indifferent service. It also told me that this company does not have a culture that values me (and perhaps you) as its customer.

Most organizations are great in processing customers. Very few excel at serving and satisfying customers. We get processed all the time. Go to the bank and make a deposit. In most cases you get exactly what you expect — a correct receipt for your deposit and the amount of money you requested. Had anything occurred to leave you with a positive impression of the bank that would keep you loyal? It may be most unlikely . Perhaps your teller did not acknowledge you by name or thank you. May be the employees talked among themselves.

Exceptional service and satisfaction are required to create loyal customers. The process of being served is what’s memorable. That personalized transaction is the key to customer retention.

Customer service is not enough. Customer satisfaction that leads to loyalty is the goal. “Loyalty” means you retain a customer and increase the business you do with that customer, developing a relationship so this customer will not be lured away to the competition with the promise of a lower price.

Almost everyone knows the research and statistics, a few take the numbers to heart. Research done some years ago tells us it costs five or six times more to attract a new customer than to keep a current one. Experts estimate the cost today as being closer to eight to ten times. Bain & Company reports that if a company retains 5% of its current customer base, its profits will increase between 25% and 125%! Have you noticed how many companies spend their time, money and energy to attract new customers, while doing very little to keep their current customers? Although it’s a fairly common practice, it’s very short-sighted.

Here’s a scenario that has probably happened with you last year. Let’s say it’s 7 o’clock in the evening and you have just sat down to dinner. The telephone rings. You answer and discover it’s just one of the long-distance telephone carriers offering a great deal with plenty of incentives to entice you to become a new customer. You stop the representative and say “Time out! You already are my long-distance carrier.” The rep responds “Oops!!” Then you asked “Well, can I have that deal as an existing customer?” And the answer is “No”. The offer is only for a new customer, and not for you, an established customer.

It’s amazing how few organizations have figured out that marketing to current customers is good business. What about your organization? Does it work as hard to build the loyalty and business of current customers as it does to attract new ones? Write your experiences as a customer or rep — help me to reach closer to customer service in depth.

By Soumitra Chakraborty

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” - Elizabeth Stone. Such is the intense and delicate relationship that a parent bears with the child. A new-born child of today, is the future of tomorrow. Therefore a good up-bringing of the child is absolutely necessary. Parents must put their hearts-out in seeing that a child gets enriched mentally, physically, and also gets proper moral and ethical values of life.

Valuable Tips For Ideal Parenting

1) Physical Presence : Children want and need the parents to be physically present in front of their eyes, right from infancy. In fact, when a child is in his/her mother’s womb, he or she, happens to hear the voices of the parents and starts distinguishing between the world on one side and parents on the other. It is absolutely necessary, from that time onwards, that parents do maintain a warm relationship amongst themselves.

2) Listening to and Understanding your child : Just being physically present doesn’t always serve the purpose. You have to listen to almost everything what your child wants you to understand, and interact with the infant as much as possible. This develops a proper bonding and communication between you and your child.

3) Being Supportive Towards Your Partner : Whether you are living together with your partner or not, should be the secondary issue for an ideal parent. The Parents should work together for the welfare of the child. Differences of opinion are a normal feature of parenthood. The most important thing is how the parents resolve or settle the differences that matter. In any case, exchange of respective ideas between the parents should he done in private and no confrontation whatsoever should take place in front of the child. This is just to preserve a feeling of emotional stability and security in the child.

4) Interact With the Child as much as Possible: One of the best ways of developing a good bonding with your child is to play with him/her. In other words, at times, parents do need to behave like children to maintain a close and proper interaction with them. Parents have to enter the child’s world in order to understand and exchange ideas and this in turn makes the child feel secure as well as it gives a sense of comfort and enjoyment to him/her.

5) Teach By Actions : Parents must keep in mind that children are hard core followers of their actions. They observe and follow each individual action of the parent and imitate them. So, it is very essential for a parent to act, behave and socialize properly, so that the child can pick up the best from them.

6) Love : The Best Tool To discipline The Child - To discipline is to guide and bring the best out of your child. Parents should be caring and loving enough, so that the child is inclined to listen to what they say. Talking in a harsh tone, or in a commanding attitude or forcible implications to certain aspects may have and adverse effect on the child’s all-round development.

Parenthood is never smooth and easy as becoming a parent is. It should always be remembered that if one can survive parenthood, one can survive anything.

By Chitralekha Chakraborty

I want to share a little known secret about the value of delivering good service to customers. Yes, it’s good for business and the organization. Yes, you may derive a lot of satisfaction by doing a customer service job well. No question. But what’s the most compelling reason to learn about, and deliver good customer service? It’s this. When you deliver good customer service to your customers, you experience less stress, and less hassle and grief from customers. They argue less. They’re much less likely to insult, and they’re less demanding. They don’t threaten you when they get upset (I’ll have your job!”).

You can save huge amounts of time. One disappointed customer may take up to ten or twenty times more of your time than a satisfied one. And the time spent with the displeased customer is usually not all that much fun. Customer service skills help you keep your happy customers happy, help prevent customers from becoming unhappy and taking out their frustrations on you, and help you deal effectively and quickly with customers who are upset and unhappy.

Every Tuesday I will write about the tools to interact with customers more effectively, so that the company, the customer, and you, the person dealing with the customer, all benefit. PowerIdeaz.com will provide us the space to discuss all those; and here will continue worlds first “Tuesday is the Customer Service Day” Blog. Hence, we will not restrict our discussion only on the principles or platitudes, or handy customer service slogans; rather our focus will also be on ‘doing’.
• What should you do with a customer who is swearing at you?
• What do you do to prevent customers who have waited a long time from getting really angry?
• What do you do to provide advice to customers so it will be heard and appreciated?
We’ll deal with these questions along with solutions.

Next week I’ll cover some basics of customer service; so customer service newbies can increase their understanding of what customers want, and the things that cause customers to hit the roof. We’ll also talk about various types of customers (internal, external, paying and non-paying), and we’ll explain how you can best use customer service techniques.

Far too much customer service training and far too many customer service books tell you only what you already know. Do you really need to be told again that you should smile? Or shake hands? No. But you might find it useful to know when it’s a bad idea to smile at a customer.

So, here’s the bottom line about this “Tuesday is the Customer Service Day” blog: you may come across a few things you already know. But you’ll also come across a number of techniques you probably haven’t thought about. Please do leave comments here with any unique, off the wall, follow-up tactics that have worked for you; and along the way, save yourself a lot of hassle and a lot of grief.

By Konica Paul Chakraborty

Women….

The fragrance of full bloomed jasmine at night,
The colours of ecstasy showing bright,
The vibrating pulses in mens’ wild heart,
The concoction of wit, mirth and art.

Women…

The strong history bonding mankind with earth,
The mother bearing the forthcoming childbirth,
The teacher teaching qualities humane,
The stoic who frees life of love, joy or pain.

Women…

The Gayatri of Hindu, Mary of Bethlehem,
The Teresa caring for each all the same,
The nightingale nursing the rich and the poor,
The spirit from heaven barring the locked door.

Women…

The future mistress of the universe,
The entrepreneur of the day, spirited and terse,
The leader of the nation battering the odd,
The sculptor of a beautiful world, where there’s just concord.

Women….

The ship that sails against powerful winds,
The mermaid igniting idle thoughts in the minds,
The navigators who navigate through the vast ocean of life,
The pioneers with powered ideas that end all strife.