While in Tehran, have you used Snapp to order your taxi through your mobile application or Zoodfood to order your food online? Has technology made substantial changes in your industry? Are you about to become old news as some new competitors steals all of your loyal customers?
Digital disruption is taking shape in Iran and for good reason. We are watching business model after business model being disrupted by major changes in mobile technology, new marketplaces are being created which is transforming how buyers and sellers interact with each other. Technology being provided by local providers such as Parsonline and Irancell, have accelerated business digital transformation in all major industries.
But through all of these changes, one thing has remained the same: Customers are king. Today’s customer expects answers instantly and they want immediate gratification. A company might be having an excellent product or service, but if they don’t provide a memorable customer experience, they will lose. Thus, if you want to deliver an efficient and effective digital transformation strategy for your business, it must be based on transforming your customer’s experience, in such a way that it becomes differentiating.

That is where a new CRM thinking comes in. With a well thought out investment in CRM process and technology, you can delight your customers by putting all the answers they want, right at their fingertips. Regardless of channel of interaction, from classic retail to modern mobile marketplaces (like Snapp), CRM technology puts personalized and immediate answers in front of your customers. This sounds a bit complicated. Well, it is.
Pause for a moment, and think about the CRM evolution that has happened over the last 3 decades. In US, thirty years ago, a CRM application meant a call center application which allowed call center staff to track their trouble tickets. In early 90’s, CRM technology enabled sales management through sales force automation applications. In late 90’s, with the adoption of emails, marketing automation tools became the driver of CRM investments. But what truly transformed the CRM industry was when companies stopped looking to CRM application just as a way to introduce efficiencies inside their organization. Instead, when companies started looking to CRM application to manage the interactions between companies and their customers, that is when CRM shifted from a cost reduction investment to a revenue generation investment, composed of transformation across culture, processes and enabling technologies.
Still, most of the times, companies are stuck in their old way of doing things, using their legacy CRM technology to support separate business functions. What is more, they have not introduced any CRM culture shift and process improvements in their organization. By looking forward, by correctly using CRM capabilities to enable people, process and technology requirements, businesses will be able to provide a customer-first digital strategy. This CRM transformation ultimately needs to deliver on the following mandates:

• Build customer loyalty through a customer service capability that consistently delivers an efficient and effective solution for customers
• Increase revenue through cross-sell & up-sell capabilities
• Design a differentiated to-be customer experience, and align people, process and technology capabilities to deliver on customer needs
• Capture customer data across all interaction channels, and generate actionable insights to help with segment based treatment delivery
• Leverage technology to migrate customers to self-service channels which will help to reduce cost across marketing, sales and after-sales services

Where do you start?

• Customer needs driven initiatives: Understand customer needs, drivers of satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Leverage that information and identify key customer pain points. Define initiatives that address those pain points.  If you are able to deliver on those needs and remedy the pain points, you will ultimately succeed.
• Enabling employees: Empower employees.  Your CRM infrastructure and supporting processes must be designed with the employee and the customer in mind.  The right CRM application helps sales team to sell effectively and helps customer support agents deliver a delightful customer experience by providing appropriate information to the right customer at their preferred channel of interaction at the right time.
• Effortless Interactions: Understand the customer journey and choreograph customer interactions accordingly.  Make it easy for customers to work with you.  This needs a well-orchestrated service delivery across each human and digital touch points.
• Personalized Information Delivery: Transform your business in such a way that it operates based on single view of customer information.  Today’s customer has more access to information than before, thanks to advances in smart phones, social media and digital enablement through Iranian providers.  Your CRM platform needs to capture all customer information across all of those channels and enables the business to operate based on insight driven interactions.

What we learned:

Sarveno has helped leading service providers in Iran through successful CRM transformations.  Here are some practical tips we have learned through those experiences:

• Start small: Thing big, start small.  Make the initial scope small so that it becomes achievable.  Leverage pilot approach to show that team is able to deliver on transformation objectives.
• Deploy dedicated transformation team: Having the marketing, sales and contact center be responsible to deliver on transformation projects will be difficult.  Often times, they are pressured to deliver on near term objectives, which will result in delayed deliver on transformation projects.  It is more beneficial to create a dedicated transformation team to deliver on transformation projects.
• Measure the value: Make sure that you have implemented ways that shows how much value you are generating across the organization.
• Manage risk: Plan for the worst case scenario, hope for the best, which means that you have to manage risk in every single step.
• Implement Best Practices: Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Understand the leading practices and customize it for your current situation at hand.

With a successful CRM transformation, your organization will be able to capture and understand customer needs.  With those insights, you will be able to implement targeted treatments for each segment and deliver a differentiated customer experience which will be sustainable.  This is how great companies like Apple and Starbucks have been able to separate themselves from their competitors and deliver benefits for both shareholders and customers.

About Sarveno

Founded in 2012, Sarveno Business Solutions has grown into Iran’s premier CRM management consulting companies focused on delivering game changing CRM solutions to organizations in Iran.

We believe the path to becoming customer centric and delivering on your customer needs is much more than installing a CRM application. It involves formulating an appropriate CRM strategy and changing the internal culture. Combining proven methodologies, previous successful international experiences, and access to subject matter experts across leading international CRM solution providers, Sarveno enables clients to address their CRM challenges through implementing sustainable and differentiating solutions.

Furthermore, Sarveno is the first company in Iran who is providing a cloud based CRM solution, called SarvCRM, which is hosted in one of the premier data centers inside Iran.

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Surprise Gadget is a website which provides this opportunity for Iranians who live abroad to surprise their family and friends in Iran by creative and exciting offers. For instance, You can invite them to a fancy restaurant in which we host your guests in VIP even better than what you imagine. You can also send a memorable picture printed on Persian carpet or a cake. Additionally you can send flowers and many other interesting gifts.

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Everything is simple through the surprise gadget website and you can register your order just by some clicks and finally pay for it by your credit card. You can customize your gift by website tools to be felt personal. We care about all the details to make a remarkable moment for people you love.

As I started to evaluate some of great ideas, I had to realize that there were plenty space for the improvement in term of design. And when I talk about design, I don’t talk about pretty screens or beautiful product, I talk more about relevance and about the user experience.

Today, among all startups based in Silicon Valley, the distinguishing factor of Silicon Valley’s brightest companies is their design. Instagram for instance simplified the cacophony of social media into single, beautiful images. Pinterest is another example, where it turned links for fashion and recipes into shareable, lust-worthy cards. In a recent study regarding the impact of design on success rate of startups, they find out that 27 startups co-founded by designers and 13 creative agencies were acquired in the last 4 years by companies like Google, Facebook, Adobe, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Yahoo.

Why are VC’s and giant technology companies like Google are suddenly so interested in design? Why Google paid $3.2 billion to purchase Nest Labs? And why many VC’s hiring designers as partner? It is very simple. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.
And why you should care as an entrepreneur for design? Just because design has become a “game changer” and this in not only in Silicon Valley. All statistics show that startups co-founded by designers have created billions of dollars of value and are raising billions of dollars in capital, and since the VC firms increasingly see the importance of design, it is more likely that they invest in your start up, because of great user experience.

My advice for startups in Iran: Start with design, rather than just end with it.

*Disclaimer: Due sanction we did not offer any mentorship or any similar coaching activities. We only gave feedback to their ideas without any follow-ups after the event.

Now, think about having a music player that has an unlimited and up-to-date collection of music for you all the time: yes, we’re talking about the birth of the online music streaming service, bringing to mind names like Spotify or its older cousin, Rhapsody.

Navaak (which means Tune in Farsi) is an online music streaming service for Iranian music that is legally in the market. The concept is like other popular streaming services but the key difference is that it provides just the music tracks that have a publishing license from the authorities. Navaak provides its music archive by making a contract with musicians or music publishers in Iran. One major issue that you, the reader of this article, may think about it is the pace of internet in Iran. Almost all mobile operators in Iran like IranCell, HamrahAvval, Rightel provide 3G and 4G services. Navaak believes that with the growth of these technologies in Iran the quality of mobile internet connections will be good enough for customers to listen to music everywhere without any interruption or slowness of service.

Navaak Team

Even if you temporarily do not have any internet connection, you can use the offline mode as a premium user, due to be launched in the near future. Until that time, which is when Novaak gets fully functional, users can take advantage of its currently available features for free. One of the major features of Navaak is its recommendation service which suggests music tracks based on what have you listened to before and what have you have recently liked.

Team members of Navaak are Ehsan Razzazi, Saeed Vayghani, Alireza Jafari and Arash Khangaldi. Navaak has competition in Iran on top of the international ones which are currently in the market such as Headphone and Ahang. But Navaak distinguishes itself from its competitors because of its web player as well as its iOS and Android mobile application. Navaak has now more than 11,000 music tracks in its archive and boasts of 10,000 users. In the Apple Store, Navaak has so far been downloaded 6,000 times.

Navaak has been a Dmond Startup Accelerator since March 2015 but the product dates back to September 2014. Navaak has been Dmond’s sole investment so far. Navaak is very much interested to expand its pool of investment funds by raising money from local and also international investors.

Written by Peter Thiel

Published in September 2014

I recently finished reading a book about startups. The name of the book is “ZERO to ONE”, written by PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel . My key takeaways from the book are the seven questions, that Peter Thiel recommends, that “Every Entrepreneur must answer:

1. The Engineering Question: Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
2. The Timing Question: Is now the right time to start your particular business?
3. The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
4. The People Question: Do you have the right team?
5. The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
6. The Durability Question: Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
7. The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see.

The book provides helpful information on being an Entrepreneur and how to be and remain successful. And how we can apply and answer these questions in context of Iranian Startups?

Let’s walk through one by one:

• On #1: Iranian universities produce lot of great engineers each year. But when it comes to creativity and coming up with new ideas, many of them tend to copy new ideas instead creating them. It might work for short time, but in the long run this will end up in a flop.  I like the quote from the film “Beautiful Mind” where John Nash says: “Find a truly original idea. It is the only way I will ever distinguish myself. It is the only way I will ever matter.”
• On #2: Timing is another factor for any entrepreneur. I think the current Iranian market has a huge potential for launching new products and services, however we need to do our homework and be aware about the market trends and not to bee proud about our achievements.
• On #3: Thiel says monopoly, not competition, is the way to go. His advice to entrepreneurs is to find a niche and dominate it. From the current market situation perspective in Iran, many new ideas can play a monopoly role, but don’t forget, many similar ideas are on the way and this means you have to see constantly in your rear mirror.
• On #4: This is for me the most important issue many (established) Iranian businesses have in Iran and this is also a cultural one. Our education system never thought us to work as team during our 12 years of schooling.  Our parents encouraged us to compete with the others rather to collaborate. Teamwork should be learned and can be enhanced through education and proper working environment. We need to change our mindset and also trust others more thane ever.
• On #5: Many entrepreneurs I met, are very good engineers, but not a good salesman. No matter how strong is your product, Iranian startups underestimate the power of Sales and Marketing. Don’t be afraid, work also with somebody who has also have a sales and marketing background.
• On #6: Durability is another factor, which many Iranian businesses (not only startups) oversee. The reason is again our cultural mindset. We have never learned to plan for the long term. We want only make quick wins. Iranian businesses need to incorporate sustainability in their company culture.
• On #7: The education system in many countries (even industrial)  teaching us to stuffs that more or less are old standard. We never try to challenge those stuffs we learn in the school. We must learn to see what other people don’t see.

Looking forward to hear your thought on this review.

Happy Reading!

Prior to Periscope, Kayvon founded his first startup, which he sold to learning business Blackboard for $4 million before he even turned to 21. Kayvon is 27 years old and was born in San Francisco. His parent immigrated from Iran to US before 1979 revolution. He has a B.S in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Since Live-Video streaming is shaking the tech world, this become for Periscope the momentum to sell the startup to Twitter. Twitter paid in March 2015 in a quiet deal slightly less than $100 million*, which made Periscope one of Twitter’s more expensive purchases. This seems a good deal for both sides. For Periscope which was founded in 2014 and had only 5 team members (today 25 employees) without even launching the product after 11 months of works and also for Twitter as real-time communications platform, who wants to become the major player in the Live-Video industry.

There are also big challenges Periscope (Twitter) business model faces toward content providers such as HBO**. HBO and other content providers companies are concern about piracy on the new services like Periscope. In April this year HBO’s “Game of Thrones” premiere, were illegally broadcast through the Periscope app. This incident led HBO to send takedown notices to Periscope/Twitter (in the United States the law requires that unauthorized copyrighted material online be taken down within 24 hours). In order to fix the piracy issue, Periscope needs to work on a better technology for automating removal of copyright content, but technical complexity for fixing of this issue is more complicated than it is on YouTube or similar platforms.

Other major player on the Video-Live Streaming field is Meerkat, which was launched in March and turned Live-Streaming into a Twitter’s platform. But Twitter now offers Periscope as a new service. Interestingly Periscope isn’t built into Twitter, it’s a standalone app with Twitter integration. Now the question is if Periscope will win over Meerkat and other competitors like YouNow.
Periscope has changed the game for the Video-Live streaming and is going to shake up the media. That is the reason why Twitter did not wait for the launch of the first release of Periscope.

* Industry sources tell the deal was somewhere between $75 and $120 million USD
**HBO is an American premium cable and satellite television network

For more information and complete list of startups and etc you can check this out.

Eshti is not just a market place. Eshti (which means spindle in Yazd) is a platform that frees you up to make your handicrafts and it will take care of selling, promoting and packaging them for you. With the help of Eshti, artists can focus on making handmade products. Artists can then trust their products to Eshti who will manage individual stores on its website by posting photos of products and when orders come in, packaging and selling them, all without increasing the price that the customer will have to pay.

As Meysam Dehghani, the founder of Eshti told us, Eshti is not a marketplace that is open to any artist. Eshti selects artists based on their works and signs contracts with them. Artists can register for free and consign their handicrafts and Eshti will get a small percentage from the sale of products. Eshti is focused on quality and trust with this strategy. Two days per week, they deliver products for free in Tehran. Artists are not just from Tehran but also there are many artists from Rasht and Mashhad.

In Iran, there are other online handicrafts stores but Eshti claims that they are different. They focus on promoting the artists instead of the products and what their next area of focus is to optimize their warehousing practices and the delivery of products.

Eshti is now at Dmond Accelerator. Right now, they keep the products in their dedicated section in Dmond Accelerator and they are going to launch their own warehouse in three months.

Rajamand said that their targeted ads are viewed 15,000,000 times in a day and his company is the first company in Iran that provides ‘Retargeting’ method of advertising.

However, these services are not free of charge. You can start your advertisement campaign with a minimum budget of 250,000 Rials (approximately $ 7).

Clickyab Team

Many companies and startups in Iran have already signed on, companies like Picuu, Ponisha and ZarinPal. It is claimed that one of these customers increased their sale by 30,000,000 rials just by placed targeted ads in Clickyab.

Rajamand said that their targeted ads are viewed 15,000,000 times in a day and his company is the first company in Iran that provides ‘Retargeting’ method of advertising.

If you liked this article, you can take a look at my previous articles:

Ponisha: The Heaven of Iranian Freelancers‏

Shafajoo Wants To Be Your Healing Angel

SarvCRM will revolutionize the concept of CRM in Iran

Ponisha Main Page

It is at this particular moment that Ponisha was born. Ponisha is the largest place for freelancers in Iran to get projects done and also to make money. Ponisha was launched in Dec, 2011 to help companies and individuals outsource their projects and hire people for short durations. It is also beneficial for entrepreneurs and startups to outsource technical parts of their projects. Here is  Nima Nourmohammady, the founder of Ponisha:  “Most people usually look for full-time jobs in a company, but I believe freelancing can be a full-time job, and with some training in marketing and negotiation, anyone with any skill could become successful. The benefits are endless. Just imagine there is no boss. In this situation, you can work whenever or wherever you want and on whatever project you desire and still make more money than people with regular employment.”

Currently Ponisha has more than 50.000 freelancers, with 2400 completed projects and a revenue of 5,103,158,949 Rials ($157,000) for freelancers. Nourmohammady said that the main goal of Ponisha  is to expand. “Our main and most important target is to reach 1 million registered members. We keep adding features, updates and promotions to keep our customers satisfied. Most Ponisha’s growth comes from our organic growth and we are thankful to our users who keep introducing us to their friends and networks.”

If you liked this article, you can take a look at my previous articles:

Shafajoo Wants To Be Your Healing Angel

SarvCRM will revolutionize the concept of CRM in Iran

What Happened in Slush Tehran