Building Connections
By RICHA VARMA
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visited a New Delhi store which uses GoConnect technology during his trip to India in February.
The friendly grocery store owner in a central New Delhi locality has a new tool to organize his financial transactions—an easy-to-use technology from an American company, Intuit. The technology gives him the power to increase visits from existing customers and stand out from the crowd via personalized, mobile marketing campaigns like messaging clients on their birthdays and addressing them by their first names. The service can be managed through the Internet or a mobile phone.
California-based Intuit’s mantra is simple: “To improve the financial lives of people so profoundly that they could never imagine going back to the old way of doing things.” This has encouraged more than 50 million small businesses and consumers worldwide to weave Intuit into their financial lives, says its Web site www.intuit.com.
Whether it is processing credit cards or accepting checks electronically, tracking daily sales or building a free Web site, Intuit offers a variety of services for managing a small business from home or office. It also helps market these businesses on the Internet, making it easier to get noticed by customers who use search engines like Google and Yahoo! Founded in 1983, Intuit recorded $3.5 billion in revenue in 2010.
Alex Lintner, president and CEO of Intuit’s Global Business Division, visited India in February as part of U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke’s business delegation to promote U.S. technologies in India. Lintner met with the managers of Zeestar grocery store in New Delhi, which uses Intuit’s GoConnect technology to market products, send relevant, timely messages to customers based on their interests and organize its business operations. Store manager Deepak Gupta provided some members of the delegation a tour of the shop and shed light on how they had been marketing to the community.
In a guest blog on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Web site, Lintner said the store had seen a sales increase of seven percent and a concurrent 90 percent decrease in marketing costs after using GoConnect. “Customer insight and feedback is at the core of how we develop new and better solutions. We call it Customer Driven Innovation, and it is central to how we approach product development at Intuit,” Lintner said.
GoConnect is aimed at Indian small businesses with less than 10 employees, and is currently available in New Delhi, Mumbai and Chandigarh. It was developed in both India and the United States, and data is hosted at Intuit’s data center in Quincy, Washington.
“Intuit’s GoConnect technology is a prime example of the kind of mutually beneficial trade that creates jobs in both countries, creating opportunities from the Intuit offices in Northern California to a neighborhood grocery store in the streets of New Delhi,” Secretary Locke said during the visit.
According to the International Trade Organization, a U.S. government body which promotes trade and investment and ensures fair trade, two-way trade in goods could reach $50billion in 2011. www.intuit.in/goconnect
