Insights from

Eko Enabled Kirana Visit

Kirana store profile

• Located in Paharganj Area market
• Lots of daily wage earner, migrant population around
• Does very good business in the area (numbers not added on purpose)
• Well placed on a prominent road, has visibility and enjoy's reputation with customers
• Has an existing reputation and is well stocked with fast-moving SKUs (certainly bigger of the Kirana's nearby)

Kirana owners profile

• Friendly, customer focussed
• Moderately digitally savvy
  • Adapt to using the phone for different digital workflows and also navigating offline systems;
  • but has fatigue from exploring new features
• Owns two phones (one of his partner's) and laptop
  • Am not sure which is his preferred choice for accessing Eko

Onboarding to new Eko initiatives

• May respond better to offline training & customer acquisition tactics better than online ones
• Chief motivation drivers can be are to increase profits by providing more services to customers
• Also threats from nearby shops providing more services can be a motivation driver (in theory) for providing more services

Working well

• Transferring money to accounts is the main use-case, with a healthy volume
  • The interface for the same is simple and well understood by the Kirana owner
• Believes in credibility/stability of the software and non-software systems of Eko (compared to other providers, who can be fly-by-night operators)

Not working

• Onboarding the shop owner to Eko's new products.
  • There was a small discussion on e-value and utility payment services not being actively advocated by the Kirana 
• Not the focus, but Eko is currently unable to help the shopkeeper digitalize the aspects of their core retail business.
  • ( This aspect of the business is interesting for lending businesses, PoS systems, e-grocery businesses, delivery business, and other business; who would like to use Kiranas as a last-mile delivery partner, etc)

Opportunities

• Better onboarding to new services (digitally and non-digitally using paper material/mini-books)
• Better partnering by involving them in the creation of new services
  • There can be several if's and but's here which I am not touching
• Better pitching of new services (with profit projections based on customized data analysis of their existing customers)

Opportunities

• Better data collection of their existing customers (though Kirana shop keepers are wary of this, esp if it threatens their core business)
• Getting into their traditional business workflows (copying inventory management systems, Khata-books, or Ok-credit's, etc)
  • I also noticed a small need for Ok-credit's use-case, which I was unsure of earlier. It "could" be used to handle accounts of few quarrelsome customers, to keep transparency and avoid conflicts with them (as a foot in the door).

Thanks

Naval Saini

Email: navalnovel@gmail.com

Twitter: @navalsaini