This article has been contributed by Gaurav Bhagat, Founder, Gaurav Bhagat Academy.
Did you ever see the 1994 Cadbury’s dairy milk ad “Kuch Khas Hain” which featured the model Shimona Rashi dancing onto the cricket field after her boyfriend hit the winning runs, perhaps you caught the 2021 remake. Both connected and at least made me reach for the refrigerator and look for Dairy milk. The only difference was that in 1994 it was my mother who was giving me dirty looks and in 2021 it was my wife.
There is an age-old saying that has held true through the ages “Facts tell but stories sell”. Think about that for a second, facts are informative, but stories are 10 times more persuasive. The reason is obvious, stories can connect with people on an emotional level, and facts can sometimes be dry and boring. When you tell a story, you create a connection with your audience and make them feel something. This will make them more likely to remember your message and take action. As the custodian of a brand isn’t that what you want? Good advertisers and storytellers understand this and make the most of this. In this article, Gaurav Bhagat hopes to share some insights that can help you do the same.
Things to Keep in Mind When Crafting Your Brand Story
Numerous studies conducted by researchers around the world found that when people hear a story, their brains activate the same areas that are activated when they experience the events in the story themselves. This suggests that stories can create a memorable experience for the listener, which can help them connect with the story and the brand it represents on a deeper level.
So, yes, stories can be powerful, but one should be mindful of some of the pitfalls and things to keep in mind when crafting your story.
Make sure your stories are relevant to your audience. It’s critical to focus on the customer and not yourself. While the story can get them to like you, do focus on their needs and interests first. Else they’ll switch off.
Keep your stories short and to the point. Depending on the platform of delivery, you may have as little as 7 seconds in a couple of minutes. Make it count.
Use language that paints a picture, some would call this a “technicolor introduction”. Our objective has to be to paint a vivid picture and get them to be in it.
Make sure your stories have a clear message, and if they end with a call to action, then that is even better.
Make sure your story is authentic, there is nothing worse than telling a story that is exaggerated and will make you seem inauthentic. In the world we live in today, just know that you’re speaking to an educated audience, and they can spot a fake when they see one. Sure, your story may not be a blockbuster, but you will move the needle with the truth.
Not being creative. If your storytelling is boring and predictable, people are going to tune out. Get creative with your storytelling and find ways to make it interesting and engaging.
Consistency is key. If your storytelling is inconsistent, people will get confused, and the message will be lost. Make sure your stories are all aligned with your brand values and end goal.
If you want to be a good storyteller and create memorable campaigns, here are a few suggestions. Understand your end audience’s “WHY”, like why should they care, why should they listen in, and why should they act? So simply put the why is their purpose and motivation to act.
Key Variables for Understanding the Audience’s Purpose
The 5 variables Gaurav uses as a coach and consultant to understand the audience’s purpose could be summed up using the acronym S.P.A.C.E.
S: Safety and Security, it’s a big one. Think about Saffola ads that talk about good health or Havells when they talk about fire-retardant wires.
P: Performance, any luxury car maker has used this one. It’s a big motivator. Even Boost as a drink has capitalized on this one big time.
A: Appearance, think cosmetics, the beauty industry, clothing. They all use this brilliantly.
C: Culture, is a powerful one, many are driven to action because they relate to the culture of an organization that is behind the product or service. Think Tata Group and tell me what comes to your mind.
E: Economics, in this context, refers to showcasing value rather than simply being the cheapest. Everyone remembers the Maruti campaign of “Kitna deti hain” or the Sikh boy playing with his dinky car and when questioned by his father, replies “petrol khatam hi nahi hunda”.
Great storytelling is an art, but it’s also a skill that can be honed. The best way will be to just get out there and get started, do your research, and use the template above to see what will resonate with your audience. Put yourself in their shoes, and vice versa. Start by creating the story outline and asking those in your inner circle for feedback. Once you’ve done that, take it to people who don’t really know you that well and eventually even to complete strangers.
In conclusion, don’t be afraid to experiment with different techniques and styles. The more you practice, the better you will become at telling stories, and who knows, one day even your brand and your story will go down in history as one of the greats.
Post-pandemic, E-commerce has changed the business model of retail— which traditionally means physical retail stores. The E-commerce growth rate in 2021 was higher than retail; do you know why? It is because of covid19 pandemic, that forced people to remain inside most of the time and order online. And that made sense at the moment. But, there is no pandemic now, so why is E-commerce booming, and why do retail stores need to step up their game? It’s because there is an apparent paradigm shift in how customers shop. People have changed, and so have their shopping habits. Now, people don’t want to go out and buy milk. They like a packet of milk delivered to their place whenever they want. E-commerce is there to fill this need generated by a host of reasons, ease of shopping being the primary one.
The E-commerce sector has a lot to gain from the latest developments in generative AI or Artificial general intelligence (AGI). The inherent capabilities of an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT hold the key to a range of customer and vendor-related opportunities including— ordering, supply chain and logistics, timely delivery, and fulfilling customer expectations. ChatGPT, as an advanced language model, can provide personalized recommendations to customers as per their past interests, as well as address their queries instantly, in real-time.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its latest upgrade, the ChatGPT Plus, are trained over a vast dataset comprising texts and codes using the reinforcement learning technique and do a pretty great job in producing human-like text responses when prompted by a user. It does great as a human conversationalist.
The E-commerce Sector And Why It Needs Something Like ChatGPT
The E-commerce sector is at a significant junction in the field of business where if it does everything it is supposed to do, it will become an unstoppable force changing the business, job, and customer expectations all at once. We are talking about AI-driven perceptivity, AI-driven trend optimization, and that unique sense of leveraging Artificial Intelligence to deliver what E-commerce offers or tries to offer. While the use of AI in data mining, data cleaning, and predictive analytics is significant in the optimization of day-to-day E-commerce operations, and most businesses are implementing it, the use of AI Chatbots like ChatGPT can help you achieve substantiated client support.
From dispatch marketing, data dissection and analytics, and website optimization to AI-driven robotization, the E-commerce future pretty much depends on what retail stores can and cannot do with Artificial intelligence and what strides E-commerce businesses make with their AI-first initiatives. It is all a matter of who wakes up, smells the coffee, and takes concrete steps towards automation, from farm to fork and plant to end users.
So, let’s see what are the ways that one can use ChatGPT in E-commerce:
ChatGPT can help create unique and value-oriented product descriptions that attract potential customers. Suppose you’re a retailer and want to attract customers to your new athleisure collection. ChatGPT could generate product descriptions for a new line of athleisure apparel in the following fashion:
Stretchy fabric: “Our athleisure apparel is made from stretchy fabric that will move with you, so you can focus on your workout without worrying about your clothes getting in the way.”
Comfortable fit: “Our athleisure apparel is designed to fit comfortably, so you can wear it all day long without feeling restricted.”
Stylish design: “Our athleisure apparel is stylish and on-trend, so you can look good while you’re working out.”
So, ChatGPT can create product descriptions that are both informative and persuasive by using engaging language and storytelling, such as the above, helping fashion retailers to increase their sales and grow their business.
Providing Customer Support
ChatGPT in Providing Customer Support
ChatGPT can also automate the process of answering frequently asked questions, providing 24*7 customer support for E-commerce businesses. This will not only enhance the customer experience but attract more customers and help build a loyal customer base for the businesses. Since ChatGPT has been trained on a massive amount of dialogue-based data, it can be easily customized (domain-specific chatbot) and help with 24*7 support.
Personal Shopping Assistants
Using ChatGPT, E-commerce businesses can offer personalized shopping experiences to customers by recommending products based on their preferences. This will not only reduce scenarios where customers spend massive time on the E-commerce website and still can’t find or choose what they like. What happens is that customers spend lots of time going through the enormous catalog of products and given the competition in e-commerce, a website with unique shopping features will attract more customers. ChatGPT can be a big help in this regard, helping customers out with their preferred products and enhancing their E-commerce shopping experience.
Using ChatGPT-4 to Make $1,000,000 in 2023 (Ecommerce)
Social Media Marketing
ChatGPT in Social Media Marketing
Marketing and advertising are proven ways to attract more customers, and, ChatGPT can transform how businesses engage customers with gripping and creative marketing pitches. ChatGPT can help generate content ideas and create marketing campaigns for social media platforms to attract potential customers, but it can help you analyze the impact of such curated ads and marketing campaigns. ChatGPT can come up with simple and creative yet engaging Ad banners and frames that are bound to get you more customers cause those who do not like a great pitch.
ChatGPT at its best
Suppose you run an E-commerce platform where you sell sports gear and you want more customers turning up, here’s what ChatGPT got for you when we asked, “create 10 marketing pitches for my E-commerce platform selling premium sports gear”:
“Unleash the Athlete Within: Discover the Power of our Premium Sports Gear Collection!”
“Unleash the Potential Within: Keep Your Game High and Sports Gear Premium!”
“Experience Sporting Excellence with our Premium Sports Gear Delivered to Your Doorstep!”
“Gear Up for Victory: Discover our Exclusive Collection of Premium Sports Equipment!”
“Uncompromising Quality: Find the Perfect Sports Gear to Amplify Your Performance!”
“Unleash Your Inner Champion with our Handpicked Selection of Premium Sports Gear!”
“Our Top-of-the-Line Gear Designed to Elevate your Game-Changing Performance!”
“Unleash Your Sporting Style: Shop our Premium Sports Gear and Make a Statement!”
“Have the Ultimate Edge: Explore our Range of High-Performance Sports Gear that can Upgrade Your Game”
“Unleash Your Potential: Shop with Confidence and Achieve New Heights with our Premium Sports Gear!”
You can refine and tailor these results to your liking and use it to create engaging and effective social media marketing campaigns.
ChatGPT can assist businesses in improving their stock management by predicting trends and analyzing purchase patterns resulting in a better, updated, and managed inventory. See, ChatGPT, as a generative AI LLM, has massive potential and capability when it comes to trend analysis and data cleaning, and generating insights. This will help the E-commerce with better inventory control and timely replenishment of stocked-out options. An updated inventory will also help with better customer fulfillment through timely, complaint-free delivery.
Use ChatGPT for Lead Generation
E-commerce businesses can use ChatGPT to create chatbots that can engage customers and identify potential leads, enabling companies to capture more sales.
There exist ChatGPT APIs that can help to create domain-specific AI chatbots, basically, a version of ChatGPT that can handle specific E-commerce tasks such as lead generation, customer service, and more. It can provide a better and more relevant response and engage inquiry clients and customers with their needs. More positive engagement will lead to more lead generation and, thus, more chances of a sale.
Cater to the International Audience
ChatGPT in catering to the International Audience
If you want your business to do good, use a global rather than a local approach.
ChatGPT can help with that as well. It is great at supporting multi-lingual communication, allowing E-commerce businesses to cater to international audiences easily. By developing multilingual chatbots for support and shopping needs at your E-commerce platform, you will ensure that no customer, no matter from which corner of the world one belongs, will turn away from your business due to a lack of understanding of languages.
Hyper-personalized Email Marketing
ChatGPT in offering Hyper-personalized Email Marketing
With ChatGPT’s help, E-commerce businesses can offer their customers hyper-personalized email marketing campaigns, increasing the likelihood of conversions. See, companies can already track what people visiting their E-commerce websites are interested in (via website cookies), and using such information, they can prompt ChatGPT to come up with a specific and personalized email marketing pitch, and it will surely help with that— delivering a catalog of products someone is interested in directly in one’s inbox, what’s not to like there!
Voice-enabled Shopping Experience
Another trend driving more E-commerce businesses is hands-free shopping, where users can command the platform to put certain items in the cart and proceed to checkout, schedule the delivery time, and pay. Using ChatGPT to develop voice-enabled shopping assistants, E-commerce businesses can cater to customers who prefer hands-free shopping, and this feature is bound to rope in more customers, and people always like more features. Minimalism is good, but more features are always a better option. By making the voice assistant multilingual, businesses can draw more customers across the continents.
Analyzing Customer Reviews
ChatGPT in Analyzing Customer Reviews
E-commerce is a business model where customers shop, but they also like to leave feedbacks that not only help the platform but helps other customers with their shopping as well. ChatGPT can analyze customer reviews throughout the platform by identifying patterns and trends, providing insights to E-commerce businesses on improving customer satisfaction and boosting sales.
Conclusion
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, can be a great tool when it comes to attracting more customers on an E-commerce platform. Businesses can update their stock by analyzing customer reviews and orders; and enhance customer fulfillment which now has become a deal-breaking factor when it comes to people shopping through offline or E-commerce channels. Timely and effective customer support and settlement of problems with customer-oriented solutions can be the right tool to drive more customers and keep customers loyal, and ChatGPT can make a huge difference with its capacity to generate creative content and provide information in a human-like approach.
FAQs
What are the ways that one can use ChatGPT in E-commerce?
Here are the ways that one can use ChatGPT in E-commerce –
Writing Product Descriptions
Providing Customer Support
Personal Shopping Assistants
Social Media Marketing
Inventory Management
Lead Generation
Cater to the International Audience
Hyper-personalized Email Marketing
Voice-enabled Shopping Experience
Analyzing Customer Reviews
How ChatGPT can help in Inventory Management?
ChatGPT can assist businesses in improving their stock management by predicting trends and analyzing purchase patterns resulting in a better, updated, and managed inventory. This will help the E-commerce with better inventory control and timely replenishment of stocked-out options. An updated inventory will also help with better customer fulfillment through timely, complaint-free delivery.
In the era of digital advertisements, in-app advertising is doing wonders for brands, whether they aim to reach the target audience, brand awareness, bring traffic, or get app installs.
When BCCI split IPL broadcasting rights into digital and TV packages for the first time from the 2023-27 cycle, an intense TV versus digital contest was about to begin until Jio Cinema bagged the streaming rights for $2.7 billion and decided to stream IPL for free. This pumped-up viewers in enormous numbers to opt for mobile streaming of the IPL— recording 2.5 crore downloads on the very first day.
Jio Cinema, by Viacom18, is a Premium VOD online streaming app and website hosting an endless range of movies and TV shows. The app also provides live streaming of sports such as Badminton, Cricket, Football, etc., and has content partners like ALT Balaji, Eros Now, and Disney.
Emerging as India’s best online streaming app for TV shows/Movies or Sports, Jio Cinema has already roped in 500 advertisers for IPL 2023.
With IPL streaming rights in hand, it has been anticipated that 60% of the advertising revenue would come directly from digital sources, implying that Jio Cinema’s ad sales could touch $330-350 million.
Jio Cinema’s frequent content updates on the portals keep user engagement high and attract a high-quality audience with good engagement and repeat visits. Advertising on the Jio Cinema is a good option, especially during the IPL season when the engagement has skyrocketed— the entire first week of IPL had 550 crore views.
The season of the lucrative T20 League— the Indian Premier League— is undeniably the best time and option to target the Indian audience in their homes and to give your brand a strong positioning, equal to advertising on National Television Channels.
With Jio Cinema bagging the IPL streaming rights, it has become a dynamic medium of branding, and various brands can use it to reach their TG (Target Group). Owned and operated by Viacom 18, Jio Cinema has become a prominent source of digital advertising for businesses in the past few years. It has been recorded that 57% of its audience belongs to the age range of 25-34, making it a millennial hub for marketing. During IPL 2023, Jio Cinema’s ad sales have been anticipated to touch $330-350 million. And with content partners like ALT Balaji, Eros Now, and Disney, it has become a prominent source of digital advertising for your businesses.
So, how to advertise on Jio Cinema?
Principally, there are three types of ads available to advertise on the Jio Cinema app— Display Ads, Video Ads, and Connected TV(CTV) Ads.
Display Ads
These are graphical ads placed within the app, typically at the top or bottom of the screen, and can be static or animated. They drive installs on your app, visit your product, or contact you. These Display ads have two approaches— Ads with Images and Ads Without Images— that can promote a brand, product, or service. These ads work based on CPM (Cost Per Mile) and run on two price models— Impressions and Clicks.
Video Ads
These are the best for brand awareness— when you send a short message video about your product/service. Video Ads can also be divided into two— Bumper Ads and Mid Rolls Ads.
Bumper Ads are video ads of 6 seconds or less that are placed before the main program or event starts. And Mid Rolls Ads are the ones that appear between the main program or event. They range between 10 and 30 seconds. These mid-roll ads are helpful for your brand to increase awareness and boost its recall value by advertising an engaging video story of your product/services. These models work on two price models— CPM (Cost Per Mile) and CPCV (Cost Per Completed View).
CTV or Connected TV Ads
These enable businesses to target the correct audience using Smart TVs linked to other OTT devices, such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick, Chromecast with Google TV, and Apple TV. These ads are on a spot-by-spot basis and are shone on a full screen for 10 seconds.
What is Connected TV | How does CTV Work?
Advertisement Rates
The advertising rates on Jio Cinema, especially IPL advertisements, vary depending on several factors, such as— advertising format, placement, duration, target audience, and the overall demand for advertising during the IPL. Thus, you may expect the rates to be higher than those on other platforms, even during non-peak times, due to the high viewership and engagement that the IPL is generating. You may also have to pay more for premium ad placements and longer ad durations. Here are the advertisement rates for Jio Cinema:
Video Ad Rates
The bumper ad video costs INR 225 for a 10-sec video for 1000 ad impressions, and the Mid-roll ad video costs INR 200 for live (10-sec) and INR 150 for highlights (10-sec).
Display Ad Rates
The rate of display ads varies due to various factors, like the target market, location, duration, and advertising type.
Connected TV Ad Rates
Here, the rates depend on your brand’s media options. Plus, other factors cause ad rates to vary— the duration of ads that depends on various factors, including the span and advertising type.
Jio Cinema targets its audiences in four broad ways— demographic, location, interest-based, and device targeting. Demographic targeting targets audiences based on age, gender, and other demographic factors. The location targeting will enable your brand to target audiences based on geographical locations, such as city, state, or pin code. The advertisements are also targeted based on interest and the basis of the type of device used by the viewer.
Conclusion
Advertising on Jio Cinema combines the power of TV-like engagement with digital-like segmentation— a powerful way to drive an audience. The segmentation depends on parameters like identity-based targeting, interest profile targeting, etc., that funnel your ads to reach the target audience. With Jio Cinema streaming IPL free for all, advertising in IPL 2023 is undeniably one of the most remarkable opportunities for advertisers. Notably, when IPL was streamed on Hotstar in 2022, millions of viewers streamed the match live, and now with Jio Cinema’s free streaming, it is believed that it will be overflowing with views. Also, Jio Cinema App has provided an easy option to advertise in the IPL 2023 matches. With the streaming app operating in 11 different languages, including the national language Hindi, Jio Cinema is a sturdy and trusted place for the dynamic medium of branding used by various brands to reach their TG (Target Group).
FAQs
How many types of ads are available to advertise on the Jio Cinema app?
There are three types of ads available to advertise on the Jio Cinema app— Display Ads, Video Ads, and Connected TV(CTV) Ads.
What is the Video Ads rate on the Jio Cinema app?
The bumper ad video costs INR 225 for a 10-sec video for 1000 ad impressions, and the Mid-roll ad video costs INR 200 for live (10-sec) and INR 150 for highlights (10-sec).
How does Jio Cinema target its audience?
Jio Cinema targets its audiences in four broad ways— demographic, location, interest-based, and device targeting.
Order fulfillment is an integral part of any product-based business as it helps to ensure customer satisfaction. However, due to its complexity, managing the order fulfillment process can take time.
To address this challenge, businesses should consider employing strategies and technologies that streamline the order fulfillment process. This article will discuss the importance of order fulfillment, models available, best practices for streamlining the process, and several solutions to simplify order management as a centralized approach.
The order fulfillment process involves a complex orchestration of strategic sourcing, inventory management, supply chain management, order processing, quality control, and customer support to ensure the timely delivery of products to customers. This process typically consists of five primary steps: strategic sourcing, inventory management, order processing, picking, packing, and shipping.
Potential challenges can occur in each phase, such as supply shortages or kinks in the supply chain that may cause delays in ordering or delivery. Additionally, a business must carefully consider which order fulfillment model is right for them; in-house processes could be expensive. Outsourcing could reduce costs but require extensive coordination with outside partners.
Efficient order fulfillment requires understanding the entire lifecycle from start to finish and a solid business plan outlining facility and technology costs, location plans, and sales projections.
Best Practices to Streamline Order Fulfillment
Efficiently managing the order fulfillment process is essential for businesses to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain a competitive edge. That said, here are some best practices you can follow:
1. Analyze the Current Order Fulfillment Process
Understanding the nuances of the existing order fulfillment process is essential for devising strategies to improve operational efficiency. To accurately analyze the current order fulfillment process, businesses must consider factors such as order volume, product type, shipping speed, customer expectations, and inventory levels. The analysis should include the following:
Evaluating inventory management methods.
Assessing demand and logistics planning processes.
Analyzing supply chain visibility (SCV) data.
Optimizing order processing time.
Automating manual tasks for improved accuracy and efficiency.
Investigating potential problems such as supply shortages or quality control issues.
Once businesses clearly understand their current practices and potential problem areas, they can devise strategies to streamline their operations.
2. Implement Lean Methodology
By adopting lean methodology, businesses can unlock the potential of their order fulfillment operations, driving them to new heights of efficiency and profitability. Lean methodology is a set of principles that focus on eliminating waste while maintaining quality and customer satisfaction.
Companies can reduce costs, increase profits, and improve delivery times by applying lean principles in order fulfillment processes. With the help of this methodology, businesses can analyze their current order fulfillment process and identify areas of improvement. This allows them to streamline their operations by eliminating unnecessary steps or procedures that are not adding value to the overall process.
Furthermore, companies can use technology solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for inventory visibility and automated order processing, which will help them save time and reduce costs associated with manual processes.
3. Automate Order Processing
Order processing automation can enable businesses to reduce costs and increase profits by optimizing the efficiency of their operations. Automating the order processing process reduces manual labor, which leads to reduced labor costs, improved accuracy, and productivity, as well as lower risks due to human errors.
Automated order processing systems integrate multiple platforms such as ERP, warehouse management system (WMS), customer relationship management (CRM), shipping software, and other traditional tools into one unified platform that streamlines data flow across departments. This provides real-time visibility into inventory levels and orders in transit, allowing for more accurate inventory management and better customer service.
Furthermore, automation eliminates the need for paper-based processes like purchase orders or invoices by creating digital records easily accessible by all parties involved in the transaction. By automating order processing with an integrated system, businesses can decrease lead time while meeting customer demands quickly and efficiently without disrupting supply chain operations.
4. Optimize the Inventory Management System
Optimizing the inventory management system can significantly reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction by providing better visibility into supply chain operations. By implementing a reliable inventory management system, businesses can track their stock levels more accurately, anticipate customer demand, and prevent overstocking or understocking of products.
An optimized inventory management system also provides customers with real-time updates on product availability and delivery times, improving customer satisfaction. Some key aspects of optimizing an inventory management system include:
Implementing automated processes such as barcode scanning and RFID tagging for accurate tracking of stock levels.
Using software solutions that provide visibility into the entire order fulfillment process, from order creation through delivery.
Utilizing predictive analytics for forecasting future demand.
Establishing efficient replenishment systems for restocking products promptly.
Establish comprehensive quality control procedures to ensure all products are up to standard before shipping.
Setting clear communication protocols between departments for smooth coordination during order fulfillment.
Implementing these steps allows them to manage their warehouse space efficiently and minimize losses due to spoilage or theft.
5. Optimize the Supply Chain
Effective supply chain management is a critical component of the order fulfillment process, as it enables companies to ensure timely deliveries and meet customer expectations. Companies must have efficient systems to manage their supply chains, including internal processes and external partners.
To optimize supply chain performance, companies should streamline processes such as planning and forecasting, inventory management, order processing, transportation and logistics, supplier management, and quality control. Automating these processes can help reduce errors and delays while improving visibility into all supply chain stages.
Furthermore, businesses should strive for close collaboration with suppliers to increase efficiency across the entire system. By leveraging technology like Supply Chain Management (SCM) modules or ERP systems that integrate all business processes from end-to-end in the cloud, businesses can gain real-time insights into their operations to optimize their supply chain performance further.
6. Improve Communication
Communication is vital in order fulfillment because it keeps everyone involved informed of changes and updates. Ensuring all stakeholders are aware of any changes or issues can help prevent delays and maintain a smooth flow of operations. As such, implementing effective strategies for communication between departments is essential for successful order fulfillment.
Technologies such as ERP systems can facilitate inter-departmental communication by providing a centralized platform for real-time data sharing and collaboration. This enables businesses to track inventory levels quickly, reducing manual errors and increasing efficiency. Additionally, it helps ensure every stakeholder has access to the latest information about orders to respond promptly to any changes or challenges during the order fulfillment process.
7. Manage Returns and Exchanges
Efficiently managing returns and exchanges require a proactive approach to ensure a smooth customer experience in the order fulfillment cycle. To optimize the process, businesses should create easy policies for customers to understand, establish a return timeline, and plan for reverse logistics.
Having clear guidelines helps reduce customer confusion and the risk of lost items or damage during return shipping. Establishing a reasonable timeline for returns ensures customers can get their money back quickly and that products won’t be out of stock for too long if returned. Proper planning for reverse logistics also prevents delays in restocking an item or sending it out again.
Additionally, businesses should consider offering incentives such as free returns or discounts on future purchases to encourage customers to return items instead of keeping them indefinitely.
8. Implement a Continuous Improvement Plan
Continuous improvement plans enable businesses to make necessary adjustments to their order fulfillment operations and ensure customer satisfaction. By regularly reviewing processes, analyzing data, and gathering customer feedback, businesses can make incremental improvements that will lead to significant efficiencies in their order fulfillment process.
A continuous improvement plan should include the following:
Assessing the current state of order fulfillment operations in performance, cost-effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and other metrics.
Identifying areas for improvement and developing strategies for addressing them.
Monitoring progress over time through regular reviews of data and feedback from customers.
Implementing changes as necessary to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Evaluating the results of changes made and making further adjustments where needed.
With these strategies in place, businesses can continuously streamline their order fulfillment process by providing customers with an efficient and convenient experience.
Conclusion
The order fulfillment process is integral to any product-based business, as it helps meet customer expectations and retain clients. To ensure the efficient and successful completion of orders, businesses should take advantage of the latest strategies and technologies.
By following best practices such as automating parts of the process, reducing manual labor, and leveraging data to make informed decisions, businesses can improve their order fulfillment process while ensuring that customers receive their orders on time every time. By combining these strategies and technologies, businesses can create an efficient order fulfillment system that meets customer needs without compromising quality or efficiency.
ChatGPT is the new tool on the block that social media enthusiasts are in love with. While people who use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have been copying quotes, sayings, and cool phrases by searching on the internet to make their social media posts a bit interesting, not to mention the book quotes and quoting random Greek philosophers, some out of context and some for the fun of it, this new artificial intelligence can do much more than that. See, being a generative AI, ChatGPT can not only give the quotes you want off the web, but it can also inspire that little creative writer inside you and help you create original, meaningful captions for social media.
OpenAI, a company that is highly involved in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning research and development, launched (on November 30, 2022) the coolest and most capable program named ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot that is capable of generating human-like text, content writing and producing creative content when prompted by the user. It was so useful! I am saying useful cause usefulness is what drives any product in this age, that it grossed 1m users in its first five days of launch and 100m users by January 2023.
Even Instagram took 2.5 months to achieve its first 1m users.
With global smartphone penetration presently standing at 67% and a significant amount of their valuable time on smartphones, marketers, and advertisers are now focused on creating ads and marketing campaigns directed especially at small screens, i.e., the mobile and ChatGPT can help.
A McKinsey Global Survey on state AI adoption concluded, “In 2017, 20 percent of respondents reported adopting AI in at least one business area, whereas today, that figure stands at 50 percent, though it peaked higher in 2019 at 58 percent.”
And with ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus making headlines with their content–creating capabilities, more and more businesses in various areas are looking to adopt AI in some way or another.
Marketers and advertising agencies can use ChatGPT to research the latest trends and news about the product or service they want to market. ChatGPT can be used to get a summary of the latest developments regarding a particular product and how customers are inclined toward that product.
ChatGPT can be leveraged to research what products people are interested in and how they interact with sellers and vendors. By analyzing local or national news on a particular product or service, people can strategize and focus more on what people need and want.
Generating Unique Marketing Campaigns For Social Media
The AI Chatbot can also be used to develop unique marketing ideas and campaign slogans, themes, and titles. It can help advertisers and marketers use the time to plan the crucial aspect of the campaigns and can help create a wireframe.
Apart from that, it can provide you with creative content as well, but you have to tailor it to match the theme and target of the campaign.
Someone rightly pointed out that generative AI can be an assistant at best (well, Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, called the Bing AI your Copilot), so why not use it as an assistant?
ChatGPT could generate ad copy tailored to a specific audience, ensuring that the ad is more effective and reaches the right people.
An Ad and Marketing company could use ChatGPT to personalize social media content for different audiences. This can be done using demographic information, interests, and other factors to generate relevant and appealing content for each audience. Marketers could use ChatGPT to create different versions of a post for different countries or regions to ensure that the content is relevant to the audience more likely to be engaged.
ChatGPT For Social Media Marketing
Well, once you have created something, be it a small advertisement or a targeted marketing campaign, it is time to market it to the right audience.
So how do you go about that, and how can ChatGPT help?
As a generative AI, ChatGPT can help you analyze the trending social media platform and give pointers on how you can approach this.
ChatGPT can provide you with a list of trendy tags and captions. If your ad campaign is less text and more visuals in the form of images, Instagram and Pinterest could be the better platform. If it is textual, you can post it on Reddit and Twitter. With the help of ChatGPT, you can find trending groups and space to market your ad.
Apart from that, ChatGPT can also help people with microblogging sites and posting creative content, and growing their follower count. People like you, me, celebs, politicians, and others can use ChatGPT to post better tweets. It can help you with witty and relevant replies and help you engage better with your followers.
On Instagram, you can use this great tool to come up with witty or quirky captions, as per your taste, and hashtags to enhance your engagement and grow your followers. The same goes for Reddit and other social media platforms such as Facebook.
Talking about politicians and celebs, a politician can use ChatGPT to tweet better tweets relevant to current events and reach their audience. This will not only enhance the prospects during crucial elections but will also ensure that voters know who they are voting for.
For example, consider this tweet by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was mocked for her made-up word ‘refudiate’ —
”Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does our throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”
-@sarahpalinusa, July 18, 2010
She followed up with:
”Refudiate,” ”misunderestimate,” ”wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
-@sarahpalinusa, July 18, 2010
Here is a tweet by former United States President Donald J. Trump that makes you think over your tweets and other social media posts and not post toxic content. ChatGPT can surely help you rephrase your thoughts and be creative.
”Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama- but nobody else does!”
-@realDonaldTrump, June 9, 2016
You can also use ChatGPT to write long blog posts on blogging websites such as Medium and Substack, where a subscription option is also available. Using ChatGPT wisely and effectively (again… as an assistant and not a writer), you can create valuable, informative, and trustworthy content that engages more people and makes you rich (well, it’s possible!).
Conclusion
In essence, whether social media posts or social media marketing, ChatGPT, and other generative AI tools can help you write better, creative, and informative content to create engaging and effective ad campaigns. You can use ChatGPT for research and analysis, thereby, personalizing social media posts or marketing campaigns to engage the kind of audience you wish to target. From social media captions to replies, comments, and hashtags, ChatGPT got your back.
FAQs
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot that is capable of generating human-like text, content writing, and producing creative content when prompted by the user.
How can you use ChatGPT for social media?
ChatGPT can be used for social media for:
Research And Trend Analysis
Generating Unique Marketing Campaigns For Social Media
For the past few months, ChatGPT has been the talk of the town. From office colleagues talking about ChatGPT and how Artificial Intelligence is coming for their jobs to dinner table talks to how ChatGPT has made lives so easy— mainly school children who are often late to submit their homework and essays.
When Google first announced its most ambitious project, the new Bard AI, it was found that it made a significantly factual error about the James Webb telescope capturing exoplanets which were incorrect. This blunder cost Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to lose 9% of the market cap, nearly 100B dollars wiped off the market in February 2023. From aiming to become the “AI first” company to lagging and playing catch up with some of the prominent players in Artificial Intelligence, Google is raising brows.
Google’s bard sometimes conjures up fake facts, and ChatGPT is not impervious to the same either. On several occasions, ChatGPT is also found making up bogus data if it was instructed to focus on data.
This is unacceptable, but what can be done about that? The simple answer is that you, the user, must be careful and mindful to know what the truth is and what is a farce.
ChatGPT is truly a revolution. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, says that ChatGPT was a pivotal moment for AI, and he might just be right. ChatGPT is a remarkable invention in the field of AI and ML. Notably, decades of hard work have gone into the transformer structure powering the AI chatbot. It is based on the GPT-3.5 model but finetuned to respond well to conversations. It can understand natural language and respond the same way. ChatGPT can generate text, write emails and creative content like poems and codes, and produce summaries of any historical event when prompted. But I must point out that any Large Language Model (LLM) is just as good as the dataset it has trained on. So, it cannot be ruled out that the answer won’t be biased one way or the other, especially on critical issues such as race, gender, and political happenings.
If you are thinking about using ChatGPT to write a blog post that is well structured and SEO (Search engine optimization) friendly, there are specific points you must keep in mind.
Use ChatGPT To Research Your Topic
What do you do when you think about writing a blog on a particular subject? You do your research and familiarize yourself with the context and the topic. You read a few articles, gather facts, and try to create a structure and a story. Now you can do all that with ChatGPT as well. It will act like your personal assistant if you treat it like one. With simple commands/ prompts like “Who was Picasso and what paintings did he make in his lifetime?” and “Describe the paintings (a series) titled ‘The weeping woman?”, etc. you can gather enough data and facts about Picasso, Picasso’s paintings, and the story behind “The weeping woman” in particular. You will know that the weeping woman was Picasso’s mistress and his muse, Dora Maar. Those paintings were created by Picasso in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, and thus are closely associated with the iconography in his painting, Guernica.
But while you research your blog title and gather crucial facts to make your blog informative and of substance, you must be mindful of the facts. You must carefully fact-check such facts which you don’t personally know so that you don’t spread misinformation/disinformation.
ChatGPT Tutorial – How to Create a Profitable Blog with AI
Ask ChatGPT To Create A Wireframe
While writing something, even as simple as a blog post, people often stray from the direction they had in mind before starting the writing process. And as it happens, many struggle with a good start. But first, what should be a good start? Well, you can ask ChatGPT to create a wireframe for you or ask, “Write a blog on xyzxyzxyz” and it will most certainly write one for you, and you can pick some points to start your wireframe and your own story. I must mention at this point that ChatGPT cannot write a good blog post, and you have to do that for yourself. And there are many reasons for that.
First of all, it doesn’t come with emotional intelligence, so the post would often be bland and direct. While direct is not bad, I like direct blog posts, but they must have some personal human touch that we humans crave because, believe it or not, AI is not a good storyteller or creator.
Secondly, context! As it happens, ChatGPT will miss your context and the direction you want it to head. Also, ChatGPT is limited by its training dataset. So, what if it has trained on 570GB of a dataset of text and codes and nearly 6B parameters? Its dataset is in the past as well. Self admittedly, ChatGPT cannot answer about post-2021 events like the FIFA 2022, Qatar, or 2022 US Open or the recently held Superbowl, where Rihanna set the stage on fire with her jaw-dropping performance.
Fact-check The Facts That Seem Odd At ChatGPT
Yes, I warned you about inaccurate content that LLMs will produce sometimes, but you can always fact-check. On ChatGPT itself, if you ask it to fact-check a particular statement it fabricated, it might admit the mistake. And correct the same.
You must fact-check on other popular sources as well, just so your content is factually correct and doesn’t become misinformation.
Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly At ChatGPT
SEO Friendly Blog
You can also use ChatGPT to make your blog post SEO-friendly. For those who don’t know what SEO is and how it works— know that Google ranks your content once published based on EAT, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So, make sure you focus on all the three. Apart from this, use ChatGPT to do keyword research and list relevant keywords that match your blog topics. You can also ask ChatGPT to create embeddable elements and enhancements to make your content more linkable, thus allowing it to enhance the content rating on Google.
Additionally, you can also ask ChatGPT to do content clustering, which will help the Google Search Engine to analyze your content better and rank higher.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is good that you use ChatGPT to write blog posts, and you can use the tips and tricks mentioned above but always focus on the context, facts, and personal touch, which AI LLM will most likely fail at. Use ChatGPT wisely and use it as an assistant rather than a writer.
FAQs
What should a blogger keep in mind while using ChatGPT for writing a blog?
There are a few specific points that a blogger must keep in mind while using ChatGPT for writing a blog. The blogger can use ChatGPT to:
Research The Topic
Create A Wireframe
Make The Blog SEO-Friendly
What are the limitations of ChatGPT in blog writing?
There are a few limitations of ChatGPT which are as follows-
ChatGPT cannot write a good blog post
It doesn’t come with emotional intelligence
It is not a good storyteller or creator
ChatGPT will miss your context and the direction you want it to head.
It has been a constant struggle for businesses to ensure that their products and services reach the correct consumer base. In the past few decades, with the advent of the internet and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., the marketing and advertising industry has changed completely. We can see a paradigm shift from television and billboard advertisements to ads on little screens on our hands that we’re using for a significant amount of time. Smartphone penetration across the world is at avg. 67% (2021), and with 8B people on this earth, it is a compelling medium to target your ads and marketing campaigns. Businesses know this, marketers know this, and advertising agencies know this very well.
There are several ways you do this when it comes to ads and targeted marketing campaigns. From traditional billboards to brochures to email and digital marketing, options are abundantly available.
Email marketing is a significant one. It is a powerful tool as businesses can use to reach their target audience, build relationships with customers, and drive sales. It is one of the most effective marketing channels, with a high return on investment (ROI).
Well, email marketing is a powerful tool that can help businesses in achieving their marketing goals. It is an effective tool when it comes to acquiring new customers, generating leads, re-engaging lapsed customers, and driving sales. It can be used to target people who have visited your website or signed up for your newsletter. Sending out emails that provide value and keep them engaged with the brand can help convert leads into customers and remind lapsed ones about the business. In addition, emails promoting products or services, along with discounts or incentives will help drive sales too. Furthermore, email marketing helps build relationships with existing customers by providing them value to create a loyal customer base which is essential for any business’s success. All you gotta do is gather loads of emails and design targeted ads marketing campaigns (which again can be done in plenty of ways) and directly deliver them to consumers’ inboxes. People readily subscribe to email newsletters, significantly making the whole thing easier.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public. Since ChatGPT is capable of generating human-like texts, and creative content, helping you write poems, editorials, ad slogans, marketing quotes, and more, it has become the fastest-growing technology in recent times. So popular that it took only five days to gather 1m users worldwide since its launch in November, and by January, it had 100M users— that is some record-breaking numbers. To put this into perspective, even Instagram took 2.5 months to gather 1m users.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is based on its large language model (LLM), the GPT-3. GPT-3, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer -3, empowers ChatGPT to understand natural language better and generate human-like responses.
When it comes to using ChatGPT in email marketing, here are some of the ways you can go about that:
Firstly, you need a successful email marketing plan which includes segmentation and personalization. Segmenting your email list allows you to send more targeted and relevant emails to your subscribers. This can help you improve your open rates and click-through rates, whereas personalizing your emails with the names of your subscribers is a great way to make them feel like you are speaking directly to them, thereby improving your open rates and click-through rates. Using ChatGPT for precisely this purpose is what you need.
ChatGPT can help with analyzing customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographic information, to identify patterns and trends. You can use this information to create segments of customers with similar interests and needs.
Take a retail clothing store, for example. A clothing retailer could use ChatGPT to analyze customer data to identify segments of customers who are interested in different types of clothing. The retailer could then create personalized email campaigns for each, featuring relevant products that fulfill the interests of each segment.
Here’s what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to ‘Write 5 personalized email marketing pitches which I can use as a clothing retailer?’
Welcome Offer
Subject: Welcome to [Your Clothing Store Name]! Enjoy 15% off your first purchase!
Hi [Subscriber’s Name],
Welcome to [Your Clothing Store Name]! We’re thrilled to have you as part of our fashion-forward community. To celebrate, we’re offering you an exclusive 15% discount on your first purchase.
Explore our latest collection of trendy apparel, from stylish dresses to chic accessories. With our handpicked selection, you’ll find the perfect outfits for any occasion. Simply use the code “WELCOME15” at checkout to claim your discount.
We can’t wait to see you rocking our fashion-forward pieces. Happy shopping!
Personalized Recommendations
Subject: Your Style, Your Way: Discover Outfits Handpicked for You!
Hi [Subscriber’s Name],
At [Your Clothing Store Name], we believe that style is personal. That’s why we’ve curated a collection of outfits tailored just for you! Based on your previous purchases and preferences, we’ve selected these pieces we think you’ll love.
[Item 1]: Perfect for a night out, this little black dress is both elegant and versatile.
[Item 2]: Stay on-trend with our statement leopard print jacket, a must-have for every fashionista.
[Item 3]: Elevate your everyday look with our comfortable yet stylish high-waisted jeans.
Explore these handpicked recommendations by clicking the links above. We’re confident they’ll reflect your unique style and help you stand out from the crowd.
And ChatGPT outdid itself with this one:
Style Inspiration
Subject: Get Inspired: Discover this Season’s Hottest Trends!
Hi [Subscriber’s Name],
Looking for some style inspiration this season? We’ve got you covered! Our team of fashion experts has handpicked the hottest trends that will have you turning heads wherever you go.
Trend 1: Statement Sleeves: Embrace drama and sophistication with tops and dresses featuring bold and voluminous sleeves.
Trend 2: Athleisure Chic: Elevate your casual looks with comfortable yet stylish athleisure pieces that effortlessly transition from workout to the street.
Trend 3: Floral Frenzy: Embrace the beauty of nature with vibrant floral prints, perfect for adding a touch of freshness to your outfits.
Explore these trends and more on our website, where you’ll find a wide range of clothing options to match your style. Let’s make this season your most stylish one yet!
Happy styling!
You get the idea, right?
ChatGPT Email Writing and Newsletter Creation 📚 Tutorial for Beginners 💻
If you are running a travel company, segmentation, and personalization will help there too. You could use ChatGPT to analyze customer data to identify segments of customers who are interested in different types of travel and then create personalized email campaigns for each, then create personalized email campaigns, featuring relevant products that fulfill the interests of each segment.
Additionally, ChatGPT can automate email marketing tasks, such as sending out emails, tracking opens and clicks, and analyzing results, saving businesses time and resources, which can be used to focus on other marketing activities.
On top of that, ChatGPT can also help with initial research. Data is everything, and it can help you gather data. It can collect relevant data about your subscribers, such as their preferences, purchase history, or interactions with your website. This data will help you personalize your email content and make it more relevant to each recipient. Then, it can also determine the objectives you want to achieve through your email marketing campaign. Whether it is driving sales, increasing engagement, or providing customer support, it can clarify your goals to guide your email content.
ChatGPT can help you with monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns as well. It can help you get a picture of metrics and show you what is working and what is not. Based on the insights gathered, it can continuously optimize your email marketing strategy. It can also make adjustments to the model’s training data, refine your email templates, and experiment with different approaches to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns in the long run.
Conclusion
ChatGPT is a great tool to give your personalized input a unique email marketing pitch pretty quickly. If used cleverly, ChatGPT can help marketers and advertisers in every area of the business world. Its creative writing feature allows you to experiment with loads of personalized content and see its impact in real time. You can also use it as a data analytics tool to help you with better insights and create new and effective targeted email marketing campaigns.
FAQs
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help businesses in achieving their marketing goals. It is an effective tool when it comes to acquiring new customers, generating leads, re-engaging lapsed customers, and driving sales. It can be used to target people who have visited your website or signed up for your newsletter.
How ChatGPT can help in Email Marketing?
ChatGPT can help in –
Segmentation and Personalization
Analyzing Customer’s Data
Automate Email Marketing Tasks
Initial Research
Monitoring the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaign
Most of you have heard of generative AI and how it can help you with generating content.
ChatGPT comes atop when creating text-based content because OpenAI’s ChatGPT is quite efficient. However, other generative AI tools can be used to generate text, visual, and audio content, including those developed by Google, as Google just announced in its Google I/O meet held recently.
Anyway, coming to ChatGPT and creating text-based content using this AI ChatGPT, you must know that it is based on GPT-3 and GPT-3.4 transformer architecture and is well versed and trained with approx 6B parameters that enable it to capture the natural language and process it effortlessly and it does a great job. It understands the assignment.
You can use it to generate content simply by using simple commands. ChatGPT will create a wide range of content, from human-sounding text responses to create content— poems, prose, imitating celebrity style (someone asked ChatGPT to imitate Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host, and it did so perfectly), and engage in human-like conversations to respond to your queries.
However, if you want to get the best out of ChatGPT, you must wonder what kind of prompts will fetch good answers cause it happens, the GPT model was not developed for human conversation or an AI chatbot. The GPT model wasn’t made to follow user instructions and then generate content. That is why OpenAI developed InstructGPT first. Not ChatGPT but Instruct GPT, and it worked. Come 2022, OpenAI launched the first ChatGPT model, which was well-suited for human-like conversation where users can give instructions or prompts.
So now that you can control what you want to know, you can tailor the content to your needs, as it helps if you know how to do that correctly and how to communicate with this ChatGPT AI chatbot effectively.
So, let’s see, in this post here, how you can optimize your conversationwith AI, create effective prompts to guide AI toward what you want to write or understand, and how you can get the most out of AI ChatGPT.
An Introduction To ChatGPT
So, most of y’all already know that ChatGPT is currently the most popular AI. There are several reasons for it to be the most prevalent— including that, Google hasn’t delivered its promise to be the ‘AI-first’ company it said it would be. Even though it announced BardAI in early February 2023, it simply hasn’t been that useful.
Anyways, on November 30, 2022, a San Francisco-based company dedicated to Artificial intelligence and Deep learning research and development launched ChatGPT (short for Chatbot Generative pre-trained transformer), and overnight it became a hit with 1M users in just five days and 100M users by January. People who became hooked on ChatGPT have been asking various queries and generating content that looked like a human had written them.
That’s the strength of ChatGPT. It can understand natural language very well and respond to queries in a human-text output. From article writing blogs, stories, poems, codes, and jokes, people use ChatGPT for many things. Since it has trained on a vast amount of data, an extensive dataset of 570GB of texts and codes that goes over 6B parameters, it can cover almost any topic from socialism and sociology to politics, physics, and philosophy.
Users can search for answers to mathematics, English, and science questions— frankly a boon for school-going children and senior students. It is also helpful for grads and Ph.D. scholars while doing research and writing research work. It can act like a human assistant.
However, it is limited as being an Artificial intelligence tool, it lacks context and emotional intelligence in its responses. Additionally, its training dataset is limited to 2021— it’s living in the past, saying it has limited knowledge of post-2021 events and happenings.
Apart from that, its responses are as good as the dataset it is trained on, so be prepared to occasionally encounter some bias on issues like gender, race, and religion, on which people often have mixed understanding.
Why Do You Need Effective Prompts With Converse To ChatGPT?
An effective prompt can help you get the most out of any generative AI. Using effective prompts while using ChatGPT for research or asking queries, in general, is vital because it helps to ensure that the model can provide accurate and relevant responses. When you input a clear and specific prompt, you give the model the information it needs to generate a response, tailored to your needs.
If you ask ChatGPT a general question like “Tell me about ChatGPT”, it will come up with a general answer; something like this—
“ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It is part of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series, specifically based on the GPT-3.5 architecture. GPT-3.5 is one of the most advanced language models available as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, so there might be newer versions or models released since then.
ChatGPT is designed to engage in conversational interactions with users, providing responses and information based on the input it receives. It has been trained on a vast amount of text data from the internet, including books, articles, websites, and more, to develop a deep understanding of human language and context.
The model learns patterns, grammar, and a broad range of knowledge from the training data, allowing it to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses. It can understand and generate text in multiple languages and can assist with various tasks such as answering questions, providing explanations, offering suggestions, and engaging in casual conversation.
It’s important to note that while ChatGPT strives to provide helpful and accurate information, it may occasionally generate incorrect or nonsensical responses. It also doesn’t possess real-time information or personal experiences beyond its training data.
OpenAI has made efforts to improve the model’s ethical use and reduce biases. However, biases can still arise from the training data or interactions with users, and OpenAI continues to work on refining these aspects.
OpenAI has provided access to ChatGPT through various platforms and APIs, allowing developers and users to integrate the language model into applications, products, or services. This enables a wide range of possibilities for utilizing the capabilities of ChatGPT in different domains, including customer support, content generation, and educational tools.
It’s worth mentioning that as an AI language model, I am an instance of ChatGPT and my responses are generated based on the capabilities of the model up to September 2021.”
It is so big of an answer. Let’s try tailoring this answer by putting on a limitation— let’s ask, “Tell me about ChatGPT in 5 sentences and no more.”
Here is what it came up with:
“ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It engages in conversational interactions, providing responses based on user input. Trained on vast text data, it understands and generates text in multiple languages. It has diverse applications such as answering questions, offering suggestions, and providing explanations. While efforts have been made to reduce biases, limitations, and potential inaccuracies exist.”
This is a pretty short and neat answer. It covers a lot of ground and talks about its capability and weakness as well. It also tells you that you have control over what it generates (this is where ChatGPT is different from the first GPT model)
By using specific prompts that are clear and specific in what you need the AI to look for and by not confusing it with so much ambiguity, it will –
Get usable results
Reduce the time and effort required to get an information
Improve the accuracy of the model’s responses
Ensure that the model generates responses that are consistent with your expectations and requirements
Ensure that the responses are accurate and relevant
Improve the overall quality of the research and queries
Additionally, using effective prompts can help you ensure that the model can generate responses that are consistent with your expectations and requirements. By providing clear and specific prompts, you are helping to ensure that the model can generate accurate and relevant responses.
ChatGPT Guide: 10x Your Results with Better Prompts
Things To Keep In Mind While Writing Effective Prompts
A prompt is only effective if it gets the job done. It helps you with finding the answer to your query and there are several things you should keep in mind while writing prompts:
Use Precise And Clear Language
Make sure your prompts are precise and clear. Avoid long sentences with many subpoints.
Use Simple And Relevant Words
Pay attention to word choice in your prompts, use words relevant to the topic you are asking about, and avoid using jargon or technical terms that ChatGPT may not understand.
Generic Questions Will Produce Generic Responses
Avoid asking questions with yes/no answers or very general questions (questions like “What is love?” ) – these types of questions often do not produce helpful responses.
Clarify With Examples If Needed
You can use examples or scenarios to help clarify your question or prompt. This can help ChatGPT to understand what you are looking for and provide more accurate responses.
Break It Down Into Smaller Sub-prompts
Provide it with multiple prompts if necessary. If you have a complex question or topic, it may be helpful to break it down into smaller and specific prompts.
Set Your Own Rules And Roles
Provide it a role, and ask it to reply accordingly. If you want an answer about how to cook Italian pasta, prompt it to take the part of an Italian chef and help you cook.
Here’s an example:
Prompt: “Assume you are an Italian chef. Now help me cook gourmet Italian pasta.”
Response: Of course! I’d be delighted to assist you in preparing a gourmet Italian pasta dish. Here’s a simple recipe for a classic pasta dish called “Pasta Aglio e Olio”:
Ingredients:
350 grams of spaghetti or your preferred pasta
4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (adjust according to your spice preference)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Grated Parmesan cheese, for garnish
Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish
Instructions:
Cook the pasta in a large pot of salted boiling water until al dente. Remember to follow the package instructions for cooking time.
While the pasta cooks, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
Add the garlic slices and red pepper flakes to the skillet. Sauté them gently until the garlic turns golden and becomes fragrant. Be careful not to burn the garlic.
Once the pasta is cooked, drain it but reserve a small amount of the cooking water.
Add the cooked pasta to the skillet with the garlic and oil. Toss everything together to coat the pasta evenly. If the pasta appears dry, add a splash of the reserved cooking water to moisten it.
Season the pasta with salt and freshly ground black pepper according to your taste.
Transfer the pasta to serving plates or a large serving dish. Garnish with grated Parmesan cheese and freshly chopped parsley.
Serve the pasta immediately while it’s still hot and enjoy your gourmet Italian dish!
Feel free to adjust the recipe by adding your favorite ingredients like sautéed vegetables, cooked shrimp, or sliced cherry tomatoes for additional flavor and texture. Buon appetito!”
Conclusion
ChatGPT is a splendid AI tool, but it is only helpful if you know how to use it ethically and responsibly. To get the most out of it, tailor your prompts. Be specific and clear, and do not confuse it with so many instructions, and ambiguity in prompts, that will result in irrelevant and futile responses.
FAQs
Why do you need effective prompts to converse with ChatGPT?
Providing effective prompts help to:
Get usable results
Reduce the time and effort required to get an information
Improve the accuracy of the model’s responses
Ensure that the model generates responses that are consistent with your expectations and requirements
Ensure that the responses are accurate and relevant
Improve the overall quality of the research and queries
What does one need to keep in mind while writing effective prompts?
There are several things you should keep in mind while writing prompts:
Making goals is easy, but achieving them is something else. It takes discipline and persistence to make your dream come true. Controlling a business is hard, and it’s almost impossible to make it profitable if you have no clear direction. It’s essential to have a vision of where you want your business to be in a few years.
Having financial goals is the beginning of the success of any business. With it, you’ll visualize how your business will perform and the possible challenges you might experience. Generally, it’ll help you come up with the best strategy for making your business successful. If you are an entrepreneur who is determined to make the most of your business, this article is for you. It will highlight tips for developing financial goals for your business.
Tips for Developing Financial Goals for Your Business
Below are the tips that will help you to develop financial goals for your business:
Only Set Accomplishable Goals
Setting goals, you cannot accomplish is ridiculous. There is no way you’ll achieve them if they are too high for you. For example, don’t expect to make considerable profits at the beginning of your business. Some accomplishments take time before happening. Go with your pace without pushing yourself too much. As much as you are supposed to dream big, make sure your goals are reachable. Here it’s not about how long it may take before you get it. The main concern is if, at all, your goal can be achieved even after many years. Look at the nature of your business and predict how it’ll perform. From there, make goals that will help you move forward financially.
Let Your Goals Be Straightforward
It’s useless to have a goal that is not specific and measurable. As a focused entrepreneur, you need to know what you want. Have the exact figure in your mind. Otherwise, generalizing things will be ineffective. You won’t have a specific mission to look forward to; hence no progress will be made. Let your trusted friends and mentor know about your goal and seek their opinion where necessary. They can act as a reminder of your financial goal in case you loosen up in accomplishing it.
Make Sure Your Goal Is Realistic
At this point, you know your specific target. The next thing to ask yourself is if it’s realistic or not. Remember, you don’t just want a financial plan; you want doable and effective. Planning what you can’t achieve will only discourage you from moving forward. You might even end up losing focus on other essential things that involve your business. However, don’t misinterpret things-it doesn’t mean you don’t dream of making significant achievements in your industry. It’s simple, set what you believe you can achieve.
Divide Your Goals Into Small Pieces
Now that you have a reasonable plan, it’s time to work towards it. Begin by breaking big goals into small ones. This way, the progressions will be noticeable. Seeing your mission getting fulfilled one by one will build up your motivation. You’ll become more determined to follow your plans since you’ll be noticing the results. Maybe you want your company to be profitable and have the most significant number of clients worldwide. You can start by attracting clients from your town, going to your neighboring region, country, and finally, outside lands. Achieving one by one may seem slow, but by the time you finish all of them, the impact will be highly impressive.
Set Your Deadline
Setting a timeline for yourself will push you to invest the required effort in achieving your goal. It will help you move in the right direction and have something to concentrate on. Don’t make the deadline too far or too soon. It should be enough to allow you to achieve your goal comfortably. Set the date on your phone or tell someone to remind you to avoid crossing the timeline.
Trace All Progressions You Make
Track any progress you make. This way, it’ll be easier to spot places you need to make changes and where you entirely made the right moves. Abandon measures that are ineffective and adjust to workable practices. Continuing with unproductive steps will be senseless, so it’s better to cut them off. In the end, you’ll make your dream a reality. Your business will reach the level you want. That is where you’ll appreciate all the sacrifices you have been making.
The Most Popular Financing Methods for Small Businesses
Things to Keep In Mind as You Plan Your Financial Goal
Here are certain things that you must keep in mind as you plan your financial goal:
Budget
Budgeting is the most critical element when making financial decisions. Ensure you perform a budget analysis that includes income and expenses. That will help you identify any overspending circumstances, pending bill payments, and falling profits. From there, you can know the appropriate goal to focus on.
Business Reports
You need accurate information on the pricing, hiring of employees, marketing, and distribution expenses. The financial report gives you an idea of how your business performs and the resources available. Therefore, it’ll be easy to know if your financial goal is suitable or not.
Tax
Tax planning will help you pay sales taxes in time and avoid harsh penalties. Consult a tax expert to reduce your tax liabilities and help you pay your dues on time. Ensure you find out the exact taxes expected from you and plan how you’ll pay without missing.
Generation of Cash
Poor cash flow can significantly affect your business. As you draw financial strategies, ensure the income is accurate. Here particular attention is needed. Sometimes the money coming in might be more than the investment you made but still not enough to pay employees and manage other bills. Have cash flow statements to maintain your customers. Also, apply for a loan from a reliable lending company only when it is necessary to avoid risking the business.
Debt Services
Of course, having debt isn’t one of your plans for your business. However, it’s good to have debt services in mind where you can seek financial assistance. Unpredictable circumstances may occur in the future, and you’ll need urgent money.
A financial goal is necessary for any kind of business, whether small or large. The tips highlighted above will guide you toward your most effective financial goal. Make sure it’s realistic, and work towards achieving it. Please don’t do it alone; consult professional individuals to help you make the best decision.
FAQs
What are the tips for developing your financial goals?
Tips for developing your financial goals are:
Only Set Accomplishable Goals
Let Your Goals Be Straightforward
Make Sure Your Goal Is Realistic
Divide Your Goals Into Small Pieces
Set Your Deadline
Trace All Progressions You Make
What should you keep in mind when planning your financial goals?
Things to keep in mind as you plan your financial goals include:
UPI or Unified Payments Interface is an instant real-time payment system created by the National Payments Corporation of India, which likewise implies that the Reserve Bank of India controls it. It helps to instantly transfer funds between two bank accounts with the help of a mobile app. The most common ones you might have come across in recent times are Paytm, PhonePe, MobiKwik, iMobile, BHIM app, among many others. Even the banks that boast of their own UPI app include Airtel Money, Axis Pay, Baroda MPay, Pockets-ICICI Bank, SBI Pay, Yes Pay, and so many others.
UPI reported 6.28 bn transactions in July 2022 that amounted to Rs 10.62 trillion, which is the highest-ever transaction volume since 2016!
In the words of Indian economist Raghuram Rajan, UPI means the
“WhatsApp moment for banking”
What is UPI? | Unified Payments Interface Explained
If you’re new to UPI or want to learn more about how it works, this blog is for you. In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about UPI, including its features, services, advantges and disadvantages, and how to use it. We’ll also discuss different types of UPI apps and how to use them. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a clear understanding of UPI and how it can benefit you in your daily life.
The UPI payments or Unified payments interface is a payment mechanism that allows instant money transfer without bank details. The UPI is developed by the NPCI and rather than a bank account number and IFSC code, the virtual payment address is utilized to pay through the UPI. UPI offers a wide range of services that make it a convenient and efficient payment system.
Here are some of the key services offered by UPI:
The most cost-effective way of money transfer
Fund transfer via NEFT entails a minimum charge of Rs 2.5 per transaction while the IMPS charges Rs 2.5 per transaction. On the other hand, UPI only charges 50 paise or less per transaction through the Unified payments interface. As such it has the potential to promote non-cash transactions of small amounts throughout India, which it is currently taking up seriously.
Cash-free functioning
UPI payments have made it a possibility for you to transfer a small amount to your vegetable vendor in a matter of seconds. Think Paytm or BHIM cards hanging on the local grocery store replacing the trouble you went through earlier to get a proper change. Think of the lesser time spent in the ATM lines. Going cash-free removes many hassles from your life and makes everything smoother in the age of digital India.
Security
People have stuck with their cash payments because primarily they couldn’t rely on online transactions and card payments as they ask for bank account details. However, the UPI method of payment cracks the deal here. The payment through the UPI does not require card details or the details of a bank account. You just need to enter your virtual payment address this way (think about the mobile number linked to your UPI app).
Real-Time Fund Transfer
Everything about the UPI app is an instant formula. Traditionally, adding new pay for the online fund transfer takes some time. This time varies from half an hour to 24 hours. In UPI, you can add a new payee instantly and transfer funds. Also, the process of fund transfer takes a few seconds with the help of a good data connection, which is very accessible for everyone now!
Cheaper alternative to POS machine
It is difficult to pay with the help of a banking card (debit or credit) everywhere you go. Most of the merchants don’t have a card swiping machine or sometimes the machines fail to catch signals. The machine in question is known as the POS terminal, which is a costly affair for the billing party involved. They have to pay the service charge for each transaction, which varies from 1.25% to 2.5% of the transaction value. This is why the UPI apps for merchants were introduced. You would have also faced the situation when the vendor asks for the service charge from you. It happens in a competitive market. Keeping the POS terminal is not very beneficial for small traders. However, UPI would help you do the same job without any cost incurred. As UPI operates through the smartphone, anyone can collect money without spending time and money on such machines. Also, the transaction cost is a mere 50 paisa, which is very low compared to the POS terminal.
One UPI app works for all the bank accounts
One might think that Axis Pay only supports Axis Bank accounts but the user gets to choose the UPI app they want to use and link all their Axis and Non-Axis bank accounts with them without any limitation. Be careful to choose the app that gives you maximum ease and options.
One-Stop Solution
The digital wallet has eased online payments. Opting for mobile recharges, buying rail tickets, shopping online and more have become very smooth because of the emergence of digital wallets. However, the number of such wallets is increasing by the day. Paytm, Freecharge, Flipkart, and IRCTC want you to keep the digital wallet. Naturally, it becomes a hassle to maintain more than one wallet. The UPI ends this problem as well. The payments through the UPI are as simple as payments through wallets, and only one app is enough to pay anywhere. Also, the UPI does not ask for money in advance. Rather, your money remains in the bank account and keeps earning interest. Digital wallets, on the other hand, don’t give us any interest as well.
Overall, UPI offers a range of services that make it a versatile and convenient payment system for users in India. Its user-friendly interface, quick transaction times, and advanced security features have made it a popular choice for digital payments.
Unified Payments Interface is developed by the National Payments Corporation of India
Currently, UPI is a free of charge payment platform. However, there has been no official statement from the authorities regarding a permanent waiver of transaction fees. The reason why UPI is free to use is its simple and cost-effective design. NPCI has been instrumental in democratizing mobile payments in India, making UPI a preferred mode of payment for even small transactions.
Despite the lack of transaction fees, NPCI has indicated that they would keep the cost of UPI very low. They have proposed a range of charges from 0 to 50 paisa per transaction. This range of charges is intended to keep UPI cost-effective and accessible for all users, including those who make small transactions frequently.
The UPI system is hailed as one of the most successful real-time payment (RTP) systems in the world since it has been adopted in India. This innovative payment interface offers simplicity, safety, and security to P2P as well as P2M (person to merchant) transactions in India. According to 2021 reports, the UPI system of payments reinforced by the UPI bank apps helped in successfully materializing over 39 Bn financial transactions, which amounts to a business of around $940 Bn, which is again equivalent to around 31% of India’s GDP. The ease of use of the UPI apps and the interoperability between them are some of the prominent reasons driving the growth of the UPI industry. The total number of transactions in a month crossed an all-time high of the $100 billion mark in October 2021.
As per a recent report, UPI continues to be the primary platform for digital payments in India, as the total number of transactions surged by 70% in 2022, reaching a staggering count of 74 billion.
The growth of UPI has transformed the digital payments landscape in India, and its impact is being felt across various industries. With its user-friendly features, low transaction costs, and growing acceptance among consumers and merchants, UPI is poised to become the de facto standard for digital payments in India in the years to come.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been integrated with credit cards to provide users with a convenient and secure payment option. With this integration, users can link their credit card to their UPI ID and make payments using their credit card balance.
This integration has several benefits for users. Firstly, it eliminates the need to carry multiple payment instruments, as users can now use their credit card for UPI transactions. Secondly, it enables users to make digital payments even if they do not have sufficient funds in their bank account, as they can use their credit card balance for UPI transactions.
To link a credit card to UPI, users need to follow a few simple steps. They need to open their UPI-enabled mobile banking app, go to the add payment option, and select credit card as the payment instrument. They will then need to enter the details of their credit card, such as the card number, expiry date, and CVV. Once the details are verified, the credit card will be linked to the user’s UPI ID.
Once the credit card is linked, users can make payments using their credit card balance by selecting the credit card option on the payment screen. The payment will be processed through the credit card network, and the user’s credit card balance will be debited accordingly. Users can also view their credit card transactions and balance on the UPI app.
UPI to Reduce Declined Payment and Payment Timeouts
Users of UPI have frequently reported issues related to payment timeouts and declined payments, which poses a significant challenge for UPI transactions. To address these issues, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has set its sights on reducing declined or timed-out payments through a new feature.
The NPCI aims to minimize these issues in real-time by enabling banks to take action within 30 seconds to unblock funds that may have been caught due to failed UPI transactions. Currently, this process can take up to 24 hours, causing inconvenience and frustration for users.
This move by NPCI is expected to significantly improve the user experience of UPI transactions and further strengthen the position of UPI as the preferred digital payments platform in India. By reducing the number of declined or timed-out payments, UPI will become even more reliable and convenient for users, boosting its adoption across the country.
Growth of UPI outside of India
The UPI, which has been strictly an Indian concept, prevalent across the nation will now be also adopted by Nepal. This has made Nepal the first country to adopt the Indian UPI system, as of February 2022. The deployment of the UPI system in Nepal would be overseen by NPCI International Payments Ltd. (NIPL), the international arm of NPCI with a partnership with Gateway Payments Service (GPS) and Manam Infotech. Here GPS serves as the authorized payment system operator in Nepal whereas Manam Infotech will further aid in the deployment of the services in Nepal.
The UPI transactions have been accepted by many other countries too, after Nepal. These mobile-based fast, real-time payments, are now already happening in the UAE, Singapore, and Bhutan. France will be the latest addition to this list of countries. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) announcement on June 17, 2022, the UPI and RuPay cards will be accepted in France soon. The NPCI’s international wing has already signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Lyra network of France for the acceptance of the UPI and RuPay across the country.
The Tata Group will soon be joining the league of the UPI apps, as per the news dated March 16, 2022. The multinational conglomerate is currently seeking clearance from the NPCI as per the reports. The Tata Group might also partner with ICICI Bank, as a private lender, via its digital commerce vertical Tata Digital, to power its UPI infrastructure. Tata Group has already applied to the NPCI to operate as TPAP (Third Party Application Providers) and is hoping it can go live soon.
According to the latest updates dated July 12, 2022, NPCI stated all of the UPI-based applications should first obtain the authorisation of the customers before they start recording their location and geographic coordinates. This system shall be followed without exception even for the customers who have already agreed to reveal their location originally while using the services, mentioned NPCI. In addition, the National Payments Corporation of India also mentioned that the UPI services of the apps shall continue even after the customers have revoked their consent for “sharing the location or geographical details for the app”.
Some major growth highlights of UPI are listed below:
The UPI transactions touched new heights when they crossed Rs 5 lakh crore mark in value in March 2021.
NPCI has mentioned that it will ban all gaming transactions via UPI on April 20, 2021.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed the 4 billion mark of transactions for the first time ever in October. These transactions concluded 2021 at a record high, where it recorded Rs 456 crore worth of transactions at Rs 8.26 lakh crore ($111.2 Bn).
The UPI payments recorded around 4.53 billion transactions, which is worth Rs 8.26 trillion in February 2022. It has almost doubled since the same time last year. Besides, the total value of UPI transactions was measured to be at Rs 41 trillion.
UPI recorded 6+ billion transactions in July 2022, which is the highest ever volume since it was founded in 2016. The 6.28 bn transactions that UPI platforms have seen amounted to Rs 10.62 trillion.
UPI boasts of a network of 330+ banks and an average ticket size of INR 1,730 per transaction. This makes UPI the most popular digital payment system in India.
The MoM Growth of UPI Transactions
The UPI transactions have been growing month on month. Though the UPI transactions declined slightly in June 2022, where there were Rs 586 crore transactions in contradiction with the Rs 595 crore transactions noticed in May 2022, the UPI payments have largely been quite unaffected by the RBI guidelines and the global economic scenario.
Among the duopoly that we always witness in the UPI ecosystem, of PhonePe and Google Pay, Whatsapp has risen to a record high in June 2022 with its UPI payment feature. Though WhatsApp Pay accounts for only 0.4% of the total UPI ecosystem of India, it has registered 2.3 crore transactions worth Rs 4,290.6 crore, thereby rising by 45% MoM in transaction volume and jumping 6.5X MoM in transaction count. The transaction count of Whatsapp Pay in May 2022, was only 34.8 lakhs, which were worth around Rs 294.98 crore.
Here is a table showing the MoM growth of UPI transactions in India:
Year
Total Number of Transactions
MoM Growth
2016
0.32 million
N/A
2017
915 million
2,746%
2018
17.9 billion
1,857%
2019
10.8 billion
-40.3%
2020
22.3 billion
106%
2021
43.5 billion
95.2%
2022
74 billion
70%
Crypto Payments Stopped through UPI
Some of the platforms including Mobikwik, the wallet firm of India, and the international crypto exchange, Coinbase, have been using the UPI platforms for cryptocurrency transactions. However, as per the NPCI statement, it wasn’t aware of any such happenings.
“We are not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI,” said NPCI
in a statement on April 7, 2022, which indirectly meant a warning to all the platforms doing so and an urge to stop them from doing so.
UPI – Milestones
UPI transactions concluded 2021 at a record high, where it recorded Rs 456 crore transactions at Rs 8.26 lakh crore ($111.2 Bn). The UPI transactions crossed the 6 bn mark in July 2022. PhonePe, GPay and Paytm are leading the UPI game in India with 96.47% of transactions being conducted via these UPI platforms.
PhonePe has been leading the UPI space since the beginning of the year. The Bengaluru-based digital payments app witnessed an 85.5% increase in its revenue from operations, which is recorded at Rs 690 crore in FY21 from Rs 372 crore in FY20. Google Payis the next in line among the other UPI apps, as per the reports dated 15th October 2021.
A month after the launch of UPI123Pay, the UPI transactions surged by over 19% (19.6%), thereby becoming 540 cr transactions, when compared with February 2022’s 452 cr transactions. Furthermore, the transaction value also witnessed a record rise of 16.17%, which was recorded at Rs 9.60 Tn in March from the previous month’s Rs 8.26 Tn.
The real-time payment system, which was commonly referred to as the UPI, recorded 558 cr transactions, worth Rs 9.8 lakh crore in April 2022. The total transactions seen in March 2022 were 540 crores and valued at Rs 9.60 lakh crore. With total transactions for the month worth Rs 4.86 lakh crore, PhonePe stood as the UPI leader, followed by GPay, which materialised Rs 3.39 lakh crore worth of transactions. Paytm, Amazon Pay, and Whatsapp Pay, with Rs 101.65K crore, Rs 6699 crore, and Rs 242 crore, made up the league of 5 of the largest UPI apps that recorded the highest individual transaction values also in April 2022, along with being the most popular UPI apps of the month.
Fast forward to August 8, 2022 reports, PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm command a whoping 96.47% of the UPI transactions done in the month of July 2022. Here, PhonePe led the other UPI platforms with 47.67% of transactions, followed by Google Pay’s 33.9% and Paytm’s 14.87% shares of the UPI market in transaction count.
UPI Transaction Count in July 2022
Launch of UPI123Pay for the Feature Phone Users
As per the recent surveys, 74 crore mobile users have smartphones while the others out of 118 crore mobile users have feature phones, which are designed for voice calling and texting. This reveals that a significant portion of Indian mobile users uses feature phones. The UPI facility has certainly extended a whole new era of convenient bank account transactions merging multiple banks under one phone number so much so that the RBI thinks that the UPI should also be extended to feature phone users. This is the reason why the Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das, has launched UPI for feature phone users, who can use the UPI facility without the need for the internet, which will help over 400 mn feature phone users use the homegrown payments network of India.
UPI, which was easily available to date for smartphone owners and the users of smartphones, was available only via the complicated method of USSD for the others will now be easily accessible with the launch of UPI123Pay on March 8, 2022.
While with the earlier Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) mode, the feature phone users had to dial *99#, which brought a set of menus before and initiated transactions, the new method will be easier and more cost-effective than the USSD method, which involved numerous chargeable messages.
There are 4 different technologies that will be used in this newly christened method of UPI123Pay. These are:
IVR – The Interactive Voice Response or IVR numbers stand at the core of this process where the users can dial a number and start a secured call from their feature phones. After registering themselves, they can then start their financial transactions without the internet.
Apps – The users can also use apps on their feature phones where they can avail of a wide range of UPI functions, which will help them proceed with the kind of UPI transactions they like, excluding the scan and pay transaction, the work for which is currently in progress.
Proximity Sound-based – Another method that the feature phone users can use involves proximity sound-based technology. This technology relies on sound waves to enable networking. This eventually helps them perform contactless offline and proximity data communication on any device.
Missed calls – The final method that the feature phone users can avail of is the Indian missed call approach. In this method, the users will receive a callback from a standard number, which will let them authenticate and make their transactions smoothly.
Since the launch of UPI123Pay on March 8, 2022, more than 37K users have joined the new initiative and 21,833 successful transactions have happened via the same, as per the written reply received from the Minister of State for Finance, Bhagwat K Karad.
Real-Time Payment Dispute Resolution System
NPCI is planning to launch a real-time payment dispute resolution system for the UPI ecosystem. While announcing the upcoming rollout of the feature, NPCI MD and CEO Dilip Asbe mentioned that the all-new dispute resolution system would remove 80-90% of payment failures in real-time. This feature is all set to be rolled out in September 2022.
DigiSaathi
NPCI or the National Payments Commission of India launched DigiSaathi in India along with UPI123Pay, which is the phone’s feature for real-time payments through UPI. DigiSaathi was brought in as a 24×7 helpline for the UPI123Pay, which will provide them with information on digital payments products and services. This DigiSaathi has been further made available by the NPCI for the users on Whatsapp. DigiSaathi, when it was launched in March 2021, was only available for the users via calling at 14431 and 1800-891-3333, but now they can simply text +91-892-891-3333 to access the same helpline.
The UPI apps are the apps that are designed to follow the UPI mode transactions and are primarily designed to focus on the same. There are several UPI apps that have gained popularity in India due to their ease of use, security, and convenience.
Here are some of the most prominent UPI apps:
PhonePe – This UPI app is owned by Flipkart and has gained popularity due to its ease of use and seamless transactions. It also offers cashback and discounts on various transactions.
Google Pay – This app was formerly known as Google Tez and is one of the most popular UPI apps in India. It allows users to transfer money directly from their bank accounts and has several features such as bill payments, mobile recharges, and more.
BharatPe – BharatPe was founded in 2018 in India. The company offers a range of digital payment solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to accept payments from customers using UPI, debit/credit cards, and more.
BHIM – BHIM is a UPI app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). It allows users to transfer money between bank accounts and has features such as bill payments, balance inquiry, and more.
Amazon Pay – Amazon Pay is a digital wallet service offered by Amazon that allows users to make UPI payments, recharge their mobile phones, pay bills, and more. It also offers cashback and discounts on various transactions.
Whatsapp Pay – WhatsApp Pay was launched in India in 2020. The service allows WhatsApp users in India to send and receive money from their contacts directly within the app.
If you haven’t already started using a UPI app or a Unified Payments Portal (UPI), then it is not something really difficult.
So, if you are wondering about “how to pay using UPI?” then you need not worry!
Here first, you will be needing to register yourself and create a unique UPI ID/VPA. You can register for UPI before using the payments system with the help of any UPI-enabled bank mobile application or third-party application. After the registration is done, you can then start using UPI to send and receive payments. Here are some easy steps to guide you with the process:
Step 1: You need to install either the UPI app or your banking UPI app from Google Play Store or Apple App Store.
Step 2: Then, you need to choose your preferred language, verify your mobile number and eventually select your bank account.
Step 3: Now, you need to create your profile by typing in the basic details like your name, virtual ID, password, and more. This virtual ID that you will create here will stand as your payment address.
Step 4: Next, you will need to go to the option that says Add/Link/Manage Bank Account on the app, and proceed with linking your bank and account number with the virtual ID that you have created in the previous step.
Step 5: After that, you need to create your MPIN (Mobile Personal Identification Number), which is a security code that will be asked every single time you want to continue with a UPI transaction.
Step 6: You would now be successfully registered.
UPI – UPI App Transaction Limit
The NPCI has maintained that while there is no daily limit on the number of transactions, the maximum amount of fund transfer that is possible per day is 1 lac Rupees only. This means that you can pay multiple times to different payees every day, which makes going cash-free a reality. However, when it comes to the BHIM app money transfer limit, then the app allows you to send/receive Rs 40,000 per transaction and Rs 40,000 per day.
Some UPI apps like SBI Pay and WhatsApp Money only allow 20 transactions per day which are also enough for regular use in the everyday life of the users.
UPI – Upcoming Features
UPI Features | Authorized Transactions | Authentication
In the digital world, everyday people are solving new problems through online methods. UPI has identified the opportunities to relieve the users even further and will most likely come up with these improvements in their newer versions.
Pre-Authorized Transactions
Forgetting to pay your bills can be penalized at times and cause you unnecessary trouble. In the UPI, one can pre-authorize the app to draw money for the selected items directly from the bank account before the due dates. This system would also work for EMIs and other bill payments. One would have the ease to customize as per the needs and also put a monthly cap on the automatic payments.
Biometric Authentication
Just like your smartphone unlocks itself through your fingerprint, the UPI app is set to be ‘smarter’. This technology would work on phones which can capture fingerprints or high-quality iris images. The biometric authentication would end the need for MPIN during UPI money transfers.
Error Resolve
As of now, the UPI gives an error if the same mobile number is linked to multiple people’s bank accounts. Commonly, the same mobile number is registered to the account of the husband and wife. The UPI would resolve this problem in the next version of UPI.
UPI – Advantages
UPI (Unified Payments Interface) has several advantages that make it a popular mode of digital payments in India. Here are some of the key advantages of using UPI:
One of the major advantages of UPI is that it is fast, hassle-free, and the cheapest way of money transfer.
UPI is also very fast and a safe medium, while you only need a UPI ID for carrying out a transaction.
It is easy to use as it only requires a single click authentication that involves only two factors.
The user can easily link all their accounts to one ID on the UPI app.
You also have an option of scanning with a QR code to make online and offline purchases.
If the user owns a business, he/she can get payments from clients through this app’s option of collecting payments.
While making payments on UPI, the user does not have to pay any charges as it is free by the Government.
You also get exciting cashback offers.
UPI – Disadvantages
While UPI has several advantages, there are also a few potential disadvantages of UPI system. Here are some of the key drawbacks of UPI:
Sometimes, there can be delays in payments, it takes up to 48 hours for the money to get back to your bank account.
The UPI money transfer limit is currently Rs 100,000, which you can send to anyone through the mobile app.
The UPI pin only consists of four to six digits, which should be elongated for more security.
Another major disadvantage of UPI is that it is very slow in making payments sometimes, but that can be avoided by using faster internet services.
While UPI is gaining popularity in India, it may not be accessible to everyone. Users need to have a bank account and a smartphone with a compatible UPI app to use the service.
Overall, while UPI has several advantages, it is important to be aware of these potential disadvantages of UPI before using the system. By understanding the limitations of UPI, users can make informed decisions about when and how to use this payment system.
UPI – Challenges
The UPI apps and the sector, as a whole, have faced many challenges already overcoming which it is treading on the path of glory. One of the major challenges of the UPI industry was when the world witnessed one of the most dreadful diseases of modern times in the form of the coronavirus pandemic.
Due to the lockdown imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19, UPI has recorded transactions of less than one billion for the month of April after 12 months of constant growth. This is the first time in the past seven months that UPI volume went below the one billion mark. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI has registered 0.99 billion transactions amounting to Rs 1,51,140 crore(Rs 1.51 trillion).
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an RBI-regulated entity. UPI can be used through various apps like Google Pay and PhonePe to make direct payments from one bank account to another.
The lockdown imposed by the government due to COVID-19 has caused everything to shut down or be just semi-operational. The coronavirus outbreak has devasted many sectors of human life, let it be the financial sector, industrial sector, etc. resulting in an economic crisis. Yet, India’s success with a unified payments interface (UPI) has continued to bring essential services to consumers amid the lockdown as well.
Though the government was able to transfer the relief money through UPI in the bank accounts of crores of Indians, UPI witnessed a 20.8% drop in volume and a 26.7% fall in value as compared to the month before. As corona effect, UPI had registered a little drop in payments volume in March resulting from 1.25 billion transactions worth Rs 2,06,462 crore or Rs 2.06 trillion.
Moreover, along with UPI, NPCI’s real-time payments service IMPS has also registered a sharp fall in volume as well as the value of transactions. In April, IMPS processed 122.47 million payments worth Rs 1,21,140.79 crore which is almost half of the previous month. In the previous month i.e. March, the figure was 216.82 million transactions worth Rs 2,01,961.70 crore.
The decline is shocking as in February 2020, the RBI governor, Shaktikanta Das, highlighted that digital payments accounted for almost 97% of the daily payment system transactions in terms of volume. He also mentioned that digital payments had accelerated by 50% in terms of volume in the last five years.
However, UPI body NPCI’s CEO Dilip Asbe said, “For the last five years, the number of transactions of UPI has been growing continuously month-on-month. But now there has been a slight drop in the volume due to the lockdown. The drop in volumes is due to near-zero restricted spends such as on e-commerce, travel, and similar online platforms. We expect volumes to pick up soon.”
Reasons behind the drop in transactions
It was anticipated that a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic would affect the digital payment volumes. However, financial experts were assured that digital payments will not get affected adversely but rather continue to grow as people would rely on digital transactions to avoid physical contact.
During the initial days of the lockdown, e-commerce, food tech, grocery as well as other online platforms were unable to operate. This led to a gradual fall in transactions but later the government allowed essential services to continue. Moreover, payments to PM-CARES via UPI have been the driving force behind UPI’s growth, which is still a 20.8% drop and these numbers are only in a few million.
Yet, transactions did not come back to normal as the government only allowed transactions on essentials. Hence, a majority of e-commerce services are still waiting for government orders. Soon, the government is likely to relax the norms for e-commerce platforms and allow them to deliver non-essential goods as well.
According to payment gateway Razorpay’s digital transaction report, for the month of April, the transactions in logistics have dropped by 96%, the travel sector has declined by 87%, food, and beverage by 68%, and groceries by 54%. In the last 30 days, transactions in cities like Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and Chennai took a hit of 43%, 32%, and 25% respectively. The report recorded transactions between when the lockdown was announced.
Razorpay’s report also stated that UPI emerged as the most popular digital payment method from March 24 to April 23, with 43% of the total transactions during the period. It was followed by card payments with 39% and net banking with 10%. However, compared to the previous month, transactions through UPI declined by 37%, cards by 30%, and net banking by 28%.
Steps taken to deal with the drop
Though the situation worsened throughout the lockdown, NPCI seemed prepared to handle the lockdown. CEO Dilip Asbe said that NPCI can have multiple sessions and had a spare capacity to handle the demand. In order to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly, around 5% of the NPCI’s workforce travelled to the office.
NPCI has already devised a plan for the situation with due consideration of all the factors. Asbe said that NPCI has received complaints from some businesses about delays in cheque clearing. He added that there could be issues on the last mile. “While we are in touch with banks, there might be some issues with uploading because of the lockdown. These issues might be hard to resolve now as most of the workforce isn’t available now,” said he. However, Asbe also mentioned that the main objective there was to keep employees safe. If they are safe, the operations can be managed. “There are things we cannot disclose, but there is enough backup in case something goes wrong,” he added,
The government also used the UPI technology for facilitating the transfer of money in the bank accounts of beneficiaries within a day under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY). He further noted that besides this transfer of relief funds, the government has been using UPI for transferring monetary perks in various schemes such as Ujwala and MNREGA.
After the success of the implementation of UPI in these schemes, many state governments then relied on UPI technology to transfer funds under various schemes. Madhya Pradesh government recently transferred some relief money to the accounts of lakhs of construction workers. PM Narendra Modi had also urged people to go for digital payment to ensure safety from the infection.
Major Challenge for the Stakeholders
India’s free payments system, UPI is not actually free for all. It is simply free for the users and merchants but the stakeholders have to pay a price for it. As per RBI, the costs incurred by the stakeholders in a peer-to-merchant (P2M) UPI transaction with an average order value of ₹800 is nearly ₹2 i.e, 0.25% of the transaction value. So, for example, if 16 lakh crore INR worth of transactions have occurred in the previous year on the UPI that means it costs roughly 4,000 crore INR ($500 million) to banks, NPCI, and the payment service provider.
UPI – Transaction Rules from January 2021
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come up with the ”positive pay system” for cheque payments. This system is introduced in order to keep a check on banking fraud. According to the positive pay system, the user is required to re-confirm their key details for payments that go beyond 50,000. The user, however, has a choice to use this system.
UPI offers several benefits over other payment systems such as NEFT, RTGS, and IMPS. Here are some of the key advantages of UPI:
UPI vs NEFT
Both the platforms are known to have pros and cons. UPI facilitates instant transfer for free, whereas it can only transfer Rs 1 Lakh per day. NEFT on the other hand allows the user to transfer funds from any bank branch to any individual having an account with any other bank branch in India. A disadvantage of NEFT is that the cost is higher than UPI and it takes about 12 hours for one NEFT transfer.
UPI vs RTGS
UPI transactions are fast, simple to use, and free of charge, and are ideal for future payments, loan repayment, or credit card payments. Whereas the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), is said to be of high value and needs to be processed in real-time, and is ideal for the transfer of Rs 2 lakhs and above.
UPI vs IMPS
The Immediate Payments Service (IMPS), is an instant interbank electronic fund transfer service that helps the user to access your bank account and transfer funds immediately and securely. However, with UPI the user can pay directly from a bank account to different merchants, both online and offline, without the hassle of typing your credit card details, IFSC code, or wallet passcodes.
Conclusion
UPI is a game-changing payment system that has made digital payments accessible and affordable for millions of people in India. Its ease of use, low cost, and instant transfer capabilities have made it the preferred payment option for individuals and businesses alike, and it is set to revolutionize the way people make payments in India for years to come.
With all the knowledge of UPIs, it is safe to say that people are encouraged to take a step toward going cash-free. Many other improvements are expected in the newer updates so it would not hurt to make the shift and keep up with the new digital times of managing funds.
FAQs
What is the use of UPI?
UPI or Unified Payments Interface is an instant real-time payment system created by National Payments Corporation India, which likewise implies that the Reserve Bank of India controls it.
What are the services of UPI?
The services of UPI are Cash-free functioning, Security, Real-Time Fund Transfer, a Cheaper Alternative to POS machines, and One UPI app that works for all bank accounts.
What is the Unified Payment Interface meaning?
Unified Payment Interface refers to a system that empowers the users with multiple bank accounts under a single mobile application for effective transactions. It is an all-in-one interface for payments, hence “unified”.
What are the charges for UPI?
UPI is free of charge at present. However, at the meeting of banks with NPCI on February 14, 2020, it has been decided that UPI transactions are free for up to 20 transactions per person.
What is the current UPI transfer limit?
Currently, the UPI transfer limit is set to Rs 1 lakh, as decided by the NPCI.
Can the UPI app for the current account be used?
The UPI app for current accounts can easily be used both by merchants and consumers and they work just as well as the UPI for savings accounts.
What are UPI transaction charges?
At present, the UPI transfer limit per UPI transaction is ₹1 Lakh.
Is UPI safe?
Yes, UPI is safe and secure as it has a number of measures that ensure its safety.
Is a debit card necessary for UPI?
Yes, the debit card is mandatory to set the UPI pin.
How to use UPI to transfer money?
UPI can easily be used to transfer money, in which a user needs to have his/her bank account connected along with a working UPI ID and a phone number that is linked with the bank account.
No, UPI is a domestic payment system and can only be used to transfer money within India.
Which banks support UPI?
Most major banks in India support UPI, including State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and others.
How does UPI work?
UPI allows users to link their bank accounts to a mobile app and make payments directly from their account. Users can transfer money to other bank accounts by using the recipient’s UPI ID or mobile number.
What should I do if my UPI transaction fails?
If your UPI transaction fails, you can try again after a few minutes. If the problem persists, you can contact your bank’s customer service for assistance.
Can I link multiple bank accounts to UPI?
Yes, you can link multiple bank accounts to UPI. You can switch between accounts while making payments or choose a default account for transactions.
Is there any disadvantages of UPI?
Yes, there are some disadvantages of UPI. It requires a stable internet connection and a smartphone to make transactions, and it may not be widely accepted in all merchants and stores.
Avantika Bhardwaj
