Activate inoperative EPF accounts and claim your Employee Provident Fund Money

Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), India has launched an initiative to help EPF members with inoperative accounts claim their money and locate their account details. An EPF account is termed as inoperative if there is no contribution made to the account for 36 continuous months. An inoperative account doesn't earn any interest hence it makes sense to either withdraw that hard earned money of yours or to transfer it to the EPF account opened at your current organization.

Many of us tend to not do this because of the tedious documentation procedure associated with such tasks. However, not with the launch of online facility it has become very easy to get your money back from an inoperative account. The government is even running awareness campaigns around it and today's Economic Times has a quarter page print ad to inform people about this.

Interested individuals can easily locate the details of their inoperative accounts by logging at www.epfindia.gov.in. The online helpdesk will trace the concerned inoperative account and help you to either transfer it your current P.F. account or withdraw that amount.

Once you have submitted your details at the above mentioned portal, a reference ID is created that can be used to track the status of your application. However, as a prerequisite, all applicants are required to get their UAN activated before applying for settlement of their PF Accounts. The UAN activation can be done at following URL: uanmembers.epfoservices.in

Fig: Snapshot Inoperative EPF Claim Helpdesk as on 06 May 2015

On starting the process you are asked to submit the problem description in a textbox. Please mention that your PF account has become inoperative and you want to claim your money back and get it transferred / withdrawn as per your individual preference. On clicking next, you are a shown a form in which you are required to submit various details related to the account that you are trying to locate. Please fill the form and click next. On clicking next a reference ID will be generated and you will be sent a PIN to the mobile number that you have submitted while filling the form. This reference ID and mobile number can be used to Login subsequently and track your application status. You will also get an acknowledgement mail on the shared email ID as a confirmation towards successful submission of your request.

Now take prior appointments for Aadhar Card enrollment - UIDAI

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has on a trial basis started the option of taking prior appointments for Aadhar Card enrollment. The service has been launched in a few selected cities at this moment.

Applicants can book an appointment by sharing few basic details such as Name, Email, Mobile No. and the No. of persons. One can easily select the preferred center of enrollment by using the available dropdowns for selecting their State, District/City, Locality and finally the Enrollment Center.

Generally the forms for many government services tend to be very cumbersome but this one is very simple and convenient. After entering your details and having selected the preferred center for enrolment you can select the preferred Date and Time of Enrollment. However, you will be able to select a particular timeslot only if there are any vacant slots available at that time.

The timeslots are available from 10:00 AM in the morning until 6:00 PM in the evening. Following is a snapshot of the form taken from the UIDAI Online Appointment system:

Snapshot: Aadhar Card Online Appointment System as taken from official website on 07th April 2015

We tried to select a slot for Delhi and Gurgaon but mostly came across Available Slots: 0 status. We think it is because the slots for Aadhar Card appointment must be getting booked far ahead in time.

Please do let us know if you are able to book an appointment using this system successfully. Do visit this blog/bookmark it for more information about such services.

GOSF 2014: Analyzing Great Online Shopping Festival as it happens - Part 2

The hoopla is over.
The ho-halla is here to stay!!

Analyzing GOSF 2014: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly! 

The Good: There are a lot of good things about this year's GOSF. Bigger than ever, this year's GOSF - the three day online shopping extravaganza that ran from 10th Dec to 12th Dec saw higher participation than ever both from brands and from consumers. In the third edition, GOSF started in 2012, it involved 450 online partners from segments as diverse as kitchen and groceries to automobiles and real estate. Numerous marketing campaigns not only during the actual festival days but also in run-up to the event were launched by several brands to attract consumers' attention. 

Aditya Birla Money’s finance management company MyUniverse was the lead sponsor for the event with 14 brand partners namely Asian Paints, Jet Airways, Kindle, Micromax, HP, Ask Me, CraftsVilla, Cox & Kings, Goibibo, Big Bazaar, KOOVs, Trendin, Lakme and Lenovo each of whom delighted one consumer each day (selected in most cases through a Twitter Follow and Hash Tag campaign) with 14 minutes of free shopping worth Rs. 2.5 lacs from Nov 25 to December 8th.
Their was an exclusive launch corner dedicated for new product launches during the three day festival. Some of the notable product launches included Infinity i.e. Airtel Digital TV on Demand WiFi Dongle, Google Chromecast, Motorola Nexus 6, Lenovo Yoga Tablet and Auxus Rist.

Further, their was a separate section named 299 Corner targeting first time buyers and price sensitive consumers which showcased products priced at Rs. 299/- or less with free shipping and cash on delivery options in most cases.


Did the hoopla had any impact?

Well the hoopla was definitely much more than just a hoopla. Given the growing number of internet users in India and the e-commerce boom there is definitely room for such an event. All in all, it was a good line-up of products and offers with consumer products ranging a few hundreds to costly real estate offerings worth lacs of rupees from companies like Purvankara and Tata Housing. Going by the reports the sales exceeded the wildest expectations with Tata Housing seeing 10000 flats being booked on the first day of GOSF. Similar was the experience of leading construction company Purvankara which reported more than 5000 inquiries and 507 bookings during the 3-day period. Infact the share price of the company saw an uptrend after the news got spread in the market.

Another report from mobile wallet MobiKwik suggests that they encountered more than 15000 transactions by noon on the first day of sales with rising number of transactions on subsequent days.

Any detailed report regarding the traffic during the festival is yet to be published by Google or by third-party sources. However the number of internet users in India is rising fast. The number of mobile internet users is also increasing at a fast pace. According to a recent report by IAMAI, mobile internet users are growing at a steady rate, with 159 million mobile internet users in October, estimated to reach 173 million by the end of December 2014. No. of online shoppers alone is expected to touch 100 million mark by 2016, as per several estimates. If these figures are anything to go by, India as a country has huge potential for those interested in monetizing opportunities internet space.

The article would be incomplete if I do not mention that India's most popular online shopping portal Flipkart chose to not participate in GOSF 2014. Instead the company ran its own version of Bip App Shopping Days - a special discount festival that ran between Dec, 8th - Dec, 12th 2014. The reason quoted by unidentified sources is that Flipkart had made plans of app based promotions well in advance and hence didn't want to have two major promotional plans running in advance. However, in my opinion there may be two reasons behind this decision:

a) It would be safe to assume that majority of people participating in GOSF, at the end of the day, are regular online shoppers who are well aware of Flipkart. Hence from the awareness and top of the mind recall perspective Flipkart wouldn't have gained any substantial result from participating in GOSF especially in the light of the fact that they anyway have good marketing budgets and keep doing several campaigns all round the year

b) Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale, however big a failure you might call it, did give Flipkart huge insights into the online shopping behaviour of Indian consumers. Having participated twice in the earlier versions of GOSF, Flipkart anyway has a good amount of data and might not see GOSF as a must attend event

The Bad: Logistics! They top the chart of complaints. I myself purchased a couple of items from sites as diverse as established big players to new entrants, general shopping sites to niche ones but for almost 15 days the status for my orders said - No information. The order had been placed. The order was successful. But there wasn't any information on whether the item has been shipped or not and the expected delivery dates. Infact from one of the sites I got an email saying I had the option of getting a refund as there was expected a further delay of around 2 or more weeks - making it a month from the date of purchase. Many of my friends and colleagues had similar stories to tell.

Impulse purchases are best enjoyed when you can start using the purchased item as soon as possible because impulse purchases are generally made for low risk items for which people would rather pay a slightly higher amount then wait for an unidentified time period.

Now this is a big problem. You roll out exciting offers in the market, invite customers to go all out and do crazy shopping for 72 hours - only to keep them waiting for crazy hours of unidentified number! While some may say it doesn't matter as the purchase has been made and nobody wants to take that extra effort of cancelling an offer but that is just not true. There is a high chance of people not participating with such enthusiasm in the next edition of GOSF after having faced such issues. Also, for the sites who are using GOSF as a launch platform it might ultimately cause them to generate an unfavorable image in the mind of their initial set of consumers.

Hence if you are planning to participate in the next edition of GOSF, please make sure you have done enough planning to take care of the post purchase phases as well. Cause at the end, the overall shopping is experience is what will matter the most!

GOSF 2014: Analyzing Google Online Festival Challenge as it happens

Google Online Shopping Festival - India's very own online shopping festival on the lines of Black Friday Shopping festival in the US will be held from 10 to 12 Dec this year. More than 450 online partners are expected to share their best deals during the 3 day hoo-haa.

Multiple campaigns have been going on at www.gosf.in in the run up to the event and companies are rolling out exciting offers to lure the customers. There has been a series of 14 minutes of free shopping offer that started on 25 Nov 2014 and ran up to 08 Dec 2014 under which each day a new brand from the total list of 14 partner brands have been offering new ways for winning 14 min of free shopping to the lucky customers. Use of Twitter in most of these contest has been notable with more of less every single one of these brands asking the consumers to follow their Twitter page to enter into the contest and then asking the consumer to share their opinion/quotes etc. with relation to the products offered by the brand.

Today I received an email from eBay saying:

GOSF comes early on eBay.in | Flat Rs.100 Off Coupon inside | Shop Now!

Folks at eBay: Great that you are starting early but seriously do you really want to classify this as a GOSF offer? I mean my inbox is almost full with brands including yours offering better offers all these while when there was no GOSF buzz. Please reconsider your decision to participate or your offers, cause if this you are spending your marketing budget on GOSF with such offers you are better off continuing with your regular promotions.

Moving onto PREFERRED PARTNER Aditya Birla Money MyUniverse - Guys, the amount of spam that you generate every single week with your 70% off on 5 year plan and Sunday is a saving day on MyUniverse is equal to the spam generated by five online shopping sites put together. We have had enough of it. Please either drop the subscription price itself or open up some new features at the same price. And please, seriously please, do not come up with a new good looking banner Ad (like you always do) with the same old bogus offer during GOSF. Yours is a good product yaar. Spend some money on educating people how to make the most of it rather than just focusing on driving the subscriptions.

We will add more stuff as the GOSF rolls out tomorrow and in coming days. Follow this blog if you find the article interesting!