Starter Kit. Idea 303 of 500. Cluster 15
Customer support in English, Tamil and Sinhala for the businesses of Sri Lankans abroad
The mechanism, from the book
The proof exists in Malabe. What is missing is a thousand small versions of it.
The first step
List 30 Sri Lankan-owned businesses abroad, such as travel agents, grocers and money-transfer shops, that serve customers in Tamil and Sinhala. Call the owners and offer to answer their phone and messages in the evening for one week free, keeping a log of every call. The log shows what they miss without you, and one owner paying for the next month is the proof.
- Who pays first
- A Sri Lankan business owner abroad whose customers call in three languages, who cannot staff the phone all day and loses sales to missed calls.
- What leaves today
- Support work for Sri Lankan-owned businesses abroad is done by costly staff abroad or not done at all, when it could be answered from the island.
Ask first
- Data Protection Authority. Ask what you must do to record and store customers' calls and messages.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask which business registration suits a support service paid by firms abroad.
Check before you spend
Whether call recording needs the caller's consent where the business operates, how customer data is kept, and which phone and messaging costs fall on you.
Find out these three numbers
- How many calls does a business miss each evening without help?
- What would an owner pay per month for evening cover?
- Which languages do their callers use most often?
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.