Retail & Telecom : How Similiar !

..here's something not many of us would have realised ,or may have realised ,anyways its interesting to note there are a lot of similarities between Telecom and Retail Business , wondering what is that , here is the connexion ...

Traffic & Walkins :Telecom business depends upon something termed as Traffic ,which basically gives the usage of the consumers on your network , usually measured in terms of Minutes of usages ( Mou's ) , the same traffic is measured as Walk ins ,in retail ,which is nothing but the number of customers that have walked in your store in a particular measurement period .Both traffic and walkins are lifelines for the respective businesses.

ARPU & CMS : In Telecom the average revenue that a sub on your network has generated in a month is termed as ARPU ( Average Revenue per user ) , gives a good picture of the the quality of your subscribers ,base obviously higher arpus are better , so how does it happen ..in Retail well this gets measured in terms of the average CMS , ie Cash memo Size that a store or a business delivers , this is nothing but the business in a month in terms of value by the number of bill generated in a month ,again like a higher arpu a higher CMS also indicates the store ability to attract high spenders .

Penteration &UPT :In telecom a lot of time on the marketing front is spent on the need to increase penetration of the various services ,usually related to VAS ( value added services ) , higher penetration ideally is the route to take the arpus higher in telecom , what happens in retail , here's is what ..Retail focuses on increasing the UPT ( units per transactions ) per customers , simply put drive the number of units that a customer takes in her shopping bag . Increase in Upt is a way of driving the CMS

Sunrise : Both Retail and Telecom are part of the Sunrise industry set , say along with the Insurance sector in India

Chaos Unlimited : being Part of the Sunrise industry , you bet ,means both are full of chaos for anyone venturing into these businesses from the traditional setups , " initial round of utter chaos" is guaranteed , you need to survive this period then you would probably know what to do to survive!

Telecom Retailing : there are a number of retail businesses that have sprung off catering to the needs of Telecom , like the Mobile store , Univercell , RPG cellecom , etc not sure whether they use the hardcore retail principals .Most telecom operators like Airtel and vodafone have spent a lot of monies in getting their customer contact shops or the relationship centres right .

So hope you get the picture ,for both these diverse appearing business at some moments there seems to be a commonalty , Retail and Telecom have other things which are common , like high attrition rates , huge business potential etc which all of us know i guess , ciao !