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Comment by nutanc | Hacker News Reader

Agree with this. We have a successful cloud call center product Cloudagent in India and it has an enterprisy pricing structure. We wanted to launch in the US this year and we came up with a new simplified product getkookoo.com and went with a drastic price change to capture the market. We removed per agent pricing and said a flat $19.9 for unlimited agents and pay for only the calls you make. We thought the super simple and cheaper pricing is all we need. Turns out, its not. Though we have got customers, its been harder than we thought. In our case, it looks like the second point above, trust, is what we have not been able to communicate.

So yeah, pricing is just one very small factor. It is a factor, but only after all other factors have been taken care of :)

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Your website is honestly really confusing. The design is nice and clean but the messaging is really lacking. I've ran multiple small businesses and I have no idea what "Zero agent rental forever" would ever mean to a business owner. I also had no idea what IVR meant and I've actually built automated message systems on Twilio.

Are you providing me the agents or do I have to supply themselves? It looks like you're just the software but once again the wording/copy made things incredibly confusing.

Your messaging should reflect that you provide easy to use call center software. If you're competing mainly on price then the "pay only for the calls you make" should be a tagline somewhere... that's a powerful message but I don't see it anywhere on the site.

I also don't really like the design on your features pages..at first I thought they were lists of blog posts. There's so much spacing with big faded images that don't make it easy to see the product. Not to mention you're peppering me with that free trial button when I really just want to read what each feature does...and then you could throw me the CTA at the end of the page if I liked this feature.

Hey, thanks a lot for the useful input. Will work on this now.

May I add if Ola, GE, Monsanto, foodpanda and DD are indeed happy customers of yours... that's an amazing achievement that should be highlighted more. With testimonials.

They are very happy customers :) and we have more too, HDFC life, Zomato, BigBasket, Practo, Intuit, HUL etc. But they are all Indian customers, so not sure if their testimonials will have real value for US customers. But I think your suggestion is good. Let me A/B test with that. Thanks.

Zomato and Intuit stand out immediately to me. I would definitely back the testimonial point.

I believe Intuit and Zomato are relatively well known in the US. Inuit especially through TurboTax. Maybe you could do something like "Inuit, developer of TurboTax"

I second this. Many of the people who might have the decision to buy, whether barely or really technical, will have heard of Intuit TurboTax. They'll know that's big deal.

But did "Intuit of India" develop TurboTax at all, there might be an issue of truth because same-named entities in different countries aren't necessarily legally part of a single corporation.

The brand is known, so maybe don't mention Turbo Tax but if you show the logo and it's a real testimonial it won't hurt too much that it's all Indians.

Zomato and Inuit are very famous also in Europe, plus satisfied client always give a professional look and social proof

Since you took time to give some inputs, please do let me know if you need a business phone number. Free for you :)

You should really think about investing in a copy editor for getkookoo.com. The style is great but the content is confusing and writing the price as "$19.9" is highly unusual in the US. There are also common sensical things that a copy editor will help you find, e.g. if your tag line is "Let's make those customers happy!" the line underneath it should clearly state how your service helps make those customers happy. The metrics on the number of agents and call minutes per day are tiny and easy to miss - check out how prominently metrics are displayed on other SaaS products.

Hope this helped, and best of luck to you!

This certainly helped. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Seconding the need for a copy editor. I lost interest immediately.

- The "Lets make those customers happy!" should be "Let's make those customers happy!"

- There is no space after the comma in "calls,IVR," and "chat,customer"

Don't underestimate the importance of attention to detail. These tiny mistakes would have even been caught by Microsoft Word.

If you want to communicate trust I would think hard about using a clown in marketing.

I think I understand what you want to communicate, but it reminds me more of something suitable for marketing a used car sale at jaw dropping prices.

If trust is what you want to communicate it should also be visible in the design of your web site. That means focus on details and optimization here and there.

E.g. you should check how many visited your site with a mobile phone today and see if you can spend some time on optimizing the first inoression. Also remember that users who come to your site might have other ideas on what is important. For instance maybe you should try to give your logo a little bit less prominent space and don't scroll it back into the view because it's annoying. Also optimize the page so that the call to action and testimony now beneath is visible and above the fold.

I would also focus on the value you provide to your customers and not only that you are affordable.

One issue I have with Indian companies are that they are not too good with their workers. I have heard a few stories. So maybe something that would assure me you are good with them, if you are, would be nice to see there.

Best of luck!

Thanks for the detailed analysis. Will take this into consideration. Did not understand the point about taking care of the workers. Did you mean the employees? If so, then yeah, we have had almost zero attrition. There are people who have stuck with us for the past 8 years. So guess, they are well taken care of :)

But how would I present that on the website? Any ideas? Thanks!

And carefully check grammar and spelling on your site. If you can't get that right on your homepage, I'm not going to trust that you're going to get the details right in the rest of your business. Some examples:

- Each comma in a sentence should be followed by a space.

- Each sentence should end with a period.

- U.S. prices always have two-digit decimals. $19.90, not $19.9.

- Use a comma to separate thousands. 30,000, not 30000. (No space after commas used to separate thousands.)

These might seem nitpicky, but they make a big difference in establishing initial trust.

Most of the globe actually writes €/$19,99 and 30.000, if we're gonna be nitpicky.

This doesn't seem to be true. India and China, as well as the USA and seemingly all Commonwealth countries, use "." for decimals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/decimal-comma-o...

Your link indicates that I'm right. Scroll down to the 'examples of use page', and you see that adding up the 'SI (French style)' plus the second box below that yields by far the most countries.

"Most of the globe" does not obviously mean the same thing as "most countries". "Most of the people" would be a much more plausible interpretation than a metric that gives Swaziland equal weight with China.

"Most of the area" would also be a plausible interpretation, but "most countries" isn't.

Its actually the most plausible. If you go for 'most people', the most spoken language isn't English, its Chinese. Yet ask people, and they will happily point towards English. If you go for 'most area' you again run into a problem, because Russia and Canada are totally out of whack with regards to population per square km. 'Most countries' is the happy middle ground.

They're trying to launch in the US. The USA doesn't

If you are trying to launch in the us you need to appear american, one typo can squash your whole business

Also, the term coocoo/kookoo (however you wanna spell it..) typically has a negative connotation attached to it.

> If you want to communicate trust I would think hard about using a clown in marketing.

The first thing displayed was the clown image, it took couple of seconds to load the text later. The first impression I got was this does not look like a serious site.

Too funny I initially took this as "use a clown in marketing" to mean use some guy in marketing. I just figured as an IT guy you were being derogatory. I guess that says a lot about me.

To add to what adambratt said, if you thought your main differentiator would be pricing, I have no idea what "$19.9" means. First, in the US, we always use 2 decimals, so "$19.90" - may seem minor but just kind of looks like a scam otherwise. Also, what's the time period? Would be much more understandable to say "$19.90 per month fee plus x cents per minute. No per agent fee, ever"

It would definitely be worth it to spend a couple hours with perspective customers usability testing your site.

I've already taught my eight year old that this kind of copy editing issue is a red flag when he is buying pokemon cards on amazon. For a core business service it's a showstopper. Also the website was oddly slow to show me any text.

The domain, the pricing, the content - get it fixed. It screams red flags.

Your website is completely broken at higher resolutions

http://i.imgur.com/xw4XHWY.jpg

OT but does this problem of sites broken at higher resolutions happen to you often?

t. Exclusively 13" screens user

No they usually work.

An additional note about the North American market, Copy-wise $19.9 should always be shown as $19.90 with 2 decimals to represent the number of pennies in the price.

For something like call center agents, as a small business $19.90 is too low a price. I have the same problem with Wordpress hosting. I use wpengine for $50+ per month (I don't recall what we actually pay) because for less money I presume the service provider won't care or have the resources to resolve any problem.

This is something we discussed. Thats why $19.90 is an introductory price. We are actually losing money on that. But since our India business is profitable, we are offsetting that for the first few customers. The actual price is ~$50

You should raise the price. Under twenty bucks sends the signal that the product is more of a toy.

Say I'm looking to have a local Indian phone number that routes to the US -- either like Google Voice or Twilio. Do you offer something that could help with that?

Yes, we do that, but not on this product. This product is specific to service the US businesses. If you have some time, please check out our company site which lists all our products, http://ozonetel.com

in us, it's 19.90 not 19.9 :)

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