Scenario
Ram is an electrician operating in the Shivadaspur area in the Varanasi town. His expertise lies in fixing house-hold electrical problems of all kinds, except air coolers and air-conditioners. He cannot afford to have a shop of his own and his business depends on customers who know him by word-of-mouth. Recently, Ram bought a mobile phone, and started advertising his services in the Shivadaspur Yellow Pages. Since then, the business has started picking up. However, many a times, while on a home call on duty, he is unable to accept calls, and this often results in losing new customers and upsetting old ones. One day, he finds out about a Create-your-virtual-shop service offered by his Telecom operator, and decides to sign up. He calls up the advertised phone number and creates his virtual shop as a VoiceSite in a matter of minutes by talking to this voice driven system. He also specifies reference information about previous customers and links to their phone numbers. Now the customers trying to reach Ram land up at this virtual shop and schedule an appointment with him while he is serving other customers. In addition, he adds links to the virtual shops of his friends who can take up the job in the event that he is unavailable at the time specified by the customer. Seeing Ram’s increasing customer base, the electrical shop
owner in his area requests Ram to include a link to the electrical shop’s tele-store (another virtual shop), where customers can place their orders which will be home delivered by the store. Customers can pay through their bank account or through one of the credit cards that have a tie up with store’s telecom provider. The payment happens safely through a voice driven interaction with the bank’s VoiceSite during the phone call, much in the same way as online transactions happen on the Web. This adds another customer facing channel for the electrical shop and adds to the services offered by Ram. Ram gets a percentage of the profits for customers reaching through his virtual shop and thus both Ram and the local store thrive with the use of Virtual Shop
service.

Scenario courtesy: Arun Kumar