The Work From Home culture has gained a lot of momentum lately. With just a few types of equipment, an internet connection, and a quiet room, you are all set to work from your home. 

The idea of working from the comfort of your home is something that we long for. If we go by the study conducted by Economic Times, Indians spend at least 7% of their day commuting only. Eradicating the need for commuting in public transports or private vehicle, we have established ourself into this culture quite efficiently. But is it the right culture? Let’s see!

1. Boosts Productivity

Several reports show that WFH boosts your productivity. When you are working under low pressure and on your own terms, you are more likely to enjoy the work. A report by Poverty Action Lab mentions that remote workers made 13% more calls than in-house employees, thereby increasing the engagement. 

Besides, you have steady emotional support from your family or closed ones, making it a lot better option than working as an in-house professional. 

2. Supports Good Mental Health

Did I tell you about taking timely breaks to help you increase your working speed and efficiency? Yes, this is indeed the case! Timely breaks go under better mental health. 

When you are scheduling work for the following day, never forget to include mini-breaks. Such breaks are essential to keep you going. You can even resort to applications like TimeOut, Pomodoro, Break Timer, etc which reminds you to take breaks accordingly. Just set a reminder and you are good to go!

3. Better Networking

Not going to the office doesn’t mean you have to stay in the shell. Get yourself a day free and set up an engagement session with your colleagues where you all can e-meet and share your lives. On weekdays, it is equally important to make small talk but make sure you are not invading their privacy. 

Building up a network has always been a part of the corporate world, and WFH culture should not hamper this process. Remote catch-ups always help you take one step forward and build emotional connections. And never underestimate the power of an emotional bond. 

Many Works From Home tools and software are nowadays available to get detailed reports and analysis of your performance. This includes not only the number of hours you worked but also how productive you have been on a particular day. Apart from the regular remote monitoring system incorporated by your firm, you can also send these reports to your boss/manager to making their work easy. 

Work From Home is a suitable option for all those who believe in being organized. Life has always been more than merely working and earning. While money keeps your soul together, it is the art and creativity that keeps you going. Work From Home culture promotes spending some time with yourself and discovering your inner self. If we go by the trend, it is very likely that by 2050s most of the firms would have employees work from home 4 days a week. 

So get yourself ready for the much-awaited healthy culture! Watch this space for more!

Delivery-only kitchens have been taking the industry by storms ever since the concept was adopted in India. Delivery-only kitchens, or famously known as cloud/smart kitchens, have been a successful business module in cutting the costs while maintaining the premium standards at the same time. But most of the strategies were to be implemented by physical interaction to increase the sales and engagement that have been thwarted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The only method to increase engagement and build loyal customers is now the internet, which has indeed turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Let’s understand how you can build a network of loyal customers through the online medium.

1. Stay On The Top Through Social Media

According to a Report by Ambassador, 71% of the consumers recommend those brands to others with whom they had a positive social media engagement.

It is an established fact now that social media is a brilliant tool to enhance engagement and build a powerful network. Several platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter have helped ventures to derive tremendous sales through interesting facts, competitions, quizzes, etc. A smart kitchen can avail of the benefits by organizing a few quizzes and other fun activities to get the attention of potential customers. 

2. Introduce Loyalty Points And Rewards

Loyalty Points and Rewards have never failed in any industry. Offering loyalty points for being a regular customer can do wonders. One can always propose rewards like a complimentary mini beverage with a meal and bonus points on every order to establish a loyal customer network. Further, smart kitchens can introduce discounts on particular days in a month to get more sales and enhance performance. Once you introduce these sit back and relax, let the word-of-mouth show its magic!

3. Take Feedbacks Into Consideration

The key to having the support of loyal customers is you should never neglect the feedbacks and reviews. 35% of consumers are likely to avail a service by reading a review or recommendation online, claims a report by Toast. 

Feedbacks, whether negative or positive, are an important aspect of any venture. With negative feedbacks come the detailed insights of where your smart kitchen is lacking, whereas positive feedback helps you maintain the current industry standards. 

But make sure the reviews and feedbacks over the internet are genuine. To ensure this, one can always include the feedback column on the website or the native application. 

4.  Transparency Is The Key
   

While we are stuck amidst the pandemic, one magnificent tool is to let your customer base know how you function. Anything happening behind the closed doors can appear fishy to the masses. Since over 4.5 billion people are active on the internet in today’s era, you can introduce people to your smart kitchen virtually. Let them know how you work, introduce them to your team, and assure them that you maintain complete hygiene while preparing the food their tongue relishes. 

5. Send Regular Updates

Do not forget to update your existing as well as potential network about your smart kitchens through push notifications. Along with this, sending out newsletters to localites and adopting email marketing can help you achieve a loyal customer base. Updating your customers about your business develops a sense of trust, and the results are enhanced if the updates are customized. When FreshMenu opted for the push notifications feature, their sales and customer engagement went up to 17%.

Thus we have listed a few ways to build a loyal customer base for your delivery-only kitchens. A loyal customer is the most valuable asset for any organization. With a powerful customer network comes potential leads from the industry. Investing a little in marketing can help you retain customers and can contribute to better performance. We hope you found this article helpful. 

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Navigating the website is easy, but what’s the easiest? Understanding the BTS of website navigation! And when I say this, trust me, I mean it! Being an active user of the internet, you must be aware of the basic backend processes of the internet. In this segment, I have covered everything related to the website navigation process. So get yourself a warm cup of coffee and come along.

Note: To understand this better, I’ll be using Airbnb as an example.

1. Shoot the URL

Go and type http://www.airbnb.com in the search bar of your web browser. This address is called the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Now, this is where the game begins. Upon pressing enter, Domain Name System (DNS) gets into action. Each website has a URL and an IP (Internet Protocol) address. URL is an easy-to-understand website name for us whilst IP address is in the form of numbers. Airbnb has an IP address 54.198.180.40. This is listed on the Domain Name System (DNS) where your browser looks up for it for the given URL. 

According to a report of Verisign, there are approximately 362.3 million registered domain names. Even remembering the IP addresses of 10 websites seems to be an impossible task. For this reason, we have URLs with easily accessible domain names. 

2. Decoding HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Before we move forward, let me explain to you what are the basic definitions of client and server.

The client is your device. Be it a laptop, desktop, palmtop, or your smart TV. We will categorize it into a single entity which is called a client. The client is where you will receive all the data through the web browser.

The server is the entity where all the data is stored. The client requests data from servers to access the websites. 

After you shoot the URL of the website, HTTP emerges smoothly and takes up the task. Once the IP address is matched, the browser makes HTTP requests to the server. A web server is located within the server that receives all the requests. This is necessary to access all the web pages on the Airbnb website. 

If the web server accepts the request, developers can see a message mentioning 200 OK. This indicates that the website has been found in the database. 

But if the IP address is not found or for some reason, the web server rejects the HTTP request, Error 404 is displayed on the screen

3. Receiving the data

Once the HTTP request is accepted by the server, it starts sending the data. Airbnb website includes mountains of data. Sending all this over for once and all would hamper the download speed and hence result in a poor surfing experience. 

To eliminate this, data is sent in the form of small packets that are measured in bytes. These packets follow the TCP/IP model.
Like we have a certain set of rules (or protocols) for driving, visiting historical places, etc, all kinds of communication taking place at the backend also follow TCP/IP- a dedicated set of protocols. Here TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol, which ensures that all the data transmission taking place over the internet is following the rulebook. 

You must be pondering why servers don’t send the entire data in when to go. Well, there is a catch here too. 

Around 150 million people use Airbnb to make bookings, claims a report by Statista. So it is highly likely that several people might be using the Airbnb website right now when you are reading this. Several HTTP requests are made at the same time, which might spike the load on a server. 

To cater to the needs of all these users who currently want to view Airbnb, the server sends the data in the form of packets. If it were to be sent as a whole, chances are only one of those thousands of users would be able to view Airbnb. This can highly affect the rankings and traffic of any website, not just Airbnb. 

4. Additional HTTP Requests

Talking about navigation, the entire process is dynamic and efficient. Airbnb has most of its work done through the internet and thus, it is not just a 2-page website. 

You can see numerous images, videos, GIFs, and other visually appealing media. In order to retrieve complete data, the web browser sends several HTTP requests over a short period. 

Another prime thing to be noted here is that HTTP requests are sent and received only when a secure TCP connection is established. Ideally, 1 Round Trip Time is what it takes to establish a TCP connection. High RTT time suggests that there is congestion or too much traffic on the server. This can further decline the time in receiving the packets, making your website extremely slow and inefficient. 

According to a WebFX report, 89% of people prefer those websites which take only 3 seconds to load. 

Several firms conduct timely TCP health checkups to determine the condition of TCP and how long it takes to establish a strong connection. 

These additional HTTP requests are sent only when the basic HTML architecture is retrieved. Generally, such interactive media is referred to as the Assets file. 

5. Reassembling The Packets

The ultimate step is combining all the packets into complete data. This takes place at the user’s end where you can see the actual information. Ideally, a website takes 2-5 seconds to load all the web pages and attributes. All this information is stored in the cache memory for future reference. So next time you type in the same URL, the browser would first induce the cache memory to retrieve the data. 

Additional Bytes

•  All About URL

The naming of the website follows a hierarchical model.

URL is what you call the complete address of the particular website. For example, the URL of Airbnb is https://www.airbnb.com/

It is composed of a protocol and a root domain.

• https:// is the protocol that is going to be followed. 
• www is the sub-domain.
• airbnb.com/ is the root domain.

The root domain is also divided into two parts: 

1. Domain Name: It is the actual name of the website. Each domain name is unique and no two websites can have the same domain name.

• Airbnb is the domain name for Airbnb.

2. Top-level Domain: This is the extension which follows the domain name 

• .com/ is the top-level domain for Airbnb. 

There are several top-level domain names, namely .org, .au, .io, etc. These indicate which type of website you are navigating.

• HTTP or HTTPS

HTTP and HTTPS are both protocols that are dedicatedly followed by clients and servers while communicating. But most of the people are confused between these two. Let me break it to you today: the basic difference is that HTTP is not secured but HTTPS is SSL secured version of the protocol.

HTTPS is signed by a certified authority, and it indicates that the website is safe for making transactions. While there is no security enabled in the HTTP version of the protocol.

• Cache Memory

The browser searches for IP addresses in the cache memory. There are four types of cache memory. 

• Browser Cache: The first check is done through the browser cache memory. If the website is previously visited, basic HTML files and web pages are retrieved from there. This helps to eliminate the need for downloading web pages from the webservers all over again. 

• OS Cache: If no information is accessible through browser cache memory, it moves to the operating system cache memory in order to get the data. OS cache memory is saved in the system’s CPU.

• Router Cache: Your router also maintains a cache memory. If there’s no luck in getting any data through OS cache memory, the browser then moves to your router cache memory where the minuscule data is stored. 
• ISP Cache: Last it comes to Internet Service Provider Cache Memory. If none of the cache memory seems to help, the final lookup is done in the ISP cache memory. 

And that is how it is done! Imagine several processes taking place at the backend and you get to see the whole user-friendly website in a few seconds. That is the beauty of the Internet. The architecture is quite complex, and I have tried my all to break it into pieces for your understanding. 

So next time someone asks you about BTS of website navigation, I am sure you have a detailed answer now. 

I hope you had all your doubts cleared through this article. Stay tuned for more insightful content.