The Bottleneck Wasn’t the Funnel. It Was the Phone Call.

TechShopBD sold electronics parts, components, and equipment to engineering students and hobbyists working on academic or passion projects. By this point, the company already had strong positioning across most universities and engineering institutes in Bangladesh. But monthly sales growth had slowed compared to the previous year, despite that strong position.

In 2017, I took a six-week Growth Hacking training conducted by our group chairman, Mahamudul Hasan Sohag, alongside his team from Rokomari. Afterward, I was asked to apply what I’d learned to drive growth at TechShopBD.

Ruling Out the Obvious Explanation

The first thing I tested was product-market fit, since that’s usually where slow growth gets blamed. I ran an email survey, and the results were clear: we already had it. Customers wanted what we were selling.

So the question became narrower and harder: why weren’t cart value and order numbers increasing, when everything on the surface seemed to be working?

Looking Past the Dashboard

I went through our e-commerce dashboard, site analytics, social comments, live chat logs, and phone calls, every touchpoint I could access. The dashboards and analytics didn’t show an obvious answer. The traffic was healthy. Bounce rates were low.

The answer was in the phone call recordings.

Our content and ads were driving strong traffic with low bounce rates, but orders still weren’t converting. Because the products were highly technical, many customers called customer service directly, asking whether a specific part was compatible with their project. None of our customer service representatives had a technical background. They couldn’t answer, and would just point customers back to the product description. Customers who needed a real answer, not a webpage they’d already read, got disappointed and switched to competitors instead.

The funnel wasn’t leaking at checkout. It was leaking at the phone.

Making the Case for a Structural Change

This wasn’t a fix I could make alone, it needed organizational buy-in. I proposed a three-month test to top management: move customer support closer to actual product knowledge, instead of routing technical questions to non-technical staff.

With approval, I reassigned one member of my business development team to customer service, to handle calls and live chat, and to train others to do the same. I also brought our R&D engineers directly onto live chat and phone support, so customers asking technical questions could get real, specific answers, including suggestions for alternative or compatible products already in stock. Then I promoted this new engineer-backed support across every channel we had.

What Changed

Within a month, the numbers started moving. By the end of the three-month test, revenue hit its highest point yet, a 44% increase over the previous months.

The biggest funnel leaks aren’t always visible in a dashboard. Customers rarely complain about what’s wrong, they just quietly go somewhere else. This one wasn’t in the numbers. It was in what customers were actually asking for, and what we weren’t equipped to answer.