TechShop Bangladesh 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.
That combination is what made the problem hard. A company with weak positioning has an obvious thing to fix. We didn’t. Everything that usually explains slow growth looked fine from the outside.
In 2017, I took a six-week Growth Hacking training conducted by our group chairman, Mahmudul Hasan Sohag, alongside his team from Rokomari. Afterward, I was asked to apply what I’d learned to drive growth at TechShop Bangladesh.
Ruling Out the Obvious Explanation
The first thing I tested was product-market fit, since that’s usually where slow growth gets blamed. If customers don’t want what you sell, no amount of funnel work will help, so it made sense to rule that out first. 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.
That is a confusing picture, because it suggests visitors liked what they found and still weren’t buying. Dashboards record what people do on the site. They don’t record the questions people couldn’t get answered.
The answer was in the phone call recordings.
What the Recordings Revealed
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.
For the customer, that is a dead end. They had already read the product description, which is why they were calling. A customer who needs a real answer, not a webpage they’ve 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. A time-limited test gave management a way to try the change without committing to it permanently.
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. That meant a customer whose first-choice part didn’t fit could still be pointed to something they could buy. 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.
Digital Marketing & Growth Strategist
