Category : Mobile Technologies

Besides Blockchain, Technologies That Are Still Reshaping the Banking Industry

Jan 7,2019 / By Srinidhi Rao / No Comments

Over the years, financial institutions have evolved with and as a result of the current economic, political, and social forces at play. Legal and regulatory reforms matured, and the technology behind the banking world became more sophisticated. According to a recent study by Ernst & Young – “while the recent financial crisis and resulting regulatory reforms continue to play an important role in reshaping the structure and operating models of banks and markets more broadly, technology-driven innovation will lead to much broader, deeper and more rapid transformations in future years.”

Further a Fujitsu survey entitled “Transforming Britain Report” highlighted sentiments from over 2,000 individuals (including roughly 650 business leaders from various industries) that roughly 50% of finance industry leaders are convinced banks won’t be recognizable from their current format in 10 years.

As in most industries in 2018, digital transformation is forever altering the landscape of banking. While blockchain is certainly the most talked-about technology that experts have predicted will reshape this industry, other technologies such as wearables, machine learning and AI, and robo-advisors are creating a new age of digital banking for banks and clients alike.

As of July 2018, 3.2 billion people globally have access to the internet. Researchers estimate that over 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020.

Disruption is occurring at every level in the banking industry, from faster, more transparent customer service to back-end operations and inventory management. From new technology to new competition to heightened customer expectations, incumbent banks have become increasingly vulnerable to outside pressures. Prudent banks are spearheading digital ecosystems for more nuanced customer engagement and forward-looking technology in order to maintain strong client relationships and retain their competitive advantage.

Overview

Below, we explore how innovative technologies (apart from blockchain) are leading to digital transformation in the banking industry, with customer-centric solutions front and centre.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Chatbots, Robo-advisors, & Voice Assistants
Big Data & Analytics
Internet of Things & Wearables

While these technologies are in different stages of development and adoption, they have varying and increasing degrees of potential to drastically transform how clients bank in the next decade. And with nearly 75% of consumers banking digitally, banks and financial institutions that haven’t adopted future-proofing technology strategies will find themselves obsolete.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined as technology that learns as it researches and analyzes good data. It’s currently being used in the financial and banking industries in areas such as risk and compliance management to better predict and make decisions “beyond human scale”.

Machine Learning (ML) “automates analytical model building, enabling computers to learn without explicit programming when exposed to new data.” ML technology can occur both supervised (using historical data) and unsupervised (finding patterns) to predict future events and to detect fraud, respectively.

Several notable financial institutions have implemented AI and ML technology to ensure they can streamline menial tasks and allow more time to help clients with a more bespoke approach to their finances.

For example, the AI assistant from RBC, NOMI (“know-me”), has over 3.6 million customers and facilitated a two-thirds increase in mobile app usage and a 20% increase in new savings accounts being opened in only eight months after launch. Discount Bank’s DiDi (“Discount Digital”) offers personalized advice and financial management services, along with suggestions to automate transfers of funds to maximize savings goals and to reduce costly transactions in the future (ie: unnecessary banking fees).

FINRA is testing new ML software to detect typical patterns and use a wide net to catch situations that merit a flag for suspicious activity before humans do, by learning which repeated scenarios have raised flags in the past due to legal action.

While many large banks recognize that banking is not a one-size-fits-all approach, using AI to automate tasks and ML to provide more accurate, up-to-date information about clients helps bank staff create a more nuanced approach to their clients’ financial questions and issues.

Robo-advisors, Chatbots & Voice Assistants

Nearly 4 billion people use at least one messaging app, such as Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp to communicate with their peers and businesses around the world. Banks can reach clients with chatbots or robo-advisors to engage clients ranging from Millennials to Boomers through platforms “like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp without extending business logic.”

With technology in voice assistance and natural language processing (NLP) advancing at a rapid pace, banks can harness chatbots in messaging apps to deliver advice, assessments, and customer support in an environment rich with a user base that is already familiar with the technology.

Today’s technology can analyze and determine the nuances of our voices to grant us access to our bank accounts, and several large financial institutions have deployed speech analytics software to enhance sales personalizations, customer service processes, and regulatory compliance requirements.

Credit Suisse has offered individual clients and legal entities a completely digital onboarding experience since 2017, providing a convenient method to attain new clients. Since the launch of this Online Relationship Onboarding program (or ORO, for short), Credit Suisse has seen a 65% reduction in the number of data entry errors that typically plague bank employees during a conventional onboarding process.

Erica, the chatbot behind the Bank of America, helps customers through a variety of tasks, from showing the progress for financial milestones to helping track unnecessary payments and fees that could reduce the drain of their resources. The typical use case shared by Bank of America shows Erica sending a predictive text that outlines how a client might reduce their annual fees while also reducing their credit card balance: “Based on your typical monthly spending, you have an additional $150 you can be putting towards your cash rewards Visa. This can save you up to $300 per year,” she writes.

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Technology like Erica offers clients much greater control over their finances and the sense of security knowing their bank is working diligently to anticipate and meet their needs.

While banking can be frustrating for many people, if technology is used intuitively, banks can leverage chatbots and robo-advisors to reduce errors and simplify signups and transactions for clients, freeing up valuable time and solidifying client relationships.

Big Data & Analytics

Big data enables “the sourcing, aggregation and analysis of large amounts of data,” while analytics is “the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns within data,” giving banks the power to predict future trends and evolving client needs, and subsequently offer actionable items for areas such as risk management and personal goal tracking.

Based on research from IDC, over $20 billion was invested into Big Data in banking in 2016 alone; the amount of data created each second is predicted to increase 700% by 2020, with banking and financial data dominating that increase.

Today’s advanced data analytics tools harness valuable data related to customer spending habits, personal goals, and general financial activity. Digital strategies should not be focused on new UI, but rather on transforming how quickly and efficiently customers can be reached. Advanced Big Data and Analytics tools offer banks access to new customers and greater visibility into their behavior, to be able to predict future financial patterns and to suggest suitable products for their customers.

Programs such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are at present viewed rather negatively by Tier One and Tier Two banks because they are seen as restrictive and a barrier to be overcome in order to do business effectively. However, banks can and should see these regulations as a way to become a leader in the governance of their clients’ data and privacy.

GDPR compliance offers banks an opportunity to reform their data collection and storage systems, not only giving their teams a better understanding of the flow of data throughout the organization, but also instilling confidence in clients that their data is secure. Build your bank’s ecosystem and infrastructure around the needs of your clients, using what data they share with you to create a nuanced, tailored solution to their needs.

Internet of Things & Wearables

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical devices connected to one another through the Internet in order to collect, send, and share data across the web with people and other devices. IoT offers greater connectivity to the existing data being shared by clients and other industries, and creates more opportunities to use that information to improve and enhance their internal processes and external exchanges with clients and third-party vendors.

Also referred to as the Internet of Everything, IoT is the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds to allow people and technology work more seamlessly. While IoT is still in its infancy within banking, early adopters will focus on applying it to digital product enhancements and harnessing its capabilities for financial services to other industries (such as mobile payments).

Much like IoT, wearables have become commonplace in daily activities, supporting users as they search, process, and utilize data when and where they need it. The best example of wearable technology is smartwatches that connect to a user’s mobile phone, transmitting data in an easy-to-digest format. Through banking apps, clients can access their account data using a series of voice commands or simple clicks.

Australian bank Consumer Bank launched its own version of wearable tech PayWear through the Westpac Group in 2017, allowing users to arrange payments, alerts, and other account options hands-free and on the go. PayWear was developed after Apple banned a keyboard function which would have allowed users to pay through Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. bPay in the UK allows users to pay for anything under 30£ using something as simple as a fob or a sticker at select retailers.

Summary

Banking leaders that prioritize a digital-first strategy to carry them into the next decade with a clear path to customer-centric solutions understand that embracing technology won’t make banks redundant. Implementing the right technology offers security, more personal interactions with clients, and more intelligence for issues that arise. With financial markets in turmoil as we near the end of 2018 and consumers losing confidence in large financial institutions, banks need to prioritize client relations now more than ever…and technology can help tremendously.

“The whole notion of customer experience for banks is so, so critical right now,” said Daniel Latimore, Senior Vice President of Celent. “They have challenges like security and being bulletproof — but consumers don’t care about all the constraints. They just know they can get great experiences elsewhere and they want it from their bank too.”

Mobile Technologies

Design Thinking to Fintech: 5 blog posts of 2018 worth another read

Dec 21,2018 / By Surabhi Ghosh Chatterjee / No Comments

Each passing year
How technology deconstructs
Teaches to start afresh

As we come to the end of 2018, this Haiku seems to be a fitting goodbye to the year. Endings are always about looking back appreciating what went well, gathering the learnings and moving ahead.

All year long, we have tried to do good work with our partners, explore and learn newer technologies and also sharing our experiences through our blog posts, e-books and case studies. So, as we arrive at the end of the year, we are taking a look at all that we learnt and shared through our blog, in 2018.

In this article, we have picked the 5 of the best reads for you. We hope you enjoy reading all of them…once again!

Read on.

Mobile Fintech vs Traditional Banking products: 15 awesome things winners do well

Ease of use of a digital product is paramount to client satisfaction and both FinTech companies and traditional banks realize this. And, as we all know – client satisfaction is the key to overall customer engagement, sales, long-term banking-client relationships and growth.

But do banking executives understand just how important exceptional user experience is for consumers? According to a recent survey, banks are misinterpreting and miscalculating the role user experience plays in the overall satisfaction customers have with a banking product. Something which FinTech enterprises and some prudent banks have gotten right. However, most banking executives are completely missing the mark at correctly understanding the rise in popularity for fintech products.

In this article, we will show a series of 15 different user experience features which have reached mass adoption among consumers. In doing so, we want to help banking executives visualize the difference between what their digital experiences offer and what consumers expect. And, hopefully, help them bridge the gap.

According to a recent study by U.S. Bank, 46 percent of people say that they do cash transactions less than eight days a month and 5 percent say they never use cash. Even if they do cash transactions, the amount spent is on the lower side. Most people keep less than $50 cash in their wallet. While for smaller transaction values cash remains the predominant mode of payment, spending through digital payment modes are on the rise.

It is predicted that by 2025, the overall spending through digital wallets will have increased by ten folds!

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In this ebook, we outline how digital payments have evolved over the years, the current state of the industry and what lies in the future.

Digital Transformation is imperative for all businesses. However, Digital Transformation will look different for different companies. At Robosoft we understand both the necessities as well as the risks surrounding Digital Transformation. That’s why when we work with our clients to implement Digital Transformation in their organizations, we do it based on the principles of a holistic problem-solving framework: Design Thinking – a practical and creative method for problem-solving that has evolved from fields as varied as engineering, architecture and business.

In this article, we outline what is design thinking, the key principles around it and how it can accelerate an organization’s digital transformation journey.

Voice searches and voice assistants have piqued users’ interest over the years. According to Gartner, about 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020 and as per Comscore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Voice assistants have changed customers’ relationship with smartphones from being a communication device to being enablers of simplifying some of our daily tasks.

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In this article, we outline how today’s consumers are using voice assistant and how the retail industry can use voice assistants to engage with consumers and offer a delightful user experience for them.

Health and technology are coming together like never before. From self-prognosis to smart diagnosis, from wearables for technophobes to object sensors for elderly care, from real-time health monitoring to remote patient management, from smart pharmacies to timely medicine dispensers, and from biostamps to injectables — processes, services and devices in the health spectrum are being vehemently explored. Today, we are witnessing varied types of innovations being explored in order to achieve a democratic approach towards healthcare. However, these healthcare interactions are happening in isolation. They are solving one problem at a time across the journey, waiting for the rest to be solved by another. So, there is a gap that the industry still needs to fill – integrating all the pieces on technologies together to create a connected ecosystem.

In this article, we outline, how process innovations, technology innovations and business innovations are changing the healthcare landscape and the need for a unified healthcare ecosystem and various possibilities towards achieving that.

Read more

And a bonus read…

5 must-read books on business thinking for CXOs

As we begin our preparations to welcome 2019, a lot of us will be keeping our reading lists for the coming year ready to grow in our professional and personal lives. As our CEO, Ravi Teja Bommireddipalli, puts it across –

‘’Aside from hands-on experience, I realized that the holistic thinking outlined in several books helped me immensely to grasp the problems at hand and offer solutions.’’

Among many such books, here are Ravi’s top five picks, which would help CXOs and budding CXO’s take a 360-degree approach in solving business problems.

Read more

We hope you enjoyed reading all these articles we are looking forward to learning more and sharing more in the coming year.

Mobile Technologies

How eCommerce Platforms Can Offer Seamless User Experiences This Holiday Season

Dec 17,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

With the hustle and bustle of shopping bags, the excitement of the Holiday season hangs in the air. While customers may find themselves excited to hit stores to find that perfect gift for their special someones, e-commerce platforms must focus on giving those customers an unforgettable, seamless, enjoyable holiday shopping experience.

Online retailers get swamped with surges of traffic hitting their platforms during this season. In 2017 alone, companies such as Macy’s, Square, Walmart, and Amazon all saw web outages that likely cost them millions of dollars. These issues can lead to frustrated customers and sales losses this year and for years to come if online retailers cannot adequately mitigate these disasters before they occur.

In this article, we outline eight tips e-commerce platforms can follow to prepare for the holiday season to ensure a seamless experience for their customers.

Optimized for Mobile

“Mobile is undoubtedly the most disruptive force in retail since the onset of e-commerce,” says Salesforce Head of Consumer Insights Rick Kenney.

Your customers shouldn’t be restricted to your desktop site to find a seamless shopping experience when searching for those perfect holiday gifts. Based on a recent report from Salesforce, almost 70% of ecommerce visits and almost 50% of online orders were done using a mobile device.

Even while in-store shopping, 83% of customers between 18-44 years old are on their devices interacting with those retailers in real time. If you don’t prioritize the medium where they spend most of their time, you’ve missed the mark.

Even simple UX features can make a great impact when it comes to offering delightful experience on an e-commerce platform. For instance, online footwear retailer JustFab does an excellent job of simplifying their checkout page by allowing users to log in with their Facebook account to save time and effort filling in form fields.

Ensure Your Website Is Prepared

You can prevent your site from crashing during peak periods and sustained, heavy website traffic by preparing with a few of the following considerations far in advance of the season:

Confirm (and update) your bandwidth and capacity for spikes
Install new hardware and software
Review performance expectations and SLAs
Monitor SSL certificates for validity and expiration
Host stress tests

Ensuring your company has made these preparations and advancements to your site will significantly reduce errors and blackouts, enhance your UX/UI design, and increase consumer confidence during an otherwise stressful season. Optimizing your site is one of the most critical things you can do to help increase e-commerce sales.

Add a Progress Bar to Your Checkout

Showing customers where they are in the online buying process gives them time to prepare the information they’ll need to have ready next to complete their purchase. Research shows that the greatest drop-off point is at the checkout stage. This simple design feature gives customers a sense of organization and control over their purchasing power, which instills a sense of trust and, subsequently, creates a loyal customer base.

Nixon has only 3 tabs on its progress bar, enhancing the simplicity of the checkout process for customers while also offering other features on the related pages, such as guest or member sign-in and various payment options, as customers work their way from “Add” to “Purchase.”

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Save Their Spot

Customers appreciate small but significant features such as saving their spot from when they last visited your site, should they need to leave suddenly or want to return to shopping when they have more time and focus. Saving their spot gives customers the impression you have been patiently and eagerly waiting for them to return, at their leisure. Use local storage features to track and store unique customer data to ensure a smooth transition back to your site.

Walmart allows shoppers to select their items and return later to schedule a time for delivery or pickup, depending on the items and time frame they’ve selected.

Proper Labelling and Layout

Don’t leave your customers guessing what info you need from them to make a purchase. Make it clear and eliminate any unnecessary information, graphics, and words. Customers read in an F-shaped pattern, so consider what information is important and place it near the top left corner of your site or in bold headlines.

Stats show that “the average e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate” by designing a better checkout process, even for large retailers such as Walmart, Wayfair, and ASOS. This increase in conversion rates, through better page layout and design, means big dollars…of the roughly $740 billion USD e-commerce market in the US and EU, this could mean an additional $260 billion in sales.

Keep the Questions to a Minimum

Ensure your purchase process is simple from adding items to their cart to entering payment details. According to the Baymard Institute 2017 survey, “28% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a too long/too complicated checkout process.”

For those questions that must be asked during the checkout process, ensure that you let your customers know why you are asking, so they can see the value to them if they answer.

Ensure Products Shown Are Available

As a rule, don’t show items that you can’t offer your customers.

If someone uses filters to narrow down exactly the right gift for their friend or relative, only to find out that it is out of stock, they’ll likely be frustrated and leave without purchasing anything…even if they had items in their cart when they left.

Live Chat Feature

H&M is an excellent example of a retailer using chatbots effectively, providing fashion advice based on consumers’ preferences and offering to help if customers find themselves stuck on a decision about a product.

Chatbots and live chat features can offer customers an infinite amount of accurate product details.

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Summary

Retailers should remember that their potential customers begin preparing and planning well before the holiday season starts. A November 2018 report from the National Retail Federation reported that, of the 164 million customers that will shop through the Thanksgiving long weekend, almost 25% said that’s when they start their holiday shopping.

Many sites have compiled a handy checklist of UX basics retailers should consider when implementing UX strategies, especially when typical website traffic is expected to increase. Don’t be caught in a tidal wave of traffic that debilitates your customers’ experiences with your company.

As a famous, anonymous individual once said, “There’s only one shopping day left until tomorrow.”

With the growth of eCommerce market, retailers across the globe are working towards creating delightful digital experiences for their consumers. UX/UI design plays a critical role in creating such experiences.

Over the years, we at Robosoft have created such experiences for global retail brands and its an honor to be recognized for our work. We are thrilled to be named as one of the Top eCommerce web design agencies by Design Rush a leading listing platform for full-service agencies, web design companies, digital marketing firms & top technology companies.

You can see more of our work here.

Mobile Technologies

Enterprise Mobile Applications – the Gateway to a More Productive Future

Dec 11,2018 / By Jay Shah / No Comments

We live and work in the information economy. Information is sacrosanct. Most struggling organizations I have seen, struggle because either vital information fell between the cracks in the communication chain, or good quality information was never channelled through to the right people in time.

This happens all the time in sales leads, CRM operations, customer discovery, inventory management, and the list goes on. This is why we have processes because we want to ensure that information is passed around as easily and as efficiently as possible. These processes work like a charm in smaller organizations. Information flows around quite fluidly. But as the organization keeps getting bigger, these processes start becoming a big overhead. A lot of times, they act as a crutch rather than an enabler. Communication becomes difficult, and often information is restricted to functional silos as opposed to being spread around the entire enterprise.

Consider a large digital services company. When the on-ground sales representative identifies a potential lead or untapped segment, he emails his boss about it. This, in turn, is relayed to his boss, and then to his boss and so on. However, the higher up the information passes, lower the weightage is attached to it. The next salesperson having a similar idea will face a similar outcome. Thus, the obvious pattern was missed, and the opportunity lost. This affects not only company revenue but also employee morale.

This kind of information asymmetry actually gets more acute in the presence of poorly designed and deployed enterprise solutions. The need of the hour is an easy-to-manage, easy-to-access, centralized application that takes care of all your communication and process needs.

We are talking about Enterprise Mobility Applications (EMA). Let’s take a minute to understand these terms.

Traditional enterprise solutions can be defined as a suite of applications that perform certain functions like CRM, ERP, ticketing platform, internal communications and more. These disparate set of applications serve their own individual purposes. However, as more and more organizations feel the need to start communicating faster and passing information quicker, the suite of enterprise solutions stop becoming the conduit and start becoming the bottleneck. Enter Enterprise Mobility Applications (EMA). EMAs are nothing but enterprise utility applications on mobile phones. These applications are so ubiquitous that they can be installed and run on employee mobile phones also. These mobility solutions can provide employees with the ability to enter and read vital pieces of information without having to wait to get to a computer, or without the fear of it getting dropped off somewhere in the chain. This will definitely help boost business productivity. I am not alone in my thought. In a recent survey by Apperian, 43% of respondents stated that the primary goal of their enterprise mobility applications was improved productivity.

Why Do You Need a Change?

Before we deep dive into the world of EMAs, let’s take a step back and understand why a solution is even required in the first place:

To improve employee productivity that is hampered today by either communication gaps or information asymmetry
To quickly identify new revenue channels or predict the latest trends in the market
To increase your bottom line by eliminating the unnecessary costs of travel and time delays in decision making
To expedite processes that employees find unnecessary but management needs for better control and security
To ensure higher productivity, transparency and thus higher levels of satisfaction of employees

How Employee-Facing Business Processes Are Changing with Digitization and EMAs

Let’s try to understand some specific ways in which enterprise mobility applications are effecting a paradigm shift in the landscape of processes in organizations:

An Instant Communications Platform

Any organization, big or small, realizes the importance of instant communications. But only a large enterprise can appreciate the need for an exclusive deployment of a communications platform for the company. This kind of platform can not only enable the linear model of communication but also transactional and interactional models of communication, and is a huge improvement over emails and personal/verbal notes.

A good example of how a large enterprise has adopted a communications platform for its employees is the Ozone communications platform used by ICICI Lombard. ICICI Lombard wanted to develop an end-to-end solution to serve food using cashless mechanisms in their office premises, provide Bus shuttle booking, Visitor management, Cab and travel bookings etc. As a solution, we built Ozone app to host exclusive services so that employees can get everything need at the click of a button.

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This app has helped employees not only communicate amongst themselves better but also better manage their meetings and logistics.

Another real-world example of this is NewsCorp, which has managed to establish strong lines of communication between their 25000 employees using EMAs.

Sales Leads and CRM

Every sales organization understands how critical it is to make timely follow-ups on leads and act on information specific to that customer. No more written notes and disorganized emails. This will help ensure greater horizontal and inter-functional collaboration within the company. A robust and ubiquitous CRM solution helps the entire sales team to rally around information on customers and helps them close out deals faster and more efficiently. A cloud-based CRM solution is any day of greater use and significance than one maintained on desktop applications like excel.

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM solutions in the world. Urban Ladder has greatly improved its abilities to follow up on its customer leads, track SLAs and mine better consumer insights with the implementation.

Supply Chain Management and Inventory Management

No one cares about the timely delivery of services and goods more than the customer. If you delivered on time, you merely lived up to the customer’s expectation. However, if you delay your shipment, you will be branded as inefficient. Having access to real-time updates on the exact location of your inventory (for hard goods) or progress on your project (for soft goods) puts your front-line employees in a good position where they can make educated decisions for their customers. Just in Time delivery models and agile supply chains thrive on the timely availability of critical information.

An extension of mobility applications is technology in wearables. DHL has successfully implemented a pilot program using Augmented Reality in their wearables to improve their warehouse operations by 25 per cent.

Another good example is that of Flex, the electronics manufacturer. Using a combination of IoT and cloud computing, Flex has increased connectivity between all stakeholders and consequently, productivity.

Workflows and Approvals

How many times have you had to stall some critical work because you didn’t receive approvals in time?

The prevalence of mobility solutions will ensure that all your approvers will get notified every time they have to approve some workflow, and give them the ability to do so from their mobile phones itself. Prevalence of cloud-based workflow models have fostered faster turnaround times.

A prime example of a solution that helps track workflows and maintain high standards is the BSI Entropy tool. Some of its biggest customers are GlaxoSmithKline and Vodafone, who have managed compliance and their customers better.

Onboarding and Training

If you run a sales organization, and you have new batches of people joining every month, you don’t want to be stuck conducting training throughout the year. A simple application that stores extensive training material on the cloud is the perfect solution to keep your organization agile. Another use case is to keep your executives and top leadership up to date with the latest happenings in the industry and thought leadership articles.

We have worked with the client to create a solution similar to this for Fortinet called the CISO Collective. This application has helped Fortinet executives and CIOs across the globe be on the top of their industry updates and consequently make better decisions.

CVS Health Corporation, the retail pharmacy chain has also ensured higher levels of collaboration between its executives using EMAs.

How to Select Applications That Work for You?

Whether you wish to develop your applications in-house or license them from a third party provider, enterprise app development requires you to follow some simple guidelines before making a decision.

Identify the Gap in Your Current Process

The first step in implementing a technology solution is to always identify the gaps that you want the technology to fill. Often times, companies fall prey to buzzwords in the industry without analyzing the need correctly, which results in a massive failure of the technology and a dip in employee confidence. Multiple ERP system implementations come to mind as examples. If your company can truly benefit from an enterprise mobility solution, you will know it from the information dissemination flows within your units. It is also possible that for various reasons unrelated to the technology, you are better off without the enterprise platform. This first step, though seemingly simple, is the most overlooked step of them all.

Work with the Functions Who Need It the Most

You can’t solve something unless you know what you’re solving for. Instead of imposing solutions on your frontline staff, it is always prudent to spend some time understanding the use cases of the business unit. A deep understanding of the daily operational activities and how these applications will augment the tasks is crucial in choosing the solution. This will give you a good idea of which features are the most important and which need to be shelved for the time being.

Evangelize the Product

A huge roadblock when it comes to adoption of new technology products is the adoption itself. Most teams get set in their ways of operations are often unwilling to move to a new style of working. The key is to target only a small subset of your workforce and test out the product with them. Work closely with the team to see how the product can be tweaked to suit them better. Once you gain the trust and confidence of this team, they become naturally influencers for the product across the company. Going big-bang with any new change is never a good idea. Working with teams while slowly building up confidence is the best and most effective approach.

Incorporate Feedback Regularly

No technology product can cater to 100 per cent requirement of everyone. Certain trade-offs are always required. However, never shy away from incorporating feedback from your teams. They are the ones who use the product daily, and consequently, they are the ones who will have a more informed opinion of it. Apart from making the operations smoother, you are also ensuring that your employees feel heard and appreciated.

Ensure Quick Technical Support

Though adoption is a slow process, rejection of a new solution can be brutally quick. To ensure that employees do not face technical difficulties in working with the product, ensure that they can readily access a technical support team to guide them through their roadblocks and hurdles.

Know the Pain Points Beforehand

In our collective experience of working in the enterprise, we know a few big reasons why such projects never see the light of day. It is in your best interest to know of them before you start the project so that you may be well prepared to circumvent any hurdles. Some reasons cited by other organizations are – the disparity in platform types and OS types; management of BYOD devices for contract employees; no budget from the higher management; prioritization of less important enterprise app features, thus not adding value to the chain. Prior knowledge of such impediments goes a long way in preparing the organization for rough waters.

The Ball Is Now in Your Court

Every organization might not benefit from employing an enterprise mobility solution. But the ones that might, seldom do it the right way. The advantages are evident; the process, not so much. A sensible decision-making body with common sense and an inclination for collaboration is all that is required to ensure that enterprise apps boost employee productivity in your organization.

Mobile Technologies

How mobile apps are bringing a new era of employee engagement

Dec 3,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

In the 1970s when Dave joined his first company, he was excited about the health benefits, insurance and other monetary benefits that his company was offering him. He stayed with this organization for over 30 years before retiring for a peaceful life.

Today, Dave’s son Rob has shifted 3 jobs in a matter of 7 years of his experience. While he does look forward to the monetary benefits offered by the enterprises he joins, his criteria for choosing or staying in a job are poles apart from his father. For Rob, the critical aspects of a workplace are – flexibility of working from anywhere, interesting work opportunity and the overall workplace environment.

This scenario and Rob’s expectations from his workplace speak for the most of millennial generation today. Millennials will make up the largest age-group of the global workforce and most millennials expect their organisations to provide means of employee engagement.

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However, what exactly is employee engagement? While it might seem that keeping employees happy and giving them benefits like – game rooms, Friday nights, bean bags, etc. is enough, employee engagement is much more than that.

According to Forbes –

‘’Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.’’

Employee engagement isn’t just about keeping employees happy or satisfied, it is about making sure they are giving their best to the organization in terms of productivity.

However, this is something that hasn’t been addressed by most organisations. According to a research, only 13% of employees working for an organization are engaged. For almost 42% of organizations, their top performers are not engaged with the workforce.

Now give this a thought; the top line of the enterprises, who are driving the maximum productivity for the company aren’t even engaged with the company, which in turn is affecting their productivity and finally company’s ROI. No wonder, this low rate of employee engagement costs US economy more than $500 billion per year.

It is clear that low employee engagement not just creates a negative work environment it is also affecting enterprises’ balance sheets. However, prudent organisations have started taking employee engagement seriously.

Over $720 million per year is spent on employee engagement in the US. After talent recruitment with right skills, companies see employee engagement as one of the critical challenges that they face.

Understandably so, because organizations with engaged employees outperform those with low employee engagement by a whopping 202%.

Hence, it is clear for enterprises that employee engagement isn’t a boat that should be missed.

As mentioned earlier, millennials and Gen Z are set to form the largest population of the workforce and their love for smartphones isn’t a hidden fact. Almost 70 percent of employees keep their phones “within eye contact” at work.

Today’s digital natives are constantly on their phones. When it comes to the workplace, they expect their enterprises to provide them with technology to engage them and make their lives easier, they want communication to be simplified and information to be immediate, interactive, and accessible everywhere.

According to Forbes, employee engagement is-

“the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. What we have to realize is that an engaged employee is not just bothered about a huge salary and swanky benefits.”

To meet the needs of the new-age employees, organisations are deploying various technologies to boost employee engagement and mobile apps top that list

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Here are some areas where mobile apps can be beneficial in boosting employee engagement.

Peer to peer communication

Millennials expect their workforce to be friendly, where communicating with colleagues is easy and informal. Today’s employees have smartphones with them all the time. Further, according to an Adobe research, almost 81 percent, say technology that helps them connect to colleagues more efficiently is important to their ideal workspace.

Having an app to make communication amongst employees will make their work easier and also help them respond at the earliest.

Payroll

Mobile access lets employees view payroll on their own time. Access payslips. Raise concerns/queries etc. It makes their lives easier because running to the finance department every time they need access to their play slips or need any clarifications on salary can be frustrating and time-consuming.

HR operations

While most enterprises use various SaaS solutions or their own microsites for managing things like filling timesheets, raising requests, apply leaves etc. most of these solutions can be only accessed on their PCs or desktops. These processes if available on a Mobile app, can make employees’ lives easier by giving them the flexibility to fill in timesheets or apply leaves at their convenience. These critical HR processes are typically housed in disparate systems across the organization.

By simplifying these processes, HR leaders can significantly reduce friction in their workers’ lives.

Internal communications

Millennials not just want to have a job, they want to feel valued and connected with their workplace. According to a survey by HBR, millennials rate ‘being valued’ as one of the critical aspects of being with an organisation.

As per Forbes –

‘’An engaged employee wants to have a say in the business, they need to feel like they’re part of a team that’s working towards a common goal, and crucially, they need to feel that they are a valued member of the company – not just a tool for generating profit.’’

Keeping employees updated with the larger decisions of the organization and constantly communicating with them can help to keep the workforce engaged. More often than not, this critical aspect has been left to monthly newsletters and mass emails sent to employees, with no personal touch. No wonder most internal email newsletters have an abysmally lower rate of engagement. Despite this, most internal communication emails happen on desktops or PCs through official emails.

A mobile app can give a boost to the internal communication efforts of an organization. Using push notifications for alerting employees of news and events, can ensure higher engagement vs the ones received by employees on the company intranet from their office desktop/laptop. Also, by delivering time-sensitive materials, employees can quickly digitally sign and acknowledge receipt of policies in support of corporate governance and compliance. And because a mobile device is more personal than a desktop, HR can actually leverage mobility to get live employee input.

Interactive learning modules

According to a research by Deloitte – employees under the age of 25, rate professional development as their number one driver of engagement, and this is the number two priority for workers up to the age of 35. Providing interactive learning modules and solutions can help organizations fulfil this need.

Having a mobile app which facilitates learning can help employees grow and learn at their own convenience. Further, an app can help in providing an interactive learning platform for employees and studies show that interactive learning is much more effective than static learning. In other words, employees will absorb and retain more information through interactive modules than they would if you simply assigned them a book or an article to read.

Here are some mobile apps that are changing the game of employee engagement.

Microsoft Lync

Microsoft Lync provides a unified communications platform, blending video, phone, instant messaging and collaborative work environments into one space. The app helps in-

viewing colleagues’ availability in real time and select the best way to communicate – initiating an instant message (IM), email, or a phone call.
connecting to conference calls with a single touch, without requiring long numeric passcodes or conference numbers.
forwarding or simultaneously ringing calls to Enterprise Voice (Lync ID) number so users never miss a call.

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Slack app

Slack app is like Facebook for the workplace. The Cloud platform is both a desktop and mobile internal team communication and engagement tool. The idea is to help teams consolidate their communications to one platform. Employees are part of “channels” which can be open or private. They can tag people, private message them and attach files. They can also search the whole archive on Slack to see what messages were sent.

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Engagedly

This is an employee engagement platform with built-in gamification for employee social collaboration, pulse survey tool, idea generation, and employee rewards. The app also allows for a 360-degree feedback, performance management, goal setting and eLearning. Engagedly takes a comprehensive and employee-driven approach to talent management.

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Developing a roadmap

Every organisation has its own structure and work culture. Depending on their needs, while for some organizations the ready-to-use software and apps suffice, others with disparate needs and innumerable departments and locations etc. might require a custom software or app for employee engagement needs.

Here’s is how enterprises can start their mobile app journey for employee engagement

Decide whether to have a custom app or an available suite of software

More often than not organizations tend to skew towards readily available SaaS tools in the market. However, it is essential to chart out one’s organization’s requirement thoroughly and then make a decision whether a custom solution or an already available product in the market will be best suited for your enterprise.

Voluntary vs. Mandatory

‘Engagement’ of any kind if forced isn’t engagement anymore. However, depending on which kind of tool the enterprise is deploying, it can be made voluntary or optional. For instance, while an app for internal communications or learning modules can be made optional. The one for team interaction can be made mandatory.

Choosing between a Native vs. Web App

While Native apps are a better employee engagement solution for various reasons, like their App Store deployability, user experience, and their ability to facilitate push notifications.

Web app is basically a website accessed through a mobile browser on a smartphone. Enterprises will have to carefully choose between the two, depending upon their budgets and requirements.

Deciding on the first Use Cases

Engagement apps in any organisations are deployed from the objective to create additional value for employees. Hence, the first use cases you roll out are so important. In order to ensure high onboarding numbers, it is important to launch the app with the right use-cases.

Deciding on the Content

While on a company intranet or microsite a lot of information can be shared. On a mobile app, it is important to keep the information to what is relevant. The storage space and user experience are critical reasons to carefully choose the content that should go on the app.

Modern intranets have come up with a growing number of new features and supported use cases. Mobile requires a new approach to content and functionality. When thinking about your app content, remember that it shouldn’t be a dumping ground for old intranet or newsletter content.

Ensure robust security measures

While a mobile app will give the flexibility and convenience to employees to access company information anywhere. It is critical to ensure security guidelines, to ensure that sensitive enterprise information isn’t leaked outside. Hence enterprises will have to think about app security inside the app as well as outside. For that first limit the information you put online. Every piece of content created for the enterprise’s internal website doesn’t need to be part of the app.

Align with the intranet roadmap

An employee app can be viewed as a channel displaying the intranet or as an addition to the intranet. What you need to decide is how content will be shared or not shared between the two platforms. Having a CMS solution might be an ideal situation in such cases. CMS system can help in customising and distributing information that isn’t highly confidential and is highly relevant to your employees. This way, content can be pushed to both the intranet and the app, while remaining safe.

Devise a rollout Strategy

When it comes to your launch, the question is whether to roll things out with a bang or to start with a soft launch. Experience has shown that a soft launch is more advisable.

A soft launch enables you to build your app from the ground up with the input of your employees and avoid the danger of launching a much-anticipated project that they don’t like and instead include them in the process.

In conclusion

In today’s digital world, an enterprise’s success depends on foresightedness, innovation and technology. However, using these three pillars are critical not just to connect with the consumers and the market outside, but also with the employees. To do so, companies will have to go outside their corporate comfort zone to design roles for a purpose-driven millennial workforce.

Mobile internal communication is the future of workplace communication, and mobile apps are enabling this change and paving the way for a more exciting and engaging work environment for the next-gen of employees.

Mobile Technologies

Consumer convenience in food delivery – how technology plays an important role

Nov 29,2018 / By Gourav Bhandari / No Comments

Over half of the world’s population has access to the internet today. This number will reach 76% by 2030, in which the percentage of people with mobile internet is forecasted to go from 42.4% (2017) to 99.5% by 2030 (a 6.8% CAGR).

Easy access to the internet and higher bandwidths have impacted a lot of facets of our lives. From renting a cab for daily commute to consuming entertainment content to ordering groceries and so on… we get most of these things done online. Food ordering is one such activity which has changed dramatically over the last few years thanks to technology.

According to a Business Insider Intelligence study:

“Orders placed via smartphone are expected to account for more than 10% of all quick-service restaurant sales by 2020, at which point mobile ordering is expected to be a $38 billion industry’’

It is expected that 1.8b new consumers will be added to the world economy by 2025, close to a 25% increase from 2017. Which can result in the addition of another $500b for global restaurants to share, emerging economies will be a major contributor to this growth. In markets like India, food-aggregator apps are even transforming restaurant chains’ view of their own businesses, aside from urban dining habits. A tea retailer in India, Chai Point launched a cafe in Bengaluru with an area demarcated for food-delivery apps’ personnel.

A typical day in a consumer’s life maybe be filled with some or all of these moments, where digital plays a role:

On-the-go food ordering, offers based on past purchases, incentives to increase the order size, cutting down on waiting time at a brick & mortar restaurant, discovering new restaurants, providing feedback on food & service quality, convenience of a appointed-time delivery, notifications to stock up for a big game on TV, ease of ordering through voice-enabled technology and more.

Food aggregator apps like UberEats, GrubHub, Swiggy & Zomato are tapping into the inherent needs of today’s consumers. Convenience, anytime-anywhere delivery, choice and easy payment options are some of the reasons for their success.

The BCG analysis diagram below elaborates the consumer engagement in context to the restaurant brands and their interaction with them.

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The restaurant business has always tapped into the need for convenience and experience of the consumers. Today’s consumers seek newer experiences that are in line with their changing lifestyle. With the advent of the digital medium, the standards of convenience have risen even further. To succeed, food businesses will have to continuously up that standard and make it more and more convenient and easy for the consumers to get food delivered at their doorstep.

To support the discussion here are a few facts from the KPMG report on “An appetite for change” which outline what consumers expect from restaurants and why consumer convenience is important for the future.

64% – Consumers who are more adventurous in their restaurant food choices than they were two years ago
69% – Consumers who are more likely to visit a restaurant that offers locally produced food items
60% – Consumers who are likely to choose a restaurant that offers items grown or raised in an Eco-friendly way
76% – Consumers who are more likely to visit a restaurant that offers healthful options
79% – Consumers who say restaurant technology increases convenience
70% – Smartphone users who view restaurant menus on their phones at least a few times per year
32% – Smartphone users who are willing to use an app to pay for meals instead of using cash or card

New-age technologies have made it easier for restaurants to know and cater to the needs of their patrons in innovative ways. With the massive amount of digital footprint that consumers have today, there is more than enough information available about the consumer. The use of Big Data can capture this enormous amount of information starting from consumer behavior to store level data and lay the foundation of personalization, demand forecasting, labour forecasting, order accuracy, etc.

Further technologies based on Artificial Intelligence like chatbots and recommendation engines, etc. can be trained basis this huge amount of data captured and trained to customize user interaction.

Companies are developing unified technology platforms and single Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems to enable consistent data flow to facilitate advanced analytics. At the same time companies are using Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) to facilitate inevitable innovations and integrate third-party platforms (for example, ordering through Amazon Echo or Google Home). On the other side tech players are moving to cloud-based platforms that support real-time data reporting and analytics.

Technology is disrupting the Industry and there are new horizons open for advanced automation, machine learning, and interfaces such as Voice – may sooner or later enter the mainstream.

Companies must adapt to and build capabilities on the digital front or they may miss the bus in such a drastically changing industry. If not now, it’ll be too late for companies to bridge the gap and the competitors will dominate the gameplay.

Consumers have already started blurring the line between online and offline dining decisions, and the ball is in the company’s court to hit it in the right direction or not, in order to win the Consumer Convenience game.

Mobile Technologies

How Will the Retail Industry Capitalize on Artificial Intelligence to Sell More This Christmas Season?

Nov 26,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

‘Tis the season…the holidays are once again upon us, and with retailers prepping months in advance for the advent of the 2018 season, the goal as always remains: keep customers happy and keep them coming back for more. The currently crowded e-commerce landscape includes behemoths such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart (to give perspective, Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, and Amazon, at number 7 on the list, had a market share of 37% in 2017), so smaller retailers are using every available tool to stay in the game.

As e-commerce continues to grow, with 2018 poised to be the biggest year yet, brick and mortar stores will be forced to use such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) to keep their edge and outperform their competition, pursuing innovative and resource-conscious ways to connect with their digitally savvy consumer base.

To successfully compete in the 2018 holiday market, brand owners will need to ask:

What is it that consumers want from retailers this holiday season?
What functions will AI & ML influence this season?
What are the factors that brand owners should keep in mind while incorporating an AI strategy this holiday season?

In this article, we address those questions and examine how AI and ML technologies are forever shifting how customers and retailers engage and interact with one another, particularly during the frenzy of holiday shopping.

The Rise of Online Shopping

The e-commerce market in the United States is about $450 Billion per year, and e-commerce represents roughly 10 percent of the total market. On an average, consumers spend more than 3 hours per day on social media, and with the constantly evolving technological advances, search engines and websites aren’t the only platforms to see a dramatic rise in shopping activity. Social media sites such as Instagram have experienced a rise in their engagement. Consumers are more likely to respond and relate to direct messages sent by social media influencers than those sent directly from brands themselves. Brands such as Natori recognize the power of these organic touch points with potential customers, and the relationship-building groundwork they provide for future and repeat business.

According to the Deloitte 2017 Holiday Retail Survey, more than half of shoppers reported that they would make most of their purchases online for the 2018 holiday season. Past behaviour showed that consumers primarily use search engines to find the best deals and compare prices online, but the majority still went to a physical store to buy those products. Now, the scales have tipped, balanced between physical and online sales.

Succinctly put, consumers want more with less. They want an easy-to-use, issue-free shopping experience that promises to keep on giving, very much in the spirit of the season. They want the ease of price matching and to research customer reviews before they settle on which retailers will get their dollars, but they also want fewer choices when it comes time to actually making that purchase, to reduce the anxiety of the paradox of choice.

As soon as a customer decides to purchase a type of product, “having a smaller range of potential products to choose from reduces choice overload.” AI and ML play an important role not only in strengthening marketing efforts through retargeting ad campaigns but also, more importantly, in sending the right recommendations tailored for consumers (reducing anxiety and giving customers a sense of feeling taken care of) and providing consistently stellar customer service through voice assistants and personalized experiences.

There are several key areas where retailers are or should be harnessing AI and ML technology, in both brick and mortar and e-commerce, to increase their sales revenue this year for the holiday season.

Methods to the Holiday Madness

Christopher Schyma, the Director of Retail at Sutherland, is quoted as saying:

The rise of automation through AI will have a much more significant impact on retail than other industries . . . This is the result of the changing retail industry – today’s customer requires digital-first experiences, where needs are met and expectations exceeded across a variety of touch points and at the complete convenience of the shopper.

Retailers will try to woo consumers this year with:

Marketing: Retargeting campaigns:
Customer experience: AI-based recommendations
Supply chain & logistics: Product stocks and shipping
Customer service: Chatbots

Marketing

Retargeting campaigns are by no means a new player in the retail scene. However, AI technology is becoming more sophisticated, allowing you to glean more nuanced data from consumers’ online and purchasing habits.

Instead of simply suggesting that they buy the thing they saw online in one of your ads, retargeting campaigns using AI can suggest complementary products as well, or products that they may need in the future.

Customer Experience

Personalized shopping experiences, both in-store and online, are one of the key aspects that retailers refine and prioritize when crafting their overall brand experience. AI has been involving with this process in small ways for the past few years, but we’re seeing a greater adoption of technology-forward processes. Shoppers input their preferences into their online profile, and the system generates not only a customized profile for them to view but also a tailored shopping excursion, whether they choose to visit the store in person or shop online.

This level of customization saves the customer so much time sifting through a myriad of products to help them find just the right ones. “AI tech is getting so good that it knows what you want—and can suggest complementary products—even better than you do.”

Customer Service

Self-checkout tills and chatbots have become almost ubiquitous in most customers’ shopping experiences. Recent data from Accenture shows that 65% of consumers “are already using or would like to use a number of technologies that are powered by AI when shopping, including chatbots.” Retailers can use chatbots not only in customer service scenarios to cut down resolution times but also in the lead generation process.

Chris Messina, the lead of Uber’s partner ecosystem development and expansion, coined the phrase “conversational commerce”, a phrase that conveys the “convergence of messaging apps, natural language interfaces and brands” that provide a more natural forum for consumers to connect with their favorite brands through chatbots.

The key for retailers will be to focus on freeing up their employees to do more complex, human-focused activities, rather than the mundane tasks that eat up time and can cause frustration and confusion for customers.

Supply Chain

Retailers can also make use of AI and ML technologies on the back end of their operations through their CRM, supply chain management, and logistics processes. Andrew Cross from Brabners says that AI will have a “serious impact on retail [through] the supply chain . . . inventory management systems are already in play.”

Companies such as Walmart have an AI system in place to solve their “last mile delivery issues” that frequently plague retailers when their stock is low or depleted. Richard Cawston, supply chain managing director for XPO Logistics, shares that Nestle has invested in “a custom-designed distribution centre that will feature integrated data analytics, intelligent machines, advanced sorting systems and robotics,” which will enable Nestle to streamline their operations in order to cut costs and better meet the demands of their customers over the holiday season.

Examples of Retailers Using AI Technology

Below are a few examples of retailers successfully implementing AI technology directly into their customer interactions, recreating experiences from the very first moment and giving customers a sense of awe and inspiration.

Tommy Hilfiger used chatbots heavily during New York Fashion Week in order to increase traffic to their site. The bots were nearly indistinguishable from a human, giving users the power to direct the conversation and providing them options on style guides and digital catalogues of their recent collection, as well as offering a “backstage” look of their latest show.

Stitch Fix makes use of sophisticated algorithms based on profiles filled out by customers on their likes and preferences. These profiles then help customers pick out the right items…not only saving the customer time and money but also ensuring your customers feel that each experience with your company has been tailored and personalized before they visit your online or brick and mortar store.

Japan’s SoftBank telecom operations created a humanoid robot ‘Pepper’ that could interact with customers and ‘’perceive human emotions’’. Pepper was deployed at the Ave apparel store and the store experienced a boost of 98% in customer interactions, a 20% increase in foot traffic and a 300% increase in revenue.

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Both The North Face and the Mall of America use the IBM Watson-enabled platform to offer tailored shopping experiences and customized lists of items. The system, “through voice recognition technology queries and sentiments of customers,” can understand and create a personalized plan for each customer.

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There are AI-enabled platforms that can help transform the entire purchase cycle from merchandizing to customer engagement for retailers, like Vue.ai. It is the world’s only end-to-end Artificial Intelligence stack for brands and retailers. Vue.ai’s product suite contains solutions for merchandizing and operations, the eCommerce site and app and all the way through to marketing.

Best Practices When Incorporating AI

Keep the human touch:

Retailers can embrace AI without losing the human values they built their businesses on. Your customers are people, as are your staff. Never let that become an afterthought.

Remember to be subtle:

Customers may feel “spied on” if retailers take too aggressive of an approach. Proceed with care, and remember that the choice to buy is up to the customer.

Privacy is paramount:

Your customers need to know that you have their best interests at heart. Put safeguards in place, no matter what technology you use, to ensure neither you nor your customers will regret sharing their information.

By using artificial intelligence in every aspect of your retail operations, from online searches to tailored suggestions to your supply chain management, you can ensure your customers feel valued and appreciated rather than feeling like a dollar sign. You can bring the human-ness back to holiday shopping…with a little (or a lot of) help from robots.

Mobile Technologies

Software 2.0 – A Paradigm Shift

Nov 7,2018 / By H N Ramkumar / No Comments

All these years, software is largely developed in an imperative way. It is characterised by programmers writing explicit instructions to computers to perform tasks in languages like C++, Python, Java etc. Thus, computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of ‘how to’. This imperative style concerned with ‘how to’ contrasts with declarative descriptions concerned with ‘what is’, usually employed in mathematics^[1].

With the advent of neural network based deep learning techniques, computing is moving towards a new declarative paradigm, sometimes dubbed as ’Software 2.0’ with earlier imperative software development paradigm being called Software 1.0 retrospectively^[2].

In this new paradigm, we will not spell out the steps of the algorithm. Instead, we specify some goal on the intended behaviour of desired program ( Like Recognising emotions in images, win a game of Go, identify spams in e-mails so on), write a skeleton of neural network architecture, throw all computational resource at our disposal and crank the deep learning machine. Lo and Behold! we will end up with a model which will provide results for future datasets. Surprisingly, large portion of real world problems like – Visual Recognition, Speech recognition, Speech synthesis, Machine Translation, Games like Chess and Go – are amenable to be solved in this way. We can collect, curate, massage, clean and label large data sets, train a deep neural network on these datasets to generate a machine learning model and use this model for future use. Here, no algorithm is written explicitly, neural networks are shown enough data of enough variety to come up with a predictive model.

Declarative programming is not entirely new. Relational databases and SQL queries to retrieve information out of databases is an exemplar of declarative specification of computing. Relational database is based on a simple but a very elegant mathematical formalism called ‘Relational Algebra’. Programmers specify what they want from the database via an SQL query and not how to retrieve data from database. Programmers are happily oblivious to the internal organisation of data in the database and algorithms used to optimally retrieve data. Database engines work extra hard to organise data optimally and retrieve data optimally on request via a query.

Another area of declarative computing is functional programming based on the mathematical underpinning called ‘Lambda Calculus’, which predates even digital computers. One of the tenets of functional programming is to use higher order functions, which allows us to compose programs declaratively without getting bogged down by the algorithmic nitty gritty.

For example, consider the below code snippet which extracts the names starting with ‘a’ from a list of names and converts into upper case and creates new list of such transformed names.

// Java 7
List<String> names = Arrays.asList("anna", "bruno","amar", "fido", "alex");

List<String>upperCased = new ArrayList<>();
for (String name : names) {
    if (name.startsWith("a")) {
        upperCased.add(name.toUpperCase());
    }
}

// Javascript
const names = ['anna', 'bruno', 'amar', 'fido', 'alex'];
let upperCased = [];

for (name of names) {
    if (name.startsWith('a')) {
        upperCased.push(name.toUpperCase());
    }
}

Notice how this code involves iterating over the list, checking if the name starts with ‘a’, converting each such name to upper case and adding to the new list. If this operation is quite involved, then it becomes tedious and difficult to reason about the program. We need to follow along the iteration to understand exactly what is happening inside loop body. So, the code is not evident and intent revealing.

On the other hand, consider the same operation performed using higher order functions like map, filter etc.

// Java 8
List<String> upperCased = names.stream()
        .filter(name->name.startsWith("a"))
        .map(String::toUpperCase)
        .collect(Collectors.toList());

// Javascript
upperCased = names.filter(name => name.startsWith('a')).map(name => name.toUpperCase());

Here, if we know the semantics of the operations map and filter, we pretty much know what is being done!. We need to just look up as to what operation is being performed in map and filter. This is quite intent revealing and code is concise too. One of the great advantages of such higher order, declarative program is that compiler also can infer the intent easily and can apply optimisations and transformations like parallelisation.

Renowned computer scientist Erik Meijer reckons this successful conversion of training data into models using machine learning techniques of deep learning as future direction of computing^[3].

These machine learning models are essentially pure functions devoid of any side effects and are based on solid mathematical ideas of back propagation and stochastic gradient descent. As we have seen previously, software paradigm based on solid mathematical underpinning is destined to succeed. The new paradigm is like turning the test driven development on its head: in test driven development we device test cases and then write code to satisfy the expectation of those test cases. In software development paradigm based on deep learning, we give machine the test cases(train data) and we produce software which will satisfy these test cases based on neural networks.

There is, however, one fundamental difference between the Software 1.0 code and machine learning model. Code is deterministic and discrete. The output of model is probabilistic, uncertain and continuous. A spam filter would not tell whether a mail is spam or not in discrete boolean terms. But, it will tell its confidence as to the possibility of a mail being spam. However, by providing large amount of carefully curated training dataset to the spam filter, we can improve the accuracy of spam filter to any desired level.

As Dr. Meijer puts it succinctly, the future of programming seems to be combining neural nets with probabilistic programming. Companies like Tesla have already made great strides in this direction.

References:

Mobile Technologies

How Artificial Intelligence can lead to smarter and more efficient business processes

Oct 29,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

From IBM Watson winning Jeopardy less than a decade ago to Artificial Intelligence becoming a part of our daily lives through voice assistants like Siri, Google Home or Alexa, this technology has come a long way.

Recently in an interview, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai stated –

‘’AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.’’

While it might take some time for AI to become as ubiquitous as electricity in our lives, we are heading towards that direction. And, enterprises are betting high on the technology. According to a report, the AI market will grow at a rate of 52% by 2025. As enterprises boost their investments in AI, the reign of AI is just beginning to reshape and push innovations across industries like healthcare, manufacturing, retail, etc.

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AI innovations across industries:

Here are some interesting innovations that we have seen in recent years revolutionizing various industries:

Healthcare

The AI healthcare market is expected to reach $6.6 Billion by 2020. The healthcare industry seems to be bullish about the technology and is using it in multiple ways.

Precision medicine is one discipline of healthcare where AI has proven to be extremely useful. Here a patient’s DNA is scanned through deep genomics algorithms, to identify anomalies that could be linked to genetic disorders and mutations linked to diseases like cancer.

Another prominent example of how AI is accelerating healthcare’s efforts in saving lives is Atomwise’s AI, which was able to predict two drugs that could put a stop to the Ebola virus epidemic. In less than one day, their virtual search was able to find two safe, already existing medicines that could be repurposed to fight the deadly virus.

Retail

Japan’s SoftBank telecom operations created a humanoid robot ‘Pepper’ that could interact with customers and ‘’perceive human emotions’’. According to Softbank Robotics America, a pilot of the Pepper in stores in both Palo Alto yielded a 70% increase in foot traffic in Palo Alto. Nestle used ‘Pepper’ to serve coffee at its stores in China and Japan. A visitor chooses the type, size and strength of coffee using the tablet held by Pepper. Once the selection is made, the humanoid passes the order to a dual-arm robot, which makes coffee with a Nestle coffee machine and places the beverage on the serving tray. The entire process takes exactly three minutes.

North Face an apparel brand has also adopted IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology to help consumers with purchase decisions.

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Manufacturing

General Electric’s (GE) has created Predix Manufacturing Execution Software, which is designed to make the entire manufacturing process—from design to distribution and services—more efficient and hence save costs. This suite of solutions powered by data integration, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine learning, and predictive analytics, provides manufacturers with plant-floor and plant-wide collaborative visibility of all work in process.

Banking and Financial sector

AI in the Banking and Financial sector can provide zero-lag customer service, improve efficiency and accuracy.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) launched its in-house bot Ceba to more than a million customers. Swiss bank UBS last year launched its AI systems on the trading floor, which analyses the sea of market data to identify trading patterns and formulate new strategies for trading volatility for the bank’s clients.

AI is also helping in the compliance and security aspects of banking. HSBC partnered with big data startup Quantexa to utilise AI software to counter money laundering. According to Quantexa’s press release, “the technology will allow HSBC to spot potential money laundering activity by analysing internal, publicly available, and transactional data within a customer’s wider network”.

AI boosting efficiency in business operations

While AI has accelerated the pace of innovation across industries it has also permeated the foundations of business operations and is set to change the day to day work lives impacting the ROI of enterprises. A report from Accenture states that, by 2035, AI has the power to increase productivity by 40 percent or more, for enterprises.

Here is how enterprises are using AI and Machine learning in various functions for higher efficiency and boosting ROI

Marketing

AI can find multiple applications in the marketing function from search to customer engagement.

Here are few examples of how marketing is leveraging AI

Improved search functions – technologies like Elastisearch are becoming mainstream in e-commerce by populating the best possible results for a search query. The distributed nature of Elasticsearch enables it to process large volumes of data in parallel, quickly finding the best matches for consumers’ queries.
Recommendation engines – Building a robust recommendation engine is the key aspect of creating a personalized user experience. Netflix is one of the best examples of how a recommendation engine works. More than 80 per cent of the TV shows people watch on Netflix are discovered through the platform’s recommendation system.
Customer segmentation is another aspect where AI is improving efficiency for marketing by learning from customer behaviour for e.g. Companies such as AgilOne are helping marketers to improve and optimize email and website communications, by analyzing, continually learning from user behavior.
Recently IBM launched its new IBM Watson AI Marketing Suite that improves the marketing efforts by personalized targeting, improved programmatic buying insightful campaign analytics. The suite contains three AI-based solutions – IBM Watson Ads Omni, IBM Media Optimizer, and Predictive Audiences.

At Robosoft, we were a part of a project aimed at helping a leading US retailer based in Illinois, draw maximum ROI out of their marketing spends. The company relied on senior managers’ making marketing investment decisions based on past experiences with traditional marketing channels such as billboard and newspaper advertising. Even though there were massive amounts of data available for analysis, no data was utilized in determining the best channels to spend marketing dollars for maximum return on investment.

As a solution, a large scale machine learning system was developed to maximize Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) across all digital marketing channels. The system helped in

Enhancing the company’s customer touch points’ data collection capabilities across all web & digital assets.
Determining customers’ purchase behavior across digital channels.
Recommending optimal allocation of marketing budget across all digital channels.

The company saw improved EROI across all digital channels, prediction model empowered marketing managers to make data-driven decisions and also helped in defining the in-depth content strategy to rank highly for the most relevant keywords.

HR and Recruitment functions

AI can help in various aspects of HR like scheduling meeting, filtering candidates, reducing attrition, enabling a faster recruitment process, etc.

HiringSolved is an AI-powered recruitment tool that enables diversity during selection.
Mya, an AI recruitment tool expedite the process of recruitment by providing quick responses to applicants about their application and other information related to it
IBM Watson is working towards building such a predictive model for companies, that can predict attrition patterns amongst employees.

A US-based recruitment startup wanted to revolutionize how recruiters hire using artificial intelligence. Through their proprietary machine learning algorithm, they wanted to reduce the time and effort required to fill a job position for companies. We were a part of a project for the client aimed at developing a robust machine learning algorithm to best match candidates to a job opening.

The matching algorithm that was created achieved high rate in matching candidates according to the job openings, making the recruitment process highly efficient.

Customer service and customer engagement

Artificial Intelligence is currently being deployed in customer service. According to Gartner, by 2020, 55% of all large enterprises will have deployed at least one bot or Chatbot.

Since chatbots can lead to faster but at times inefficient and machine-like customer responses, enterprises are using bots which can work in tandem with their human counterparts. One company that provides AI-augmented messaging is LivePerson, where simple questions can be handled directly by a bot, but as soon as the conversation becomes too complicated the bot can hand the conversation off to a human.

AI can also help in creating models to boost engagement with customers by improving internal processes. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Asia that conducts clinical trials based on various types of drugs that belong to Therapeutic Areas like Gastroenterology, Neurology, etc. wanted to ensure patients have access to a simplified explanation of the documentation given to patients during clinical trials. We were a part of a project for the client which was aimed at optimizing the process & time required in translation from Scientific to Simplified documents.

An AI based model was used to translate the documents to the desired language of choice. Additionally, a mobile app was built for the patients as an engagement platform for clinical trials which consisted of an AI-Chat bot that provides answers to user’s text/voice-based questions on-the-go. Resulting in patients being more willing to participate in the trial as they felt more in control of the clinical trial experience.

Supply Chain Management

One of the most challenging aspects of managing a supply chain is predicting future demands for production. Machine learning algorithms can find new patterns in supply chain data daily, without needing manual intervention or the definition of taxonomy to guide the analysis. Lennox International Inc. is an intercontinental provider of climate control products for the heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration markets use machine learning for their demand forecasting.

AI can also help in automating the inspection process for the manufacturing enterprises for e.g. The machine learning algorithms in IBM’s Watson platform can determine if a shipping container and/or product were damaged, classify it by damage time, and recommend the best corrective action to repair the assets.

Finance and Accounting

According to Bernard Marr, a futurist and a business strategist, –

‘’The key to the digital transformation of accounting and financing is pairing people and machines together allowing each one to contribute in areas they are best skilled at. Machines can efficiently and accurately analyze a tremendous amount of data, they can spot patterns in the data and learn how to treat various kinds of data.’’.

Some organizations are using AI to simplify their finance and accounting process simple like-

At Deloitte, auditors access AI tools with natural language processing capabilities to interpret thousands of contracts or deeds.
At Crowe Horwath, data scientists have harnessed technology to tackle complex billing problems in the healthcare industry. The team used machine-based learning to sift through enormous but disparate billing systems of its healthcare clients to flag accounts with discrepancies.

Challenges in deploying AI to business process

Like with many emerging technologies, there are challenges, with deploying AI to enterprise processes. According to a new MIT-Boston Consulting Group survey, 85% of executives believe AI will change business, but only 20% of companies are using it in some way, and just 5% make extensive use of it. Some of the challenges that may impede the process are –

Access to data – companies need to invest in creating the infrastructure to collect and store the data they generate and to recruit talent capable of making use of it.
Ever changing markets – businesses do not work on a static model, which means AI models will decrease significantly in efficacy, so smart companies will need to keep deploying resources and investments in keeping up with the market dynamics.
Specialists – AI still being a niche domain, the lack of AI know-how in management is hindering its adoption in most cases.
Cost – AI technologies are an expensive deal to an organization. While big names have separate budget allocations for AI implementation, it is the small and mid-size enterprises that struggle to implement AI solutions to their business processes.
Computation Speed – Technologies like AI, machine learning and deep learning solution, require a huge number of calculations to be computed at hypersonic speed. This requires processors that have advanced processing power much higher than what is in general adoption today.

In Conclusion

As rightly stated by IBM’s Dr. Kelly –

“In the end, all technology revolutions are propelled not just by discovery, but also by business and societal need. We pursue these new possibilities not because we can, but because we must.”

The bigger technology players are paving the way for having automated and AI enabled processes. The industry as a whole has to evolve in terms of technology, trained resources etc., the costs of deployment will need to go down for smaller players to be a part of the AI revolution and finally infrastructure at an optimal cost will need to be created.

Mobile Technologies

Is Voice Assistant Technology the Future of Banking?

Oct 24,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

Ask anyone you know: what’s the longest you’ve had to stand in line at your bank? Chances are high that you’ll hear a number of stories detailing long, frustrating experiences at their bank that left them feeling irked and ignored the longer they stood there.

Banks and financial institutions have a unique opportunity to use technology to create a tailored approach using empathy and automation for the delicate and sensitive nature of finance. And this begins with how users search for information to meet their specific needs.

Over 50 percent of users do at least one voice search online per day. Experts estimate that the current market share of virtual digital assistant/voice assistants will triple by 2021. Our world is becoming ever-increasingly connected and automated. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have shifted the way we view our daily list of to-dos by enabling us to manage our time and tasks more efficiently. Over one-third of people say that digital assistants are part of their daily lives.

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Currently, much of VA technology is being used for devices that manage mundane and simple tasks, such as:

Finding restaurant reservations and maintaining our home’s temperature
Using home assistants to include items on our shopping lists while our hands are full
Setting a timer while we cook
Making basic search queries for the weather forecast

However, can the emergence of VA technology be the bright future that banking needs? How will this technology enable banks and financial institutions to better serve their clients in the short and long term, without creating unnecessary barriers to our personal, human interactions?

From then Until Now: AI and Finance

Robots assisting customers with their banking needs is not a recent innovation. Indeed, anyone who has had to repeat themselves on the phone in order to be understood through a series of voice commands, or those who have been denied a bank loan because of a restrictive computer program, can attest to the fact that AI and automatic technology have been around for years.

The Banking Technology Vision 2017 report from Accenture states that not only do 80 percent of all bankers believe that voice-assistant technology will revolutionize their industry, but they believe it will do so within three years. While that timeline may seem short, the reality for many banking leaders is that they’re already starting to see the benefits of using VA tech for both customer interactions and data management.

We’ve seen tremendous advances in the field of natural language processing (NLP, for short). Users have gone from the example above, where customers would find themselves frustrated and despondent at the near-fruitless interactions with their banks, to the natural and organic conversations that we carry on with Alexa and Siri, experiencing moments of ease and delight.

When implemented well, voice-assistant technology brings customers and banks closer together. Here are a few examples of companies creating meaningful transactions and interactions with VA technology while considering the needs and wants of both their company and their customers.

Leading by Example

As a leader in the financial and banking industry, you need to meet your users where they are. And for the vast majority, that means reaching them through their mobile devices. It’s not difficult to find apps that are already making strides in tailoring their customers’ experiences while managing their financial portfolios.

Apps such as Mint (budgeting app from Intuit), Venmo (digital wallet to send payments), and Stash (investment and savings app) offer something that has been missing from much of banking: personality. Users can have a more organic interaction with these apps, empowering them to make smarter financial decisions, becoming better customers.

Tomorrow’s AI-Enabled Banking, a recent report from IPSoft highlights the fact that “73% of millennials would rather trust their finances to tech companies like Google, Amazon or PayPal than to their own bank.” That’s no small matter, and banks should be paying attention to numbers such as these.

Image source

Financial institution Cap One recently partnered with Amazon to allow users to access their bank accounts and account info with their voice. In addition, Santander enables their customers to make payments and authorize transfers using their voice within their SmartBank app.

Products, services and customer care interactions are increasingly being injected with a sense of humanness, regardless of the level of automation involved. These interpersonal relationships between you and your customers may be the difference between winning or losing to your competitors, both to existing competitors and to new market players.

People and Data: What to Prioritize in VA Technology

Voice-assisted tech is growing in popularity simply because it is easier to use. With that advantage, your company can focus on three key areas to consider when implementing (or enhancing your current) VA technology platform and mobile app: security, accuracy, and platform.

Security

Security (and privacy), while ubiquitous for banking institutions, is an ever-present concern when new technology (or any technology) is involved. Be forward-thinking in your approach to speech recognition software (and updates), password requirements, and situational consideration of privacy (for example, the option to simply display, rather than recite, confidential financial information on the screen when in a public place).

Accuracy

Despite all the advancements and innovations, VA will never be 100% correct all the time. Put safeguards in place for those times when things break down to ensure customers aren’t feeling lost or frustrated. Create a plan to handle misunderstandings when someone’s voice commands aren’t understood clearly by a bot, to prevent would-be disastrous mistakes that could cost both you and your customers significant losses.

Platform

While customers can move from app to app with ease depending on their needs, large enterprises require a strategic, considered approach to choosing the right platform for their users. For many, Facebook chatbots are the simplest and fastest form of reaching their clients, but that avenue is often too informal for most banks and financial institutions. In this regard, consider a customized yet manageable approach to your back-end technology. If you plan well, your users will continue to grow with you and your technology without you being limited in the future to the popular platforms in today’s market.

You can effectively harness VA technology in your banking app to leverage not only the existing knowledge base and familiarity with technology that consumers possess, but also to maintain a formidable competitive edge, establishing your company as a leader in the marketplace. AI and VA technology offer you the flexibility to meet customer needs with fewer resources in less time.

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