Category : 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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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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5 must-read books on business thinking for CXOs

Sep 28,2018 / By Ravi Teja Bommireddipalli / No Comments

In 2016, after nearly two decades in professional life, I enrolled in not just one, but six online courses offered by the reputed Interaction Design Foundation (IDF). My initial plan was to complete a course on ‘Services Design’ but I ended up completing these:

Emotional design – how to make products that people will love
User research –methods and best practices
Conducting usability testing
Information visualization – getting dashboards right
Mobile user experience design – designing UX for mobile apps
Design Thinking – the beginner’s guide

Completing these courses and learning something new was useful and a deeply enriching experience. The cherry on top was the email from Interaction Design Foundation about my performance: “One of our developers did a database extract of the top performers (1%) in our courses, and your name came out on that list!’’ – Mads Soegaard, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Interaction Design Foundation

After I completed these courses many have asked for book recommendations on the topic. But Design Thinking is one piece of the puzzle when it comes to solving complex business problems. Over the years, as a consultant, I have worked with several CXOs across diverse business categories and geographies. The business problems faced by each of those organizations were unique and covered a range of aspects: service delivery process, organization structure, brand positioning and many more. 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 my 5 top picks, which would help CXOs take a 360-degree approach in solving business problems:

Book 1 – Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek

In a succinct TED Talk, Simon Sinek connected Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Jobs and demonstrated that they all think in the same way – they all started with ‘why’, the larger purpose. Nike says, ‘our purpose is to use the power of sport to move the world forward’. And they outline their mission as: “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”.

Author – Simon Sinek

But the clincher is in defining who an athlete is: ‘if you have a body, you are an athlete’. Suddenly, Nike’s business is elevated from selling shoes & sportswear to a rallying clarion call. It is meaningful for their employees, partners and various stakeholders. You can see its manifestation in their hugely successful marketing and the famous ‘Just Do It’ tagline. I believe every organization can define such a lofty goal.

At Robosoft, our core purpose is to “simplify lives” through delightful digital experiences. We believe in simplifying every aspect of life; the way people buy, transact, pay, get entertained, bank, get insured, sell, invest, mange health, etc. We touch billions of lives through our advice, design and technology capabilities.

Such goals are best set in an inclusive manner so that employees buy into them and do not see it as a diktat from the top. Simon Sinek’s book explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then to ask the more important question – WHY?

Book 2 – Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes by Kaplan and Norton

Author – Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

Businesses are more complex than ever before. Competition comes in various shapes and from unexpected quarters. No one would have predicted taxi aggregators would change the face of urban transport across the globe. FinTech players continue to challenge traditional banks. Such complex challenges call for not just a clear strategy; but also require an implementation framework. Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy is to define how an organization is different from competition or what is the unique value proposition to customers. Organizations generally choose to differentiate themselves either on Total cost, Complete customer solution or Product innovation. E.g. Apples competes on innovation, Walmart competes on cost, and IBM competes on “one stop shop for IT”.

At Robosoft, we chose our value proposition to be “a full-service digital experiences agency” by offering digital advice, design thinking and emerging technologies implementation.

Once the customer value proposition (CVP) is chosen, implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation–depends on managing four key value-creating internal process perspective categories: operational efficiency, customer relationships, innovation management, and regulatory/social processes. The processes are then enabled by the learning and growth perspectives which consists of Human capital (skills, knowledge and competencies), Organization capital (culture, alignment, teamwork and leadership) and Information capital (IT applications, infrastructure and systems). This book taught me the benefit of defining the HOW?

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Book 3. The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

How do companies become learning organizations by thinking systems and thinking holistically? Peter Senge, an American systems scientist and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, offers 5 disciplines: A shared Vision, Mental Models, Team Learning, Personal Mastery and System Thinking.

Author – Peter M. Senge

As organizations grow in complexity and newer challenges emerge, our ability to identify the right problem to solve becomes extremely important. Systems Thinking is the 5th discipline that the book talks about; which enables us with the ability to think cause-and-effect. Once we know the core problem that we need to solve, our ability to identify, design and innovate the right solutions, products and services for the market becomes accurate.

This book enabled me to define WHAT products, WHAT solutions and WHAT services to offer to the market in a very holistic manner.

Book 4. Change by Design by Tim Brown

At the core of this legendary book is the belief that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination and not from a flash of brilliance. Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO and he defines design thinking thus: the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. The chapter on ‘Putting people first’ was of particular interest to me where he outlines three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design programme: insight, observation and empathy. Insight is about learning from the lives of others, observation is watching what people don’t do, listening to what they don’t say and empathy is about standing in the shoes of others.

Author – Tim Brown

I firmly believe that design thinking is not the exclusive realm of designers – we all can learn from others’ lives, feel their pain points and think of solutions. At Robosoft we get to partner with a diverse set of companies, domains and end-consumers. What we solve for is vastly different for a bank as compared to say, a news organisation – Design Thinking helps us straddle such extremes.

Book 5. The Knowledge Creating Company by Nonaka and Takeuchi

Despite the devastation of the World War, Japan has emerged as a global economic power and a world leader in important industries like electronics and automobiles. In this book the authors contend that Japanese firms are innovative, create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

Author – Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi

The culture of un-learning, learning and then innovating are the key ingredients towards becoming a knowledge organization. They say, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Our ability to not depend on past success and create a new future depends heavily on our skill to un-learn; which then opens up for a possibility to learn and create new knowledge.

Summary:

While the above 5 books are on different subjects, they all are ‘connected’ in some fashion as they are all about making a difference to the customers. Peter Drucker famously said, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”. What binds them all together and important for holistic business thinking could be summed up thus:

Identifying the larger purpose of the organization is key to success and thus “start with WHY” is the most important read for all CXOs.
Strategy is about differentiation, customer value proposition and answer the HOW for organizations. The design of strategy, its execution and monitoring are key to building successful companies and delivering value to shareholders, vendors, customers and employees
Identifying the right problem to solve is very important and thus the power of cause-and-effect is key. ‘Systems thinking’ thus becomes extremely important to solve complex problems and it also ensures that we are not solving the symptom but the actual cause. This helps us identify the right products/services for our customers and answer the question “WHAT”
Once we know the product/solution, it is important to design it well by being empathetic to the user who faces the problem and thus design thinking plays a very important role in innovating new products, services and processes
To do all the above, it is a MUST to build a learning culture that enables the organization to continuously un-learn, learn and innovate.

I look forward to your views on these books and your recommendations on other good reads on the subject of business thinking.

This article was first published on LinkedIn by Ravi Teja Bommireddipalli

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How Retail Apps Are Using Augmented Reality to Provide a Better User Experience

Sep 18,2018 / By Nikunj Sanghvi / No Comments

Imagine being able to experiment with different outfits that you want to buy from the comfort of your sofa, or being able to “try on” multiple shades of lipstick with a click of a button without the mess of color strips lining the back of your hand as you test them out in the store. Imagine being able to customize your food delivery so that your favourite items are available at the click of a button or two and having a feature that allows you to pre-order a day or two in advance.

You don’t have to imagine that with too much difficulty these features and functionalities have been available for a number of years by several large retailers, providing their customers the ability to tailor their purchasing power and subsequently giving retailers insights into their customers’ preferences and habits.

Research indicates that by 2020, augmented reality technology will claim a market share worth over $120 Billion. And while consumers have witnessed significant advancements that help them simplify their decision-making process, many retailers may have been slow to adopt this burgeoning industry tool while it was still in its early stages. The good news for consumers is that many are slowly joining the ranks of these larger companies that have been using the technology for years, with the hopes of making this technology ubiquitous in our shopping habits.

Let’s examine a number of key ways that augmented reality technology is helping retailers create a more delightful customer experience from beginning to end.

Virtual Reality vs Augmented Reality

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Let’s begin with a quick definition review, and a differentiation in two closely related technologies. Virtual Reality (VR) portrays a world completely generated by computers and entirely immerses the user in this constructed world; Augmented Reality (AR), however, sits at the crossroads between the real world and the “enhanced” reality that is projected from digital devices in order to increase (augment) our senses and perceptions. Essentially, VR requires the user to enter an entirely fictional world, whereas AR is real life with “upgrades” or add-ons.

Because of its usefulness in a range of applications, AR has become widely used in the retail world. This technology, once innovative and new, is now offering a reliable and effective UX tool for retailers. Marci Troutman, CEO of SiteMinis, states this well:

“Like any other marketing effort, if [AR is] deployed thoughtfully and with planned momentum, it could give any brand a great lift in sales no matter what the competition is doing. If other brands aren’t already deploying consumer-friendly additions that help their customers shop better and easier, then they should take note at successes surrounding those who do and consider a change.”

The rise of the viral sensation Pokémon GO saw this on a global scale, with an almost manic adoption of augmented reality in the mainstream media. Users found themselves immersed in half-reality, half-fiction as they scoured their neighbourhoods and communities for signs of hidden Pokemon to catch and other players to connect with, often to the detriment of their own health and safety. Despite these negative effects, Pokémon GO showed people that AR is a formidable and easy-to-use tool to generate mass adoption if designed properly.

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Augmented Reality is a More Powerful Tool

There’s a popular saying that, in essence, states that the most powerful tool is the one most often used by its owner. The same can be said for augmented reality. Once on the fringe, it has become commonplace in our devices and applications and a staple in how we interact daily, both with technology and with people. AR is a simpler technology to implement than VR technology, in as much as it can often be cumbersome and expensive to create a different reality for users using VR.

Consider the medical field: doctors, nurses, and medical practitioners would greatly benefit from immersion or support in a critical scenario that had real-life, real-time consequences, but that can also allow them to learn more effectively in a constructed or semi-constructed reality.

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AR can be especially useful in this arena by reducing errors, offering real-time assistance for difficult cases, and providing beneficial shortcuts for both patients and doctors. For example, nurses and other medical professionals report that 40 percent of the time they can’t find a patient’s vein on the first try, with those numbers being even higher when drawing blood from children or seniors. AccuVein, a product that accurately scans for and locates a patient’s veins, is helping to significantly reduce the “miss rate”, in some cases as close to zero misses.

In the world of retail and consumers, however, customers need to only understand and experiment with the products they’d like to buy in order to learn how those products will serve to enhance their daily lives. From this perspective, AR makes an effective and powerful tool.

Take QR codes, digitally rendered square blocks of even smaller blocks of black and white, which have been around since 1994. These codes contain useful data, such as a direct link to a company’s website, an online promotion, or an action to email someone, simply from scanning the QR image. We still use QR codes (in blockchain transactions) but have graduated far beyond these simple QR codes from a decade ago, and can now access tools that recognize data from a picture of a sign in a store or the facial recognition software that helps you pick the best shade of lipstick for your skin tone.

Enhancing the User Experience with AR

In effective marketing campaigns, retailers have to walk a fine line between showing customers their current reality (life without this product) while attempting to show how things will improve or redirect that reality once their products are in the hands of the customer all without making the customer feel belittled or attacked. This messaging is subtle, but so important for the relationship between retailer and consumer, as it implies that reality needs improvement and what better way to convey that than by actually enhancing reality in real time?

Retailers are incorporating AR technology into many aspects of the customer experience, both online and in person at the store. For retailers selling physical products and goods, AR tech offers customers an easy way to see products in “real life” without ever stepping foot in a store. Zara, McDonalds, and Sephora are well-known examples of companies that have integrated AR technology into their platform to reduce frustrations that consumers may feel when searching for just the right products, as well as providing comprehensive information about those products to build trust between consumers and retailers, which creates a longer-lasting relationship that benefits both parties.

Almost 75% of consumers think that retailers should be utilizing augmented reality technology in some way, and over half of customers feel that if companies are already using AR technology, they aren’t using that technology to its full potential to make the customer journey streamlined and customized. Although AR technology can drastically increase sales, if the technology isn’t designed properly for users, then sales will stagnate.

We examine several of these companies below that have implemented AR well, and how this technology has not only increased the enjoyment their customers feel when shopping for their products but also helped customers make better purchases that match their needs.

Companies Effectively Using AR Technology

From Cart to Consumer ─ Simplifying Decision Making for Customers

Sephora introduced AR into their platform in early 2017 by way of their Virtual Artist platform, which shows customers a realistic “mockup” of how certain skin care and makeup products would look with their face shape, skin colour, and other distinguishing features. With the addition of more efficient 3D facial recognition software, Sephora gave customers the power not simply to upload a self portrait, or “selfie”, to the app but now offered real-time rendering of their face using Sephora’s app, giving them a more realistic impression of the Sephora products they were hoping to purchase.

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Try Before You Buy: Using AR to Create Your Dream Home

A recent survey showed that furniture is the most popular item that customers shop for using augmented reality technology. AR offers retailers the opportunity to create comprehensive and immersive product catalogues for customers; if they never look at it, it’s no inconvenience, but these product listings are available at a moment’s notice and greatly reduce the time spent researching the various options available to customers.

Retailers like Wayfair and IKEA have created apps that allow users to select products from the catalogue and use their smartphones or tablets to show in real time how those products would actually look in their homes and offices. This reduces the stress involved with picking something that doesn’t fit, and it reduces the time spent searching, buying, shipping, and building a product that eventually doesn’t work well for their space. Retailers know that this workflow significantly lightens the burden on the customer and allows them to research these options all before clicking “Buy now”. The team at IKEA is anticipating that this technology will show a triple increase in sales by 2020.

Mouthwatering Experiences Through AR and Dining

The app for Bareburger harnesses AR technology to allow customers to “see” the menu item in front of them on their device before they order, giving them a better, more mouth-watering ordering experience.

The Future of AR in Retail

While AR technology has been around for roughly three decades, advances in facial recognition, immersive technology and real-time feedback are just starting to come into maturation. Those developing and using this technology recognize that the future of AR lies in how the devices we currently use and how we use them will change, and inexpertly enhancing and crafting the user experiences with AR.

From a customer perspective, “AR allows for pre-purchase testing of products and makes the purchase process feels more hands-on.” In today’s market, however, users don’t have wide-reaching access to a completely seamless interaction with retailers, and there are still bugs that need to be worked out in existing software (lacking a natural field of view, comprehensive product info, 3D sensing, low resolution) before users can feel confident using AR from retailers on a large scale to be able to receive customized experiences.

This is where the key changes in the technology will greatly impact mass adoption of AR technology: the tailoring of “personalized, accessible and well-designed” products, services, and experiences. Shopping is an activity that each and every one of us performs, and when retailers recognize the value of investing in and properly designing AR for their customers, they’ll begin to see greater returns on customer loyalty, brand power, and increased sales.

Mobile Technologies

Digital Transformation – how integrated enterprise solutions are fueling the process

Sep 6,2018 / By Jay Shah / No Comments

Started in 1934, LEGO was on a growth trajectory for over 50 years. In 1994, owing to the rising popularity of video games and internet the company suffered a major set back and a drop in their sales. In response, they tried diversifying their product portfolio and also collaborated with various production companies to form themed products. While this lead to a short-term rise in numbers the phase ended soon. That is when the organization started with a drastic revamp journey in 2004 with its new strategy called ‘shared vision’. One of the major pillars of this strategy was ‘leveraging digitization’.

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Since then, digitization has remained a critical aspect of LEGO’s business strategy. The company has weaved in digital technologies in multiple areas – at a product level, consumer level and at an enterprise level (as depicted in the figure below).

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All these forces, working together helped LEGO overcome the negative growth in 2003 and mark about 30% growth in the next 10 years, a curve that is on an upward trajectory since.

While LEGO’s success story and digitization efforts sound inspiring and business leaders would love to replicate this success in their respective domains, it is easier said than done. Advancements in technology and digitization are not just changing the way enterprises operate but how various industries operate as a whole. Uber has changed the transportation business, Netflix has completely disrupted the OTT landscape, the automotive industry has recently witnessed the entries of technology companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, as vehicles are increasingly getting connected; there a lot of such examples.

As digitization is reshaping the competitive landscape of the companies, it is crucial to understand how short-term are existing business models, in the light of the fast pace of digital disruptions and how they can also leverage technology to address it.

But are enterprises ready for the rapid pace of this change? In this context, digital transformation for enterprises is a must but do organizations really know what does it mean and how to go about it?

As pointed out by this research, while 90% of business leaders deem digital transformation important bit of their business strategy. Almost a similar percentage aren’t sure how to create a plan that integrates the entire digital ecosystem for their organization seamlessly.

There are various challenges that enterprises today face while developing a digital transformation plan. One of the key challenges is disparate systems. The need of digitization though apparent, the need for an organizational level digitization integrating all the departments is still not established.

Also, the rate at which various departments are embracing digitization is also different. For instance, while customer-facing and IT departments are excelling in their efforts of digitization, HR and other departments are lagging behind. This is leading to a lack of strategic alignment between departments, and finally affecting an organization’s progress towards digital transformation.

As per a study, Only the minority (37%) of business leaders see delivering a seamless experience across digital channels as one of the top three priorities for digital transformation in their organization, but half (50%) see this as a top area for focus when aiming to improve the digital experience for customers.

This non-integrated approach towards digital transformation has also to do with the way digitization has evolved. A digitization pyramid has the below elements (as shown in the image below)

In earlier days, there was a huge emphasis on the lowermost layer which is the Transaction Processing Applications such as SAP, Oracle, Core Banking Solutions, etc. And, as the name suggests that was largely capturing transactions. We went through talking about end-to-end processes, and integrations to avoid Silos.

In the next phase of this evolution we saw a lot of ERP solutions emerging to manage and to some extent centralize data. Today, another layer which is the knowledge-driven or intelligent layer is evolving on top of this, which is enabled with technologies like Analytics, AI, Machine Learning, advisory solutions etc. Further, customer acquisition strategies powered by the data gathered by these solutions are making enterprises understand and design solutions based on consumer insights. Now the same cycle is repeating at a higher level. We are talking about end-to-end solutions, integrations, avoiding silos. But at a higher level of abstraction that focuses on Customer Acquisition strategies, Analytics, ML, AI and so on.

Slowly the Server side is becoming more powerful and prominent. And also the real estate, memory and storage on the Mobile device is increasing. This revolution is what we need to capitalize on. Businesses are adopting enterprise solutions that are solely the Server side solution. At the other end, some talk about only the optimization in the mobile device. However, both these need to function and evolve together to bring about the largest benefit of the current cycle of the digital revolution.

What is an integrated enterprise solution all about?

It is about creating a connected ecosystem where people, businesses and things, are all working together to make business transactions (financial or non-financial) happen.

Take for example – the data recorded by a blood pressure monitoring device remains native to the machine. What if this data can be transferred to a diagnostic centre or a hospital where a physician can access it in real-time and advice the patient on their health, and probably patients can also make payments for the consultation online. This completes a transaction in which a patient, a machine (thing), a platform (cloud computing), one or more applications, businesses and a set of doctors are involved. In this case, technology has enabled the interaction of various components inclusive of the enterprise and the end-user to make a business transaction happen.

There are various technologies that are helping enterprises in developing well-integrated enterprise solutions that act as key enablers for digital business transformation. (As shown in the image below)

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1. API Management: APIs are one of the critical aspects of creating a connected enterprise solution. These are the set of functionalities that businesses would share with their partners, customers etc. In this context various API management tools become important. Businesses deploying enterprise solutions for digital transformation would have to look at adopting different aspects of API management. APIs can be used in exposing one or more business services to consumer applications and also help enterprises open data and services that help them integrate with their existing business partners. For example, a manufacturer or retail wholesaler may share its product catalogue and inventory data via API with resellers who want to integrate updated information about available products for sale on their own retail websites.

2. Cloud-Native Apps: When creating a connected enterprise solution there will be a need for more flexible platforms that can enable faster changes in business data and functionality, and cloud-native apps can help businesses achieve that. Cloud-native applications are purpose-built for the cloud model and is a way of approaching the development and deployment of applications in such a way that adapts or understands the various facets and nature of the cloud – resulting in creating processes and workflows that fully take advantage of the platform. In cloud-native apps, these requirements could be easily fulfilled utilizing containers and microservices. With microservices architecture, apps are being built as a distributed collection of services, which pairs up with the distributed nature of the cloud.

3. DevOps: Today, owing to the need of building enterprise solutions that are connected, it is important for businesses to adopt DevOps way of building and delivering software.

According to AWS –

‘’DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.’’

This helps in creating an ecosystem where various development, operations and in some cases the quality assurance and security teams are merged together for faster delivery of solutions.

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4. Internet of Things (IoT): When creating connected enterprise solutions IoT becomes a critical aspect for CIOs and IT leaders. In this context, Machine to Machine platforms (M2M) become the most important part of IoT solutions. Both Machine to Machine and IoT are technologies enabling devices to communicate with each other, M2M refers to isolated instances of device-to-device communication, and IoT refers to a grander scale, synergizing vertical software stacks to automate and manage communications between multiple devices. Bringing these two together will play an important role in created connected enterprise solutions.

5. Analytics: With multiple sources of data from customers, partners, things, customer service representatives etc., it becomes of prime importance for business enterprises to use the data in reshaping their business solutions based on the insights derived from the data and reshaping existing solutions to meet the customer demand. To make the most out of this data Big data technologies and predictive/prescriptive analytics are going to play a decisive role in generating value out of data. Integrating these analytics capabilities with the enterprise solutions is becoming important.

6. Mobility: As smartphones become smarter and more integrated to our lives, business stakeholders internal (employees) and external (customers, vendors, etc.) would want to be connected to businesses through different channels, mobile being one of the most important of these. Enterprises would have to start offering and supporting their products and services across diverse mobile devices and subsequently start strategizing for relevant mobile technology adoption.

7. Web-Scale Technologies: Web-scale technologies refer to an architectural approach which helps in delivering capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting. Web-scale IT methodology enables businesses in designing, deploying and managing infrastructure at any scale that can be packaged in a number of ways to suit diverse requirements and can scale to any size of business or enterprise. It is not a single technology implementation, but rather a set of capabilities of an overall IT system. Web-scale technologies are redefining the traditional approach towards web/mobile app development enabling digital business transformation.

8. Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS): While moving applications to the cloud in form of cloud-native apps enables enterprises to develop more agile, faster and flexible solutions, it is not feasible to move all apps into the cloud. Hence it has become essential to integrate cloud-native apps with on-premise apps, this is where iPaaS solutions have become important. These platforms help to integrate develop, execute and govern integration flows between disparate applications. An iPaaS can simplify an organization’s overall system. With the help of a virtual platform, iPaaS connects applications and resources to create a consistent structure. The iPaaS framework creates a seamless integration of resources across multiple clouds and between cloud and legacy applications.

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In conclusion:

Many organizations today are struggling with digital transformation and facing challenges in their pursuit of building an integrated enterprise solution that gives insight to the end-to-end process. However, with the availability of innovative technologies like SaaS-based digital experience monitoring and analytics, which provide deep, in-depth visibility, unique insights and actionable recommendations this situation is fast changing. In the future we will see an evolution of smarter, intelligent enterprise solutions, that will fuel the digital transformation revolution for enterprises helping them build an integrated ecosystem, benefitting the end user, optimizing workflows and also driving ROI for enterprises.

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