Internet has opened up new possibilities for communicating, from emailing and blogging to mobile video chatting. Most businesses now communicate with their customers through multiple online channels. As brands prioritize this digital experience, they often overlook communicating by voice is faster, easier, and more effective than typing messages. According to the advertising and marketing advisory firm BIA/Kelsey, calls to businesses are expected to exceed 169 billion per year by 2020. These calls are 10-15 times more likely to generate a successful sale or follow-up activity than digital form submissions, which means they are more efficient in generating revenue. Voice is central to communication, and because it’s not strictly an online channel, it presents a challenge for brands that treat digital transformation as a matter of generating clicks and website views. The challenge is particularly acute for businesses that operate in categories such as insurance, lending, travel, or healthcare. In these “considered purchase” categories, consumers typically reach out to a brand after conducting preliminary research online, and are thus well qualified to buy. Read more at https://hbr.org/2017/07/your-customers-still-want-to-talk-to-a-human-being

Nobody sets out with a plan to fail, but so often people let obstacles get in the way of their success. They start off towards their goal, full of energy and ambition, and then years later we may find them still stuck in the same dead-end job or dreaming of the life they could have had. The author here, Daniel Milstein, CEO of Goldstar Family of Companies mentioned here that through his own successes in starting up four companies, he figured out a few things that can stall us. They are Time, Lack of Focus, Holding Back, Attitude and Fear. According to the author, one should obliterate the obstacles and move ahead. Read more at https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297278

Major reasons why chatbots fail is their inability to understand the context if someone is being sarcastic. They fail to decipher if customers try to mix two languages or more. More than aiming for convenience, it ends up harming the user experience. Trying to make the bot answer every query rather than on a particular area makes it dysfunctional. In many cases, bots may fail to have human intervene into a problem or escalate the issue that it is not able to answer. It is more about how the chatbot is deployed. Disconnect occurs when businesses put chatbots without thinking through the customer or internal user journey. Nonetheless, chatbots would still make sense for functional activities for e.g. looking for nearby restaurants, flights between two cities, weather etc., instead of evolved transactions like choosing products and adding to cart that’s more suited to a browser experience. The technology is here to stay but it is not mature currently. In next three-five years, there will be a  lot of industry segments replaced by chatbots. Read more at https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297633

GST regime necessitates a high level of synchronization between tax payer’s application, invoicing software, and  GST system, which without automation would be difficult. These include item level detail in invoices, maintenance of trail of all amended entries, reconciliation of sales and purchase register between vendors and buyers on a minimum three monthly returns and other events such as auto reversals demand or automation of tax compliance process within any tax entity. If anything is a miss, it will directly impact the business’s compliance rating and act as a deciding factor for the buyers, lenders and insurers, whether to deal with that business or not. Till now, Goods and Services Network (GSTN), a private company set up to provide IT infrastructure to the government, taxpayers and stakeholders for GST implementation have appointed 34 GSPs which will offer support and services in form of GST APIs to help tax payers and businesses in compliance. Functionalities available through GST APIs includes registration of tax payer and consultants, return filling , payments, ledger maintenance, etc. Factors such as intuitiveness of reconciliation, validation and tax determination engine, data security, storage and privacy policies etc. should be taken into consideration by taxpayers while choosing the right technology vendor to ensure smooth compliance. Read more at https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297632

To all voracious readers, here is an ideal list of books to have in bookshelf of every data scientist and analyst. These books cover a wide range of topics and perspective, which would help to become a well-rounded data scientist and analyst. Here are a few:

• R Cookbook by Paul Teetor

• Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney 

• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik 

• Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik 

• How to Measure Social Media: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing and Assessing Social Media ROI by Nichole Kelly

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte

• Visualize This: The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics by Nathan Yau

• The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos & Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, & Figures by Dona M. Wong

• Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few

Read more at https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/06/infographic-read-books-analytics-data-science/

The culture of an organization has a significant impact on the overall success rate of change initiatives. Weak process culture implies lack of proper teamwork.  The signs of a weak process culture includes no collaboration amongst different teams, morale is low, and process and change initiatives frequently seem to fail. One of its biggest cause is invisible leadership. Now, to turn around a weak process culture, the following steps maybe followed:

      1.  Demonstrate active leadership

      2.  Empower the real process owners

     3.  Sustain momentum – deploy into structured change

     4.  Provide process guidance

     5.  Sustain communication

With the building blocks for a strong improvement culture in place, teams will feel empowered to collaborate on improvement efforts. Engaged teams armed with the right attitude can take any tools and turn their efforts into real improvement for your customers and for your bottom line. Read more at  https://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/organizational-change/articles/how-to-spot-and-fix-a-weak-process-culture

Flipkart is not the first of the many e-commerce players to start their operations online. All has not been well for this industry in the past, both for consumers and investors. This has happened for various reasons including the entry of diverse competition as well as government policies—particularly demonetization. Following a offline to online strategy is only because of declining growth in the e-commerce industry is an overstatement. The idea is to provide interior designing consultancy and offer a holistic experience to the consumers for better decision making. Another reason for an offline presence is offering a platform for increasing brand credibility and cement its online business. Read more at https://theindianeconomist.com/online-offline-e-commerce-industry-declining/

Customers who have made purchases with a business once, make up a significant chunk of customer database. The second purchase is a key milestone in the customer journey. Now, using data, certain areas should be focused on first time customers that can help to push these customers into their second purchase. They are:

• A varied basket – with items from multiple departments – doubles the chances that a customer will make a second purchase.

• By offering discounts.

• Returns predict a higher customer lifetime value.

Optimizing these above factors can attract many customers on a long term basis. Read more at http://www.optimove.com/blog/ecomm-using-data-push-customers-second-purchase

At Singularity University’s Exponential Finance Summit in New York last month, Peter Diamandis talked about technology, money and a demonetized world. We all have access to everything at the palm of our hands due to advanced technology, robots implying higher efficiency and lower cost. But technological unemployment follows. The counterbalance to technological unemployment, is the demonetization of living. The most common example of this phenomenon is the smartphone where a bunch of different things can be performed in a single device. Demonetization is one of the factors of technological disruption, where money is taken out of the equation for a given product or service, making it available to everyone. Communication, Entertainment, Energy, Transportation, Housing, Education, Healthcare are a few fields of example Diamandis gave in this context. Read more at https://singularityhub.com/2017/06/08/technology-will-erase-jobs-but-also-make-everything-cheap-or-free/

Customer Value Maximization is a good method used to attract customers to increase transactions and keep active customers of a business for a long duration. The primary factors which contribute to the total revenues that a customer will generate are time, purchase frequency and monetary value of purchases. Maximizing the value of the customer to the business implies maximizing time × purchase frequency × monetary value equation. The pillars of every value maximization strategy are:

1. Customer segmentation 

2. Tracking customers over time.

3. Accurate prediction of future customer behaviour.

4. It should be based on the use of advanced calculations to determine the Customer lifetime value (LTV).

5. Marketing action optimization.

Read more at http://www.optimove.com/blog/maximize-customer-value-smart-way