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[x]cube LABS is a leading digital strategy and solution provider specializing in enterprise mobility space. Over the years, we have delivered numerous digital innovations and mobile solutions, creating over $ 2 billion for startups and enterprises. Broad spectrum of services ranging from mobile app development to enterprise digital strategy makes us the partner of choice for leading brands.
Bimodal IT, Blog

CIOs & Digital Business Leaders: Should Bimodal IT Be The Strategy For Your Enterprise?

Bimodal IT - [x]cube LABS

“Digital business transformation requires leveraging a broad set of sourcing options to enable rapid digital innovation and accelerated legacy modernization. Sourcing and vendor management leaders will learn how to choose from a spectrum of bimodal sourcing options for digital business success.” –Claudio Da Rold, Analyst at Gartner

In the world of Enterprise IT and innovation, a new concept, a new method of functioning is taking its root: bimodal IT.

The term bimodal IT was coined by Gartner in 2014. The idea here is that businesses are better served by running and managing their IT initiatives under two distinct umbrellas, or in two separate modes.

One Mode is the traditional approach intended to optimize information while having a strong emphasis on safety, stability, and accuracy.

“Mode 1 is essential as it preserves a company’s cash cows. It not only retains a company but also funds the innovative projects that are designed to respond to threats from disruptive upstarts like Airbnb, Uber, and Kickstarter,” said George Spafford, Research Director of IT, Operations at Gartner.

Mode 2, on the other hand, is exploratory, focused more on agility and speed to drive innovation in the organization. As Spafford asserts: “organizations must try different approaches and experiment with IT to challenge the range of needs presented by digital business.”

Drive Digital Innovation With Gartner’s Bimodal IT

In order to operate in an evolving business where new digital technologies like IoT, cloud computing, big data are emerging quickly and going mainstream even quicker, you must adapt your business to the rapid technological changes. If you are still clinging to the outdated technology your competitors, are quite likely to gain a competitive advantage over your business. The bottom line is anything that rests only on an outdated technology is a potential liability to the enterprise, and therefore technological upgrades  are a must along with a conventional workflow.

Simon Mingay, Research Vice President at Gartner outlines the importance of bimodal IT, saying: “Bimodal capability that marries the renovation of the IT core with the exploratory approach to developing new digital products and services is essential for an enterprise to survive and flourish in the digital era. Both modes will play a crucial role in innovation and digital transformation.”

Today every sector is IT dependent, be it sales, business development, customer or employee engagement. Bimodal IT empowers enterprises to organize their IT needs that provide firm and reliable solutions to run an efficient business and at the same time manage uncertainty to drive digital innovation while meeting various business requirements within an enterprise. According to the survey by Gartner, “more than half of organizations have a clearly defined digital business strategy. The percentage of organizations that have formally implemented bimodal IT has doubled from 6% a year ago to 12%. 36% of organizations have been using some forms of agile/faster modes of operations, and another 20% of organizations plan to implement bimodal in 12 months.”

Importance Of Bimodal IT In The Digital Era

Enterprises need to understand the importance of both these modes as they offer great opportunities in today’s digital era. Most enterprises are changing their methods and adopting suitable control and a culture which gives them the freedom to experiment with their capabilities and proceed further even when they are unsure about the future. Most of the organizations have not only adopted the bimodal approach but also started getting benefits both internally and externally. Gartner research says Bimodal brings together, capabilities inside and outside IT. It provides an iterative solution or application development methodology, which includes methods such as agile or lean software development.

CIOs and digital business leaders are challenged to align business performance goals and stay up-to-date with the technological trends. According to Gartner’s survey,“CIOs are growing versatilists to drive digital business and bimodal IT, from an average of 21% of IT workforce with a versatilist profile today to 32% in three years.”

Digital Business Transformation - [x]cube LABS

 

-Gartner

Agile Innovation

Enterprises aiming to undergo a successful digital transformation need to be creative and break the routine process to initiate innovation. Implementing Bimodal IT helps organizations build an agile software & technology-led business innovation.

Digital business leaders need to identify the requirement to design Bimodal IT and how it helps an enterprise to acquire its strategic goals and usher value to the business. Per Gartner’s research, IT operating model entitles an enterprise to determine and configure the optimal balance between centralized, federated and decentralized governance, decision rights and structures. It recognizes the maturity and capabilities in relation to the goal operating model by designing a roadmap for change via Gartner’s ITScore Maturity Model and helps enterprises to enhance its agility, speed, innovation and the renovation of the IT core by simply implementing the bimodal approach.

Yes, it is important for IT leaders to implement the right strategy using the data and analytics to develop new and innovative products. Nick Heudecker, an analyst at Gartner says, “delivering on new, innovative uses of data and analytics requires new approaches to managing data and analytics programs. Data and analytics leaders must master how to react to these different approaches, how they vary as conditions change, and the associated impact on program management.”

Gartner predicted 75% of IT organizations will have a Bimodal capability but only half of those organizations will succeed by 2017 and so far in this digital era bimodal approach has evinced positive responses. Therefore, IT leaders must enact both reliability (Mode 1) and innovation (Mode 2) into their digital strategy to determine key strengths and enhance their capabilities. Gartner’s research report says,“CEOs are predominantly focusing on growth levers, with 35% concentrating on technology among top-five priorities with the customer experience and workforce enhancement, and two-thirds of CEOs are raising investments in technology.”

The enterprises who want to be recognized as a digital business or want to enter into the digital transformation era must start engaging their leadership team now. This model not only empowers enterprises to face uncertainty but also enables CIOs and other business leaders to create and develop the bimodal capability to keep up with the rapid technological changes.

Blog, Gamification

Enterprise Gamification Creating Immersive Engagement In Recruitment and Training

“People do not take actions that are necessarily the most economical, but actions that make them feel the smartest.”― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

In a perfect world, the right company chooses the right candidate and as a happy and productive employee, he lives happily ever after. The dynamics that dictate the real world, however, are different. Organizations around the world find themselves hiring employees that are not so suitable for their culture and spend millions in engaging and retaining them. It’s hardly surprising that, according to a study by Gallup, 51% of employees are not engaged or that 17% of employees are, in fact, actively disengaged. In a job market where the demand for talent far outweighs the supply, recruitment teams have to spend enormous amounts of time and money on filtering the candidates best fit for their roles. Failing to choose the right candidates adds further to their woes as disengaged employees are costly to the organization.

Gamification, fortunately, has created a bright spot in this area.

Enterprise Gamification - [x]cube LABS

Picture Courtesy : Ingimage.com

So, What Is Gamification?

It is the application of game-design elements and game-principles in a non-gaming context. It taps into the individual’s desire for achievement and recognition. The latest crop of gamification tools is developed by a team of designers, writers, developers, data and behavioral scientists. It works on the premise that it brings about more involvement in a candidate or an employee subject to an immersive gamified experience.

  • First, anyone would enjoy the feeling of achievement that comes with acing the game.
  • Second, they are likely to view the learning experience more objectively when they are given feedback in a gamed environment.
  • Third, they are likely to retain what they have learned.
  • Fourth, they are more likely to carry a positive image about the brand of the organization they have just interacted with.
  • Fifth, it is quite easy to participate in a game, which these days is available on a variety of devices including the favorite of the millennials, the smartphone.

How Does Gamification Help Recruiters?

Recruitment specialists often juggle with quite a few tasks and though automation does help them out, they find themselves compelled to choose candidates from a talent pool which is usually spoilt for choice. Here is how gamification tools assist them:

Measure A wider range of skills: Assessing a candidate by his job profile is one thing, but assessing things like his problem-solving abilities under duress, aptitude and behavior is another – something that has been given the short shrift. To ensure that a more comprehensive assessment of skills is done in a short period of time, recruiters can use gamification tools.

  • A case in point is Shell, which has launched ‘The Shell Explorer Game’ to test candidates on problem-solving and thus arrives at their aptitude and the motivation even prior to the recruiting process.

Simulate the role played by a potential employee: By creating a simulation of real work scenarios that the candidate is likely to engage in, the recruitment gets a clear perspective regarding his suitability for the job.

  • For instance, according to Forbes, by deploying a game, the organization gets a wealth of information about the candidate – if he is empathetic, risk averse, cool-headed, perceptive, a quick thinker, agreeable, an introvert/extrovert – something traditional time and methods of interviewing would easily miss.

This is also useful in the long term because an employee who is thus made aware of what his future likely has in store is more likely to make an informed decision about joining the company. Such an employee is likely to be more productive and retainable for the organization.

Reach out to a bigger talent pool: The beauty of gamification tools is that they can be deployed on social media, thus reaching out to a bigger talent pool, overcoming the barriers of time and place. Candidates who have aced these games can then be invited for the next round of interviews. Thus, recruiters can save a lot of time and money even before the interviewing process begins. Moreover, they are also in a better position to choose candidates who are more suitable for the job.

  • For instance, PwC has invited students on Facebook to play its game called ‘Multipoly’ that simulates the nature of work involved in an audit and consulting profession, a gray area for those not familiar with it. According to PwC, 78% of students were more eager to join the firm after completing the game. The company saw a spike in the number of applications, too.

How Does Gamification Help In Training?

In the complex workplaces of today, usually, a training program aims at imparting knowledge and influencing the behaviour of the employees. Using traditional methods like a classroom session or a one-on-one presentation, engaging the employee’s attention is a big challenge. While the training content may have the best talent behind it, it may not be absorbed or retained by the employee, much less create the behavioral change it needs to bring about. Here is how gamification aids training:

Makes learning exciting with rewards: When an employee uses a gamification tool, he is likely to be visually engaged in a work scenario that he will relate to and learns changes in policy or applications quickly. She would have to participate in quizzes that provide him instant feedback, win him points on the leaderboard and even encourage him to display it as a feather in his cap. Gamification can make it exciting using a gamut of techniques.

Retains the learning for a longer period of time: Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Gamification is a tried and tested approach to involve the employee in various simulated work scenarios and this helps him retain what he has learned better.

  • For instance, Tesoro, a Fortune 100 oil refining company, has deployed our HR solution for recruitment and training, which simplifies the complicated process of oil refining. It was reported that using this tool, they have achieved higher rates of retention.

Makes learning cost effective: Several organizations use gamification tools to simulate extremely complicated functions such as pilot training.

Virtual Reality - [x]cube LABS

Picture Courtesy: Pexels.com

  • At Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base, 70 percent of F-35 pilot training is completed in a simulated environment using a Virtual Reality game before the pilot climbs into a cockpit. Imagine the cost to live and resources saved when a prospective pilot gets adequate exposure in a simulated environment.
  • Similarly, the US Department of Defense conducts large scale drills training through gamification, something extremely costly using traditional methods.

Plays its part in employee engagement: Digital workspaces are radically changing the way employees are engaged. Since it is likely that the candidate chosen for the job is not always the ‘best fit’, organizations need to have a practical approach to engaging him. Training is a great opportunity to hold his attention and using gamification can engage him effectively.

Improves employee productivity: Since gamification has a direct impact on employee engagement and post-training retention, it results in a much more motivated workforce. And, a motivated employee is a productive employee. Further, since it stimulates the competitive spirit of the employee, he is more likely to take on his team members. With each member of the team giving his level best, the team is assured of scaling greater heights.

Helps achieve desired behavior with greater ease: According to Gamification by Design co-author Gabe Zichermann, “Gamification is 75 percent psychology and 25 percent technology.”

Since even the best employees are prone to inertia, enforcing behavioral change through training is often challenging. By stimulating the brain’s reward circuit, gamification works on the psychology of the employee and brings about change.

What should organizations focus on?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2015 millennials will overtake the majority representation of the workforce and by 2030, the hyper-connected, tech savvy generation will make up 75% of the workforce.

And here is what the Zogby poll is saying about them: “A majority of 18-34-year-olds (57%) told us that they play video games at least three times a week. We wondered how important they feel that playing video games is to the development of several works and life skills. Two in three (67%) said it was important in helping them to learn how to create winning strategies. Seven in ten (70%) felt it aided them in learning how to solve problems. Almost two in three (63%) noted the importance of video in teaching them how to work smoothly and successful on a team. (70% of younger Millennials 18-24). Fifty-nine percent said these were a big part in helping them resolve conflicts (64% of the younger group). And two in three (66%) felt playing video games was vital to help them understand new technologies that will be useful in life.”

Gamification will immediately connect with the psyche of the millennial who is playing video games to achieve purposes that are beyond what constitute the usual. As employers are considering how to empower their organizations digitally, it is important to consider who will work with them in the future and explore the possibilities.

chatbots, Digital Transformation & Innovation

Chatbots In Insurance : Your Friendly Virtual Agents

The insurance industry is usually associated with lengthy form-filling, elaborate questionnaires, time-consuming background checks, shortage of staff, and a cumbersome customer service. Global consumers trust the insurance industry less than they trust supermarkets, banks and car manufacturers, according to a new survey from Ernst & Young. With the limitless possibilities of innovation Artificial Intelligence now has to offer, insurance companies find themselves in the fray to win customers.  And, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, insurance industry is adopting chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence to stay in the game.

What’s A Chatbot?

It is a software program that interacts with customers using voice or text, interpreting their queries using Artificial Intelligence. A chatbot is a smooth operator: efficient, consistent, tireless, and available 24X7. It can interface several customers at once without missing a beat. Today,  a customer typically has to wait on the phone, or put several details together in an email to get the simplest of queries answered. But with chatbots, she can instead interact with the friendly neighbourhood bot which can resolve her queries in a split-second.

Chatbots for Insurance Industry - [x]cube LABS

Picture Courtesy : Ingimage.com

How Are They Relevant To Insurance Companies?

Millennials make a big piece of the potential-customer-pie: According to a survey by Swiss Re, US consumers under age 44 are more than twice likely to buy life insurance on the internet than those over 65. And, since millennials are dependent on smartphone for everything from texting friends to buying financial products, it is in fact, best to reach them at places where they inhabit – their messaging apps. Recently, in an act that brings its users closer to companies through conversational commerce, Facebook has opened up its Messenger app to chatbots. Customers can now talk to a chatbot from their favourite messaging app.

Insurance companies involve repetitive, time-consuming, and lengthy questionnaires: Chatbots have a way of engaging customers by texting them little snippets in response to questions soliciting to-the-point answers. They avoid redundancy as they can quickly connect the dots of data they collect from the customer to arrive at the risk profile. Chatbot avatars have a way of making the conversation very personal and friendly, so the customer almost enjoys the experience.

Customers expect an on-going communication from insurance companies: According to a study by EY.com, customers of insurance companies world over want more frequent, meaningful and personalized communications. This is best facilitated by chatbots who can make conversations with the customer from time to time, ranging from wishing him on his birthday to arranging relevant assistance during accidents.

Customers find the fine print of insurance lengthy, arcane and almost intimidating: Chatbots help share the same information in digestible chunks and make insurance something easy to deal with. In turn, the insurance companies gain the trust from the customers.

How An Insurance Company Benefits Out Of Chatbots

Bringing in new customers: According to Forbes, 70% of people are now buying insurance on the phone. Each time a customer visits the website of the insurance company, the chatbot can talk with him about what he is looking for and make it exceedingly easy to position a relevant product. It can fetch a quote for what he is interested in with no time to lose. A virtual assistant doubling as an insurance agent simplifies the obscure aspects of insurance to a great extent.

In their marketing efforts: Chatbots have a way of engaging customers in a friendly way. They can be used to position relevant insurance products as a part of their ongoing conversation. Since chatbots can potentially reach an unlimited number of customers in one go, this means of communication slashes the marketing costs for insurance companies. That the customers are more likely to pay attention to a chatbot also implies more conversions. The exercise also reinforces a positive image of the brand in  the customer’s mind.

To process claims: Think of all the data that needs to be gathered, carried and submitted to an insurance agent. Chatbots make it a breeze to collate and process all the information. Lemonade Insurance Company has recently used its claims-bot to process a claim in just three seconds, with zero paperwork. It also used its algorithms to run a speedy  fraud-detection check. Chatbots even facilitate the process by suggesting the fastest way to reach the insured.

For customer service: A chatbot answers customers questions in the simplest language possible. In case a chatbot is not able to interpret a customer’s question using its algorithm, it can connect him to a customer service agent seamlessly. For the customer who has a ton of things on his mind, insurance is usually not at the top of the list. Moreover, he’s likely to have home, travel, car, and health insurance and it takes time and effort to stay on top of them. To ensure that he doesn’t miss payment of premium and go through the hassle of renewing his policy, chatbots can remind him in time. In fact, chatbots are so reliable that in case of impending storm, they offer advice about how to submit a claim. In so doing, imagine the reach a chatbot can have!

Insurance Companies, Don’t Miss The Big Opportunity!

According to a  report by PwC, “Social and technological trends, which shifted customer needs and expectations, are a source of opportunity for tech-savvy insurers. Those market players who have been taking action and adapting their offerings to changing client demands will at least maintain their market position.”

Providing innovative solutions using Artificial Intelligence (AI) throws up a big opportunity for insurance companies that want to increase their market share by giving them competitive advantage. The corollary holds true, too: Insurance companies who will not take advantage technology will miss out on a customer base that is eager to get insured. So, companies need to take a deep and strategic approach to drastically change the their operational efficiencies. Those who  automate customer-facing roles, underwriting and claims processing are likely to emerge as the market leaders. And those who use reliable algorithms to identify potential fraud will have better profit margins as they would be able to offer a more risk-aware underwriting.

Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Healthcare

Attention Healthcare Providers: Here’s 5 Ways You Can Leverage AI to Transform Care

Artificial Intelligence - Healthcare Solutions - [x]cube LABS

Forrester predicted that investments in AI will grow 300% in 2017.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being considered as a game changing technology to achieve further breakthroughs in healthcare sector. There’s currently a scarcity of over seven million physicians, nurses and other health workers worldwide, and the gap is widening.

Doctors are being overextended to respond to the growing needs of the population. Also, training physicians and health workers is historically a strenuous process that requires years of education and experience.

OpenText research revealed that nearly two in five (38%) UK consumers would trust the medical diagnosis given by AI and just over 1 in 10 (11%) said they would trust the diagnosis of AI more, or just as much, as a doctor’s diagnosis

~OpenText

Artificial Intelligence, is the cornerstone of digital transformation for healthcare and you must infuse intelligence into all of your products, applications, services, and experiences.

Here’s how AI algorithms and software are improving the quality and availability of healthcare services.

1. Optimization Of The Clinical Process

One of the most basic yet efficient use cases of artificial intelligence is to optimize the clinical process. Usually, when patients feel ill, they go to the doctor, who checks their body functionality, asks questions, and gives a prescription. AI assistants can now take charge of a large part of clinical and outpatient services, freeing up doctors’ time to attend to more critical cases.

Ada: Is a health assistant that integrates  its technology with Amazon Alexa to improve the user experience. Ada becomes smarter as it gets familiar with the user’s medical history. Ada also provides the option to contact a real doctor, besides generating a detailed symptom assessment report.

2. Personalized Experience

The assistant provides a personalized experience by using natural language processing and generation to provide a rich and fluid experience, and machine learning algorithms to create a complex map of the user’s condition.

AiCure: Is the only clinically-validated and scalable platform to confirm medication ingestion on mobile devices. This helps patients with a personalized experience and ensures accurate data on a dose by dose basis. It has the potential to transform and streamline the clinical trial process.

3. Early Detection Of Diseases

The treatment and prevention of rare and dangerous diseases often depends on detecting the symptoms at the right time. Early diagnosis can result in complete cure. Conversely, a late or wrong diagnosis can have damaging or potentially fatal results.

Google’s AI division, utilizes DeepMind’s AI technology to analyze more than one million eye scans and find out the early warning signs of visual degeneration. Machine learning is expected to recognize those symptoms that even experienced doctors may miss.

4. Unlimited Competence

Human skills and experience are limited and hard-to-earn when it comes to examining images and samples and making reliable decisions. AI algorithms can quickly ingest millions of samples in short order and glean useful patterns. And unlike humans, they don’t lose their edge with age. Several institutions and firms are investing on this scheme in developing healthcare solutions.

Your.MD: Is an AI-powered mobile app that provides basic healthcare. The chatbot asks users about their symptoms and provides easy-to-understand information about their medical conditions. The platform has a vast network of information that links symptoms to causes.

The assistant uses natural language processing  to provide a rich and fluid experience, and machine learning algorithms to create a complex map of the user’s condition. These two collaborate to provide a personalized experience. Your.MD suggests steps and measures to remedy the illness, including warning users when they need to see a doctor.

5. Sustainable Future

With rising costs of treatment, ageing populations and doctor shortages, today’s healthcare is not sustainable. The future of medicine will be innovative, patient centered, digital and sustainable. A healthier and more inhabitable future for societies depends on scaling the art of medicine which is being facilitated by AI.

Babylon: Currently provides video consultations with doctors. The AI-driven app receives and checks patient’s symptoms against  its database. In addition to its database of papers and textbooks, the app also considers the individualized history and circumstances of the patient including family health history, medical records, daily habits, heart rate, cholesterol levels, allergies, and more.  Babylon examines hundreds of millions of combinations of symptoms and  offers appropriate pieces of advice.

There will be technical and ethical challenges that will certainly scatter our pathway forward—all of us in the health industry need to stay the course and continue to dream big about AI. We’ll need to navigate carefully and thoughtfully to ensure the effectiveness of AI in healthcare. Fortunately, artificial intelligence can help the healthcare sector to overcome present and future challenges.

Artificial Intelligence

It is necessary to  digitize healthcare to ensure access to quality, affordable and outcome based care. Here are a few recommendations on how to go about it

  • Make devices and sensors that record health data.
  • Develop integrated systems that can store and analyze it, growing our understanding of disease and measuring physician performance.
  • Design smart algorithms to support decision-making, prescribe personalized treatment and ensure compliance with therapy.
  • Make access to someone’s own health data a basic human right.
  • Protect health data and privacy of patients to avoid misuse of information.

Where will AI impact healthcare the most? Respondents said that the maximum impact would be around improved customer service (35%), operating efficiency (27%) and decision-making (22%). These could be considered as broad indicators of where investments in AI will be made for the industry as well as where we may see the first widely successful implementations of the emerging AI technology.

Blog, chatbots, Travel

5 Ways Chatbots Are Changing The Face Of Travel Industry

Chatbots in Travel Industry

In the race of who will impart the best experience to its customers, companies started experimenting with chatbots. It has taken over everybody’s imagination and is now being used almost everywhere. It all started when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said, “people will be able to talk to Messenger bots just like they talk to friends.” A year later Facebook launched its Bots for Messenger app which has the ability to deliver automated customer support. The software has a significant inference for enterprises in making e-commerce suggestions, content and interactive experiences much easier than ever and most effective. Chatbot is now the key practice for all businesses to interact with its customers. A personal service assistant to customers that books tickets, appointments, orders food for them and thus help enterprises to be more effective.

What Is Chatbot?

Chatbot also known as chatterbot is a computer program designed to imitate conversations with a human via natural language text or voice methods. It scans keywords and responds with the matching keywords from a database. Its features can be used in providing more personalized customer service, product recommendations, and so much more, therefore, chatbots are the future of Customer Experience.

“Chatbots have become the biggest thing in tech. They unlock the ability to provide personalized, interactive communication akin to talking to a human customer service or sales rep, but at scale for much cheaper than call centers. A conservative estimate is that chatbots could replace 1-800 numbers, offering more comfortable customer support experiences without the hassle of synchronous phone conversations, hold times and annoying phone trees.” –TechCrunch

Chatbots Growing Travel Industries

Chatbot is a buzzword today. Research says, over 2.5 billion users have at least one messaging app in their smartphone and it is predicted to go up to 3.6 billion users by 2018. Travel industry was amongst the early adopters who found the grip on new technology like bots, virtual attendants to book flight tickets and hotel rooms, wearables, etc,. Adoption of all these technologies has revolutionized the whole travel and hospitality industry by generating efficiencies and elevating customer service. BI Intelligence report says, messenger app usage has become more extensive when compared to  social networks, which brings a huge opportunity for travel industries to target their customers in these platforms.

Online travel organizations such as Expedia, Booking.com, Kayak, Cheapflights, Skyscanner, are already experimenting with the new Facebook Messenger Bots to assist their passengers to find flights at the reasonable prices. Using the bot messenger app users just have to select the date, time and their destination. The app will then  show five different available options to choose from and without leaving the Messenger app users can also select hotels and confirm the booking. Kayak, is a fare aggregator and offers multiple travel sites to the travelers to compare and filter the results. They too have got Alexa, a voice interaction app which allows users to search and compare flights as per their preference and once the user is done with the selection they are taken to the Kayak site to complete the booking process. Kayak CEO, Steve Hafner says, “there’s a whole generation who are more familiar with text messaging and voice via Siri looking for a different interaction with an online travel agency. We have voice interaction with Alexa, where you can actually talk to Kayak and say, ‘Hey Kayak, what’s the status of my flight to Denver later today? Where can I go this weekend for $300?’”

Chatbots in Travel Industry
Source – Social Media Today

Chatbots brings competence and efficiencies to the organization by providing a personalized customer experience and 24/7 service to interact with the travelers in different languages. For example, most of the time travelers have some basic and simple queries for which they need to contact the call center which on the other hand could be handled over a chat interface. With all these automations the dependencies on agents will be less which also means company has to spend less. Travelers also get a quick resolution by simply sending a chat message and the chat robotic will answer and help the customer at any point of time, plus they will have the record of their full conversation in the app. On a recent survey taken by Travelzoo, a global Internet media company reports more than 6,000 travelers in Asia, Europe, North America and South America, said yes to have robots assistant and 80% expected robots to play a bigger part by 2020 in the travel industry. It ensures consistency, accuracy and prompt information to customers which are the key element for a travel industry to run a successful business.

Impact Of Chatbots In The Travel Industry

The evolving technology has furnished unmatched experience for enterprises as well as for customers. It is a well-known fact that the enterprises which provide excellent service are the ones who will lead the brand name and chatbots, having the huge impact in the travel industry are helping the travel and hospitality organization to reduce customer churn, increase sales and revenues.

Chatbots in Travel Industry
Source – Gartner
Though AI is quite in its infancy in the hotel sector, however, it has a massive potential to reshape the entire travel and hospitality industry. As the usage of messaging options is growing, already there are various hoteliers and travel agencies that are building their own apps or initiating messaging apps like Facebook Messenger.

Here Are The Five Ways Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The Travel Industry

1. Acts As A New Digital Touchpoint

For a business to run an agile process it becomes essential to first understand what their customers want and then identify a platform where they can serve a great customer experience. There are multiple channels available, therefore, opportunities to reach broad audiences are plenty. The Chatbot is a new digital medium for the travel industry. It has opened an advanced dimension for customers to book their holidays. It’s easy and 24/7 customer service, which makes it convenient for travelers to resolve their queries or concern at any point in time. Chatbots also offers cost savings by serving millions of customers around the world and take customer experience to the next level.

2. Accentuates Customer Engagement

Chatbots offers a great personalized customer service and boost travelers’ experiences in every stage such as pre-arrival to the post trip experience. For example, chatbots assist potential customers by giving them multiple options to book their holidays. Once the booking is done, it starts sending out automated reminders to travelers about the booking date, time and their reservations in advance. When they arrive at the destination guest will receive a suggestion from the bots about the location, like hotels, spa treatments, transport facilities, and so on. It can even interact with the guest post-trip, by asking them for a feedback of their overall journey.

3. Augments The Staff

Chatbots have the potential to interact with humans at twice the speed. It allows hotel staff to foresee where their service is needed and move accordingly. It helps staff to optimize the guest experience and shun bottlenecks. Well, the front-office needs a human interaction because AI chatbots are skilled in responding only to uncomplicated question. Leaving everything to the bots will help online travel organization to have add-on features, without the aerial or training and payroll. This will lead to maximizing profit and at the same time saves customer time with the quick access and instant booking facility.

4. Creates Cross-Sell And Upsell Opportunities

Google reports, 65% of holiday travelers and 69% of business travelers go online to plan their travel. Research says 92% of millennials are pleased with live chat and 23% are predicted to travel and spend $1.4 trillion by 2020. Chatbots offers solutions to the travel industries to build a powerful relationship with customers and are more likely to bring opportunities which will increase revenue through the Cross and Upsell. These opportunities will allow travel industries to engage with their customers with little risk and drive definite ROI in a small duration of time.

5. Quick Access To Data For Personalized Service

Gathering valuable customer data is one way how chatbots are revolutionizing the entire travel industry. All the chatbots are integrated with PMS, that facilitates bots to interact with the travelers throughout their journey. As all interactions with the customers are recorded it lets travel agencies to create seamless experiences for frequent travelers and offer more personalized services. Chatbots create fantastic opportunities for the travel industry by enhancing customer experience with enlightened service.

In the travel industry, AI chatbots deliver a very simple and effective customer experience. Having a huge potential in future, chatbots offer a superior customer experience that drives superior revenue growth for the organization.

Blog

The Ultimate Guide To Home Automation And Smart Homes

Introduction To Home Automation

Technology has fast evolved in the last decade. Web, mobile, cloud, social, big data analytics & Internet of Things- disrupting the way we live and work. Powered by powerful gadgets and advanced technologies, our homes too are in for a massive transformation. While connected homes are going mainstream, the market still has a long way to go before it reaches its full potential. Awareness with respect to value propositions has not been realized by most of the consumers and early adopters face significant pain points that needs to be addressed. In this post, we will discuss connected homes in great detail to understand its potential, the technology behind it, compare smart home hubs, various challenges blocking the growth of connected homes and what it holds for the future.

 

We use so many appliances at home that often it becomes difficult to keep track as to whether everything is switched off or not, especially after stepping out of the house. Smart homes do make life easier and more convenient. Who wouldn’t love being able to control lighting, entertainment, and temperature from their couch? The Internet of Things has made it easier than ever to set up a smart home in which you can remotely control your door locks, lawnmowers, lights, thermostats, vacuums, and even pet feeders, using your smartphone and an app. It’s also made it very easy (and relatively affordable) to monitor your home from just about anywhere. Connected devices have reached every nook of the home.

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What Is A Smart Home?

Home automation or smart home (also known as domotics) is a house that is equipped with network-connected products or “smart products,” connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or similar protocols. These protocols are used for controlling, automating and optimizing functions such as temperature, lighting, security, safety or entertainment, either remotely by a phone, tablet, computer or a separate system within the home itself. All such automated devices also receive as well as interpret their owner’ instructions and then behave accordingly.

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The home automation concept utilises Internet of Things technology that integrates objects with the internet, thereby connecting them all to a common platform which can be controlled by the user. Whether you’re at work or on vacation, the smart home will keep you informed about what’s going on, and security systems can be built to provide an immense amount of help in an emergency. For instance, not only would a resident be cautioned with notification of a fire alarm, the smart home would also unlock doors, dial the fire department and light the path to safety.


It is speculated that the home automation industry could witness highly favourable sales figures in the upcoming years. Looking forward to this speculation, consumer electronics manufacturers are ramping up their product lines in the hope that home automation finally hits the mainstream. Thanks to smartphones and tablets, and the many home automation apps that are now available, this trend is only expected to move north.

Benefits Of A Smart Home

What’s the benefit of all this super advanced connectivity? In a single word, convenience. Having a smart home lets you do a lot of the things that you’d normally do — like adjusting the air conditioning, turning off the lights, preheating the oven, lending a key to your neighbor — with a lot less effort. Some appliances will learn your schedule and activities while you can set schedules for few of them, so that certain things will happen at specific times of day, and the amount of effort you have to put toward managing your home is drastically reduced.

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Connected Home Solutions

There are a lot of great smart home products on the market right now, and many others are entering the market as we talk. The “smart home” concept is taking off and you should be keeping up, otherwise you’ll end up missing out on the future. A lot of folks ridicule the idea of smart appliances but we’re shifting into an age where it’s becoming less of an equipment with a purpose and more of a desirable luxury.

Smart appliances are cutting edge models that can connect to the Internet and perform more advanced tasks than traditional appliances. What exactly can they do? Well, that depends on the particular model at hand. Let’s take a look at some of the more useful smart gadgets currently available.

Home Surveillance System

Security cameras are the first line of defence when it comes to protecting what’s most important—your home, property and family—and they are a crucial part of any home surveillance system.

Not everyone understands how to go about making their home safe and secure, But they do  want a shielded home. There are just too many products on the market, and with the advent of smart tech like the Samsung SmartThings and Google’s Nest, the possibilities are nearly endless. So what should a homeowner do? You need to figure out exactly what your home needs only then you can begin to narrow down the type of home security system that’s right for you and your family.

A smart home security system connects to your home Wi-Fi network so you can monitor and control your security devices using your smartphone and an app. Basic systems typically include a couple of door and window sensors, a motion detector, and a hub that communicates with these devices using one or more wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee, or a proprietary mesh network. A smart security system offers components that work together in a seamless environment and can be manipulated using customized rules. Most of the systems have a mobile app that lets you use your smartphone as your command center to arm and disarm it, create rules, add and delete components, and receive push notifications when alarms are triggered.

Thermostats

A typical room thermostat just gives you the option to change the temperature in your home using a dial or control panel whereas Smart thermostat is a smart technology allows you to remotely control your home’s temperature via a tablet, smartphone or desktop for greater control over your central heating.

It’s smart because it “thinks” and remembers for you. It learns your normal schedule by taking your movements into consideration, and turns itself off when nobody is home. Some models can even detect occupancy in different rooms of the house and adjust temperatures accordingly. And of course, it provides you the ability to change things on the fly from wherever you are (via smartphone, tablet or laptop) when your schedule changes.

A smart thermostat gives you more user friendly, more efficient, and more accessible control over your home’s heating using three basic components.

The first component plugs directly into your boiler and can wirelessly talk to the second component, the in-home device that is the thermostat and main control. The third component is an app that is downloaded to a smartphone (or tablet). Users can remotely control the thermostat/main control device via the app, allowing them to adjust their heating from wherever they may be. This is the basic functioning of most smart thermostats.

Lighting

Smart lighting networks fit into the home automation trend and will surely modify the home lighting style, forever. Smart lighting incorporates many technologies so that either indoor or outdoor lights will work automatically under certain conditions. Every smart lighting network is different from the other, but some of the more significant solutions feature smart lights that are capable of instantly switching on when someone enters a room or changing colour when something occurs.

Smart lighting networks vary drastically, but generally, their lights can either work independently or together when connected. There are two types of smart lights: sensor-integrated and non-sensor integrated and two main ways of controlling smart lights: control hubs and smart devices.

There are some of the most popular smart lighting options out there like Philips Hue, LG Smart Lamp, Samsung Smart Bulb and many more.

Smart lighting eliminates the need for you to get up and flick that switch. The network does all the work for you, automatically, though you can still program the lights to respond as you wish. The sensors that the smart lights have  help identify people and things like when they need light, as well as how much they may need.

Home Automation

Home Automation Hubs

Smart homes are no longer some sci-fi fantasy—they have truly arrived, thanks to home tech hubs such as Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home. These devices allow homeowners to access all of their smart home integrated technology from locks to thermostats to music and far more through voice commands. Those days are gone where you had to type a question or command into a search bar or manually manipulate a control panel.

Only with three strong options available , you might be wondering: Which smart home hub is right for me? They may all do similar things and be compatible with the same third-party products (including Nest thermostats, Philips Hue lights, and SmartThings home security), but there are some significant differences among these devices.

Home Automation

Amazon Echo : “Alexa”

Amazon Echo is a smart voice assistant speaker which has been released by Amazon and controlled by a cloud-based voice assistant called ‘Alexa’. Amazon has stood out in the digital market by launching Amazon Echo in November 2014. It is basically a bluetooth connected speaker that plays music from Spotify and Pandora. Another very remarkable feature of Amazon Echo is that it can control light automatically and HVAC home tech paradigm with a voice-activated voice assistant name Alexa. Amazon Echo ($179/£150) is one of three speakers that has become a part of Amazon’s lineup of Alexa-powered home devices. Joining the Echo earlier this year were the Amazon Tap ($130) and Amazon Dot ($50/£50).

Amazon Echo has seven microphone sensors called “beam-forming technology,” situated under a LED ring at the top of the device  that will hear your voice from any direction. Amazon Echo is a good listener as it can hear your voice even if there is any background noise. You can start chatting with Amazon Echo by saying ‘Alexa’ or ‘Amazon’ which you can change in setting in Alexa App. Alexa is similar to Google Assistant, that processes data in the cloud. It will run without any internet connection. So, you don’t need to spend money on internet packages. So, Amazon Echo is very interesting device it can do more when you begin chatting with it.

Amazon Echo is a minimal cylinder that measures 9.25 inches tall and 3.27 inches around and weighs 2.34 pounds. It’s a bit tall for shelves but otherwise unobtrusive. It comes in black or white.

The lower half of the Echo is covered in tiny perforations for the speaker grille, while the top half has a volume ring that lights up whenever Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, is activated. It has two buttons: one that turns the microphone off, and a multipurpose Action button.

Amazon Echo was specially designed for the music. You can ask Alexa to play music with Alexa Voice Service. You can also ask Alexa to provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more. You can also play music from Amazon Music, Prime Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. You can connect your phone with Amazon Echo via Bluetooth. You can also ask Alexa to book Uber or order a Pizza. Amazon’s Alexa skill is an app that works with Amazon’s hardware system which gives you more personalized experience. There more than 3,00 Alexa skills that allows any third person to create the skill sets. You must install skills from the Alexa App, it is not included by default. As long as the sleek cylindrical speaker is within earshot, you can say “Alexa” hen ask it to play music, lock your doors, and more. Thanks, Alexa!

The Echo is by far the leader of the pack when it comes to the number of definable “skills” with 300 and counting—from reading your Fitbit stats to calling Uber. And if you’re a Prime member, the Echo can order products. Just say, “Alexa, buy me a toothbrush,” and it’ll place the order. It’s almost too easy to order stuff. To keep in mind, Echo may not understand everything you’re asking. You may want to go ahead and give it a shot if you want a tried-and-tested product. If you’re put off by the nearly $200 price tag, try the Amazon Dot ($49.99), which has the same capabilities only with a smaller and less sensitive speaker.

Google Home: “Ok Google”

Google Home is a voice activated “Ok Google” voice assistant device introduced by Google. Google Home was first announced in May at Google I/O event and then after five months it went official from November 04. Google Home is now available in fabric and metal varieties and is integrated with high-excursion speaker that delivers “crystal-clear highs and rich bass.” So, you can play music on multiple Google Home devices at one time. However, Amazon Echo doesn’t communicate with each other well like Google Home.

The Google Home measures 5.62 inches tall and 3.79 inches around. It weighs 1.05 pounds, and it comes in white, with swappable bases available in several colors and materials, including carbon, copper, snow, mango, marine, slate, and violet.

Google Assistant is one of the significant features of Google Home. Google Assistant uses cloud to answer your questions just like Alexa does. However, Google Assistant uses the everyday language hence, you can easily chat with Google Home. Google Home is compatible with Google Music, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, and TuneIn to play music. You can also set alarms, get dictionary definitions, and, of course, control lights and thermostats with Google Home. Google Home works with Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings, and IFTTT. Its also compatible with other Alphabet products, including Google Chromecast and Nest.

With the simple phrase “OK Google,” Google Home is ready to play music from your app of choice (Google Play, Spotify, Pandora), manage your grocery list, set alarms, translate phrases, turn on your lights, and essentially “Google stuff” with your voice and accomplish anything you could type on your laptop or Android phone.

While the voice-tech capabilities between Google Home and Amazon Echo are similar, experts generally agree that Google Home’s assistant has a better grasp of language so you end up with fewer conversational dead ends.

Google Home is feeble in comparison to the Echo in the number of “skills”: Echo boasts over 300, from telling jokes to thumbs-downing songs, while Google Home has only around 80. But that’s likely to change as Google starts to roll out newer versions.

Purchasing can be a decision , if you want the smartest smart home hub where it feels like you’re talking to an actual person. It’s also $50 cheaper than the Echo and “a little more friendly looking than Echo thanks to the interchangeable bases” with different colors and coverings (metal or fabric).

Apple HomeKit: “Hey, Siri”

Apple HomeKit was announced in 2014, Siri works with Apple HomeKit on iOS. Apple HomeKit is specially designed to control home automatic appliances. It can also work like Google Home and Amazon Echo to control home appliances. Apple HomeKit means Siri is integrated with iTunes and Apple Music. Apple HomeKit is preferred by people who have iOS 10 equipped gadgets or Apple TV. So, you can use easily control your Apple products.

Unlike Google Home and Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit isn’t trying to sell consumers on a new, physical hub. There are some benefits there: Your existing, iOS 10-equipped iDevice (including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, or Apple TVs) can serve as the nexus for your intelligent apartment through the Home app and with voice activation commands to Siri, the longtime virtual assistant available with Apple devices. This means you can stock up on all the HomeKit compatible products you want and simply make sure your devices’ operating systems are up to date.

The main thing to understand about the Apple HomeKit is that it’s not a physical hub you buy, but Apple’s framework for communicating with and controlling connected accessories in a user’s home. Apple HomeKit is the choice for iPeople—folks who already have iOS 10-equipped or iOS 10-ready mobile devices (that’s a lot of us) or a new Apple TV from the company. If you primarily use an Android device, HomeKit likely isn’t the best option for you. The Home app comes standard with iOS 10 on any Apple mobile device. You can purchase Apple devices capable of launching the Home app at the Apple website or at an Apple retail shop. Just tap Siri, and the iOS built-in “intelligent assistant” will make your wish its command.

“Mac-heads and Apple fanboys will gravitate toward this technology,” Bradford says. So if you can’t go a day without your iPhone, MacBook Air, or Apple Watch, this might be the smart home solution for you.Although the HomeKit brings the convenience of having control at your fingertips, that’s kind of a problem.You don’t see a lot of people adopting the HomeKit for the simple fact that on older versions of this app, you have to push a button to activate Siri to make a voice command.

People are looking for the quickest way to do things, and having to push a button adds an extra step. They’d rather be able to just yell into their living room to get their device to work. This has been worked upon and the latest iteration of Siri can be activated by voice alone with a “Hey, Siri.” Yet some phones must be plugged in, or at least pulled out of your pocket. So, hands-free, this is not. You can get give it a try if you’re a diehard Apple fan and never plan to change.

The Amazon Echo Vs Google Home Vs Apple HomeKit

Home Automation

Here’s a rundown of your three main options, along with the features they support and the devices they are compatible with.

Amazon Echo Vs Google Home Vs Apple HomeKit Feature-wise Comparison
Features Alexa (Echo) Google Home HomeKit/Siri
Price $180 $130 $230 approx.
Responds to voice commands Yes Yes Yes
Always listening Yes Yes Yes
Wake word Alexa, Echo, Amazon or Computer OK Google, or Hey Google “Hey, Siri”
Music streaming options Amazon Prime Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, others Google Play Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn Yes, Available
Smart home partnerships Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell, SmartThings, Wink, Insteon, Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue, Lifx, Lutron, August, Logitech Harmony, Anova, Big Ass Fans, IFTTT, Control4, Crestron, other devices via skills Nest, Honeywell, SmartThings, Wink, Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue, Lifx, Lutron, August, Logitech Harmony, Anova, IFTTT and others iOS 10-equipped iDevice (including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, or Apple TVs) can serve as the nexus for your intelligent apartment through the Home app
Customizable appearance No Yes Info not available
Output to stereo system Yes, via Bluetooth and the Echo Dot Yes, via Chromecast Yes, via Siri
Synced audio playback to multiple devices No Yes, to any Google Cast device Via Siri
Personal assistant highlights Add items to calendar, make a shopping list, make a to do list, check flight status, track a package Search Google, get a personalized daily briefing, check traffic, check your calendar, make a shopping list, check flight status, track a package send texts messages, search Twitter, and open up your front-facing camera,payments, VoIP calling, and ride booking.
Other features Order a pizza, play a game, arrange an Uber pickup. Echo has an ever-growing list of thousands of skills and counting Cast to your TV with Chromecast, launch and control YouTube or Netflix via Chromecast Info not available

 

Amazon Echo Vs Google Home Vs Apple HomeKit Device Compatibility
Lights/switches Alexa (Echo) Google Home HomeKit/Siri
Philips Hue Yes Yes Yes
LIFX Yes Yes In Process
Lightify Yes No No
TP-Link bulbs Yes Yes No
Sengled bulbs Yes No No
Lutron Caseta Yes Yes Yes
Belkin Wemo Yes Yes No
D-Link smart plug Yes No No
Leviton switches Yes No Yes
Smart hubs Alexa (Echo) Google Home HomeKit/Siri
Wink Yes Yes No
Logitech Harmony Yes Yes No
Insteon Yes No Yes
Scout Yes No No
Lowe’s Iris Yes No No
Control4 Yes No No
Crestron Yes No No
SmartThings Yes Yes No
Smart thermostat Alexa (Echo) Google Home HomeKit/Siri
Nest Yes Yes No
Ecobee3 Yes No Yes
Honeywell Lyric Yes No Yes
Sensi Yes No Coming
Netatmo Yes No No
Other smart devices Alexa (Echo) Google Home HomeKit/Siri
Roomba Yes No No
Neato Yes Yes No
Garagio Yes No No
Gogogate Yes No No
August lock Yes Yes Yes
Rachio Yes No No
BAF Yes No No
IFTTT Yes Yes No
Yonomi Yes No No
Alarm.com Yes No No

 

Challenges Facing Connected Homes

Home automation is still limited to a few households because of its high cost and complexity. There are certain reasons because of which smart homes are not quite the mainstream. Manufacturers from all industries are coming up with their own solutions to the table but are also have a tough time with their own pain points. A significant amount of adoption is required to unlock the value in this market.

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Operational Knowhow: People’s ability and knowledge to handle and comprehend the technicality of the system. It’s not as simple as it seems.  No device can work without instructions so one should know how to operate and set the device so that it works as per the demands.

Unsure Investment: People are reluctant to invest a huge amount of money for something about which they are unsure because there is still not a standard system for home automation. Many think of it as a concept that may not flourish for long.

Hacker Risk: A smart home is subject to a lot of risk of being hacked allowing intruders to break-in because of its advanced automation. Once hacked, the whole control would be handed over to the hacker and then even the owner would lose access to his/her own house.

Data Monetization: Software and ecosystem players are deciding which piece of the value chain to play in as monetizing data collection in the ecosystem is difficult.

Equipped Salesforce: Service providers (e.g., utilities, home security) need to build sales force capability for complex connected-home devices and create technological capability across the company.

Distinctive Features: Hardware manufacturers and consumer electronics have difficulty creating distinctive features that could increase margins as they suffer lack of brand loyalty in an immature market.

Data Ownership: Telecom and cable providers experience a tough time fighting for ownership of customer data and home interfaces with ecosystem players. Connected home competes with existing, high margin products for sales associate and marketing focus.

Merits and Demerits of Smart Homes

Who doesn’t love automatically managing security systems, controlling sprinkler systems, coordinating outlets, and turning appliances on and off while away?

Although these devices are certainly not new to the market, many systems have become much more affordable in the past few years, and the use of home automation is now more widespread than it has ever been before.

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But is it right for you? Here are a few ifs and buts to help answer that question.

Saving Energy: Home automation systems have definitely proven themselves in the arena of energy efficiency. Actual energy savings ultimately depend on the type of device you select and its automation capabilities. But on average, product manufacturers estimate the systems can help consumers save anywhere from 10 to 15 percent off of heating and cooling bills.

Convenience: The less you have to worry about, the better. Right? Convenience is another primary selling point of home automation devices. Many systems come with remote dashboard capabilities. Simply pull up the dashboard on a smart device or computer, and turn the device off in a matter of seconds.
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Security: Remote monitoring can put your mind at ease while you’re away from the house. With remote dashboards capability combined with automated security systems help you mitigate the risks of intrusions: you will be alerted immediately if something uncharacteristic happens.

Installation: Depending on the complexity of the system, installing a home automation device can be a significant burden on the homeowner. It can either cost you money if you hire an outside contractor or cost you time if you venture to do it yourself.

Technology: Sometimes a good old-fashioned flip of the switch is a lot easier than reaching for your smartphone to turn lights on and off. Automating everything in life may sound extremely appealing, but before you decide which system is right for you, think about how far you really want to take home automation in your household.

System Compatibility: To truly leverage the convenience of home automation, you may need to invest in centralized platform technology to control all systems and devices from one location. Controlling all aspects of home automation from one centralized platform is important, but not all systems are compatible with one another.

Cost: Even though the price of home automation systems has become much more affordable in recent years, the cost to purchase and install a device can still add up.

Business Opportunities In Home Automation

The trend of automating home activities by using intelligent terminals to control appliances and equipment has started gaining popularity. Connected home presents numerous growth opportunities for businesses. However, in order to utilise these opportunities, service providers will need to develop innovative business models,  embrace new technologies, create new partnerships and address new markets.

Explore new business models: Healthcare and assisted living has been transformed with patient monitoring, device management and communication merging seamlessly in real time. This was possible due to the emergence of connected devices. This will enable better collaboration between medics, hospitals and drug companies, improve diagnostics and give rise to innovative business models. For instance,  the billing could be based on usage/time or nature of intervention, rather than a fixed consultation fees.

Establish partnerships: The demand for media sharing services that can connect all the devices used in a home already exists, but the surge in demand for personalized entertainment services will call for new partnerships. The demand for online content seems to be very promising in the near future and the migration to an all-IP environment will enable consistency and convenience anytime, anywhere media and on any device.

Technology Integration: As evolving networking technologies move towards uniform standards, new possibilities are emerging out of this convergence. For instance, a data download can raise a notification if it is already present on any device in the connected home.

Or a call on a mobile phone could automatically and seamlessly switch to the home’s wi-fi network once the user is home. Such convergence will give rise to many new services.

New billing & revenue models: Combining several services into a single mobile number will eliminate the need to manage multiple bills. This will initiate the emergence of new billing models based on time of day, seasonality and location or even the type of device. Targeting specific customers with content based on screen size, location, season will be much easier for advertisers and will also give an understanding of the home’s technological ecosystem (devices owned, usage, etc). This will increase the flexibility and effectiveness of the advertising models. An advertisement delivered on TV over cable can result in an immediate purchase via the TV’s online connectivity.

Smart Home Is Future

Home automation is the present and future. There are already a plethora of smart products you can pick up to make your home smarter. Despite all the technological advancements and innovative products, there is a constant mental conflict as to how important it is to automate everything around us. The question is, do we really need smart homes? Although it’s less about convenience and more about home security, yet the most basic things always start with handing over the work to machines.

Home Automation

The market for smart home solutions is promising. The smart home market is predicted to boom to a $121 million market by 2022. Even so, entrepreneurs may have to wait for some consumers to catch up with the technology. Although prices of the devices are now within reach for most consumers, a third of consumers say they’re not comfortable with smart technology, which could hinder adoption. Older generations are especially reluctant, as they consider themselves technology novices or beginners, potentially hindering their adoption of smart home solutions. This may explain why nearly six in 10 respondents still don’t have any automation devices for the home.

Home Automation

Smart home companies still have a large untapped market for the devices. Rapid urbanization, growing tech savvy population and modern day living challenges provide great opportunity to the growth of digital homes. However, businesses need to quickly address practical challenges to boost customer confidence in home automation technologies. The future looks interesting for smart homes.

Blog, Customer Experience

5 ‘Can’t Miss’ Considerations To Build A Highly Effective Customer Experience Framework

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Who are your customers? What do you want to do for your customers and get better? Are your employees aware of your vision? Answers to these questions are an absolute necessity for business leaders to deliver a seamless customer experience.

“The most powerful journey maps are produced when the right leadership support is provided, the appropriate people are involved and the necessary data is analyzed.”
-Augie Ray, Research Director, Gartner for Marketers.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer Experience (CX) is the term used to describe a company’s interactions with a customer. It is an essential chunk of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which is divided into three elements such as, the customer journey, the brand touchpoints, and the environment where the customer’s expectations are being matched.
According to a recent Gartner survey, “89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago”.

Why Is Customer Experience (CX) Important?

As per experts research, customer choice has become the main differentiator, they have multiple choices between products and services to pick from and can call for an omnichannel experience, so, it becomes very important for enterprises to not only deliver a product or a service to their customers, they also need to shift their focus to customer experience management (CEM) by delivering it with a customer service excellence and differentiating the brand from competitors.
The kind of experience they get, decide their loyalty and advocacy, as customers carry experiences throughout their journey. Always remember a company cannot run successfully without its customer, thus your customers owe your brand name, not you. Bloomberg Businessweek took a survey and found that delivering a great customer experience has become a primary strategic objective. Also, a recent Customer Management IQ Survey says, 75% of customer management executives and leaders rated customer experience as the highest importance.

A Journey Framework

Source- Gartner
A customer journey framework provides a structured approach to Customer Experience. The framework is needed to align company’s ideas to be more customer-centric and have omnichannel exposure and interact with customers to deliver an outstanding customer experience.Here are the 5 key points to be kept in mind while strategizing the foundation for a customer experience framework:

1. Map Customer’s Journey

A customer’s journey framework shows how company’s vision and transformation activities are created, with a more detailed customer experience. It helps business leaders understand the customer’s interaction with their product and unveil improvement opportunities. Lewis C. Lin is a bestselling author and according to him, there are 5 stages of the customer experience which are called 5Es. They are;

1. Entice: What event triggers a user to enter into the UX funnel?
2. Enter: What are the first few steps in the UX funnel?
3. Engage: What task(s) is the user trying to accomplish?
4. Exit: How does the user complete the task?
5. Extend: What follow-up actions occur after the user completes the task?

2. Understand Customer’s Perspective

It is one of the most imperative foundations of the Customer Experience (CX) framework. It’s all about customers and the way they interact with your brand, so it becomes important to know your customers. Divide your customers into categories, into personas based on their behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, as each customer needs different approaches and so the framework. One of the common approaches is ‘Mystery Shopping’. It is a tool used to measure the quality of service, or compliance with regulations, or to gather specific information about products and services. The second one is the ‘Business Diagnostics’ approach used to analyze the strength of the business. Gartner defines it as a form of advanced analytics, which examines data or content to answer the question “Why did it happen?”, and is characterized by techniques such as drill-down, data discovery, data mining and correlations. And the third one is ‘Voice of the Customer’ approach, a term that is used to describe the in-depth process of grasping customer’s expectations, their preferences and aversions.

3. Identify Required Action

While creating a customer journey framework, enterprises have to go through both positive and negative experiences. As the framework design helps to determine what the future customer experience is going to be like, leaders can identify their business opportunities and align their business priorities. But before designing the framework, it is important to adhere to the business promises and loyalty. This indicates the effort that the enterprise is making to transcribe the perfect customer journey framework and evaluate an actionable framework. When altering the framework, initiate changes according to the customer’s behaviors and expectations and make sure there is no inconsistency in delivering what was promised to the customers.

4. Transforming The Customer Experience With Multiple Touchpoints

Touchpoints are interactions between the enterprises and the customers. Design a touchpoint to know what customer feels or thinks and find a way to improve. Once the relevant action is identified, the next step is to transform the business which demands leaders to arrange customer experience across multiple touchpoints. This helps to fill the gap between the touchpoints and the customer’s experience. Also, being the key strategy to identify and estimate the investments and plan accordingly. An organization needs multiple channels and touchpoints to have a deeper strategic visualization of the customer experience to build a significant competitive advantage.

5. Build The Journey Framework On Data And Insights

Data works as a fuel to build a strong framework because an enterprise cannot exercise on the assumption basis to drive value in the future. According to Gartner, frameworks which are built on data and insights provide a solid foundation to develop an accurate journey and expand collaboration. It also becomes the guide to gain harmony when there is any dispute. ‘

Gartner data includes, direct feedback surveys such as relationship, transactional or special purpose survey, indirect feedback such as text, speech and interaction analytics for customer care calls, operational data from CRM systems, call center software and marketing analytics to infer customer perceptions, market research to understand the target audience, qualitative research including focus groups, online research communities and ethnographic research.

Google uses ‘HEART’ framework to identify their customers and their emotions. It is the first user experience tool that helps Google to measure progress towards their key goals and drive product decisions. It uses user-centered metrics which are integrated with traditional metrics with emotion-led indicators. HEART framework helped to make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centric. The HEART – Happiness Engagement Adoption Retention and Task success that tells what customers think and behave to interact with the customers.

Having the framework will help an organization to proceed with current journey to the expected journey. It is an area which requires focus for higher retention and empowers decisions to enhance end-to-end customer experience, address vital touchpoints and build a customer-centric approach.

Blog, Industrial Revolution

We’re Amidst 4th Industrial Revolution! Here’s What You Must Know

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Innovation has a come long way from the first industrial revolution to the fourth industrial revolution which the world is witnessing today. It has brought unbounded opportunities to the business leaders and changed the way people live, work and interact with the world. Let’s fly back and overview our journey of the Industrial Revolution and how did we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The First Industrial Revolution took place between 1750 – 1840 in Great Britain. Water and steam were used to mechanize the production process during this period. The term “Industrial Revolution” was given by an English economist named Arnold Toynbee. During this time steam engine, iron making techniques, new textile machines, cement, printing press, banking industry, and railways were invented. All these inventions replaced older and revolting methods and lead to a larger industrial workforce.

The Second Industrial Revolution was in between 1850 – 1969. This was the greater Industrial Revolution in the Revolution history also known as the “Technological Revolution” powered by electric power to create mass production. It originated in the US and moved to European countries like Germany, France, UK, then to Japan. It highlighted the time period where iron, engines, steel, rail, electricity, petroleum, telecommunications were developed towards modern business administration. Innovation such as railway networks, telegraph, telephone, typewriter, electric generators, and so many mass production boosted the economic growth.

The Third Industrial Revolution was driven by Information Technology in the year between 1980 – 2000. In the new era of the industrial transformation business leaders used electronics and information technology to automate production. The first computer model, smartphones, the Internet, 3D printing, the laser was invented in this period. Jeremy Rifkin, an American economic and social theorist pointed the third industrial revolution is all about the Internet of Energy and how energy, mobility, and digitization will change the future. How technology growth will increase mass outputs in less time and reduce costs.

Soon after the Third Industrial Revolution ended, the year 2000 opened a portal to the Fourth Industrial Revolution also known as Industry 4.0 to digitize production. Technologies that are mixing physical, digital and biological component are causing a huge impact in all the industries and reshaping business models for a better future. The revolution includes scope, velocity, scale and systems impact that takes business leaders into a new age. As internet being more powerful in the fourth revolution linear solution is no more an option. Where exponential thinking is evolving, it is transforming every industry without any exceptions and the transition is still in process.

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Shaping Path To The Next Industrial Revolution?

German Government refers Industry 4.0 as “a technical evolution from embedded systems to cyber-physical systems where Machines no longer simply ‘process’ the product, instead, the future product will communicate with the machinery to tell it exactly what to do. This revolution connects all embedded systems and smart production processes which will radically transform industry and production value chains and business models.”

It is essential for every organization to not only survive in the market but also to stay ahead of the curve. In this current revolution era company’s size doesn’t matter, what matters is the adoption of new technologies and how business leaders are blending it with digital innovation to thrive. The Industry 4.0 that includes all the smart production, Internet of things, digital ecosystems, cyber-physical systems, AI and so much more have engulfed all the industries. Experts say, “we stand on the cusp of a fourth Industrial Revolution” where innovation in technologies will emerge into a new path for growth and development in the future.

“At the end of this transformation process, successful industrial companies will become true digital enterprises, with physical products at the core, augmented by digital interfaces and data-based, innovative services. These digital enterprises will work together with customers and suppliers in industrial digital ecosystems. These developments will fundamentally change individual companies, as well as transform market dynamics across a whole range of industries. And that’s true in countries all around the world – in both the developed as well as the emerging markets”.

-PWC

The Key Essential To Embrace Industry 4.0

Information technology (IT) skills are the essential key to embracing the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. It leads to automation, Big Data Analytics and comprehends how cyberspace is opening a new dimension for the organization. Innovation strategy drives digital innovation and helps companies identify their potentials and sharpness to embrace Industry 4.0.

As per the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Information Technology 2016 Report, countries like Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Singapore, the Netherlands and the United States are the lead generator of economic gains from information and communications technologies (ICT). On average, this group of high-achieving economies at the pinnacle of the report’s Networked Readiness Index (NRI) economic impact pillar scores 33% higher than other advanced economies and 100% more than emerging and developing economies. The seven are all known for being early and enthusiastic adopters of ICT and their emergence is significant as it demonstrates that the adoption of ICTs – coupled with a supportive enabling environment characterized by sound regulation, quality infrastructure, and ready skills supply among other factors – can pave the way to wider benefits.

Opportunities Of Industry 4.0

Driving Income: The Fourth Industrial Revolution has lifted industry’s income levels worldwide. Along with the income, it has also brought a tremendous impact on the work style and the individual quality of living.

Increased Efficiency: Industry 4.0 unlatches opportunities for technologies to increase the efficiency, optimized workflow, and smart manufacturing. World Economic Forum research says, in the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity.

Driving Economy: Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.

Challenges Of Industry 4.0

Automation: Industry 4.0 where digitization becomes the top priority it also becomes the biggest challenge for a company due to automation, which requires flawless connectivity and data sharing, the company’s security and privacy becomes the major concern.

Precision and Stability: To run a successful cyber-physical communication a high amount of accuracy and stability needs to be retained plus the transformation requires huge investments.

Job Segregation: Inequality being the Fourth Industrial Revolution major concern, it is nearly impossible to anticipate what the situation is likely to emerge and it carries the potential to kill jobs and skills in future. This has the highest probability of segregating the job into segments such as low skill will be paid less and high skill will get paid more.

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Although there are challenges, experts realized that the fourth Industrial Revolution is more likely to enhance living standards by increasing the level of digitization and making the technologies available for all. PWC took a survey of 2000+ companies and 33%, says their company is advancing today and it’s predicted to increase over 72% by 2020. Their study declared that at the end of the Industry 4.0 transformation process, successful industrial companies will become true digital enterprises, with physical products at the core, augmented by digital interfaces and data-based, innovative services. These digital enterprises will work together with customers and suppliers in industrial digital ecosystems.

Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation

How & Why CIOs Must ReInvent To Successfully Lead Digital Transformation?

Marc Cecere, vice president and principal analyst on Forrester’s CIO role team said, “When companies were considering a digital transformation, they were looking for somebody who knew technology, who had a lot of clout in the organization, and who touched the bulk of the organization. It comes down to either the head of marketing or the CIO.”

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Digital technologies are transforming workplaces by bringing IT innovation and evolving business culture to adapt to these changes. As it continues to evolve business, digital transformation is becoming more imperative and companies who are embracing the change are taking over the market. According to a research,  125,000 large organizations are launching digital initiatives. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted digital transformation initiatives to double from 20% to 50% by 2020.

Here’s the thing, one cannot integrate digital transformation without a plan or a leader. It needs good understanding and knowledge of technology. It requires experts who can use the tools to digitally transform all the processes and reinvent platforms. That’s when CIOs play a vital role in the technology section of the digital transformation process. Industries like healthcare, finance, etc., are already accelerating adoption of digital technologies to engage customers and CIOs are responsible for offering essential IT assets and equipment to support the change.

 

As per Gartner’s 2017 CIO survey, CIOs are investing 18 % of his/her budget in digitization which is expected to increase 28% by 2018.

How Can CIOs Lead Digital Transformation?

As per IDC research, by the end of 2017, over 70% of the Global 500 will have dedicated digital transformation/innovation teams.

CIO focuses more on IT agility and IT exploration to enable digital transformation. They have to consistently look for the opportunities that extend the company’s digital capabilities by embracing “Bimodal IT”. This helps CIOs to support the business with exploratory (new) digital innovation mode, and simultaneously operate in the traditional mode.

CIOs, offer digital solutions to the company with a clear understanding and vision of what IT can contribute to the business. Gartner’s recent survey has found that 75% of executives expect digital to help double the revenue, which creates an enormous opportunity for the CIO to become a key source of wisdom and advice. They are responsible for retaining discipline and operational excellence in the enterprise while changing the IT culture and becoming more flexible. It requires a remarkable skill to lead digital transformation and CIOs are the valuable assets that drive value to the organization by leveraging technology. They point out technology trends to all c-suite leaders and help them make strategic decisions with the real-time insights. At the top, they are expected to furnish steady IT solutions to all departments and ensure IT security by protecting company’s data and utilize it to bring maximum benefit to the enterprise.

Opportunities For CIOs

Digital transformation is shaping and enhancing the market with a significant touch and almost all enterprises are becoming an IT company. It is increasing the efficiency of customers as well as enhancing employee experience. This creates a huge opportunity for CIOs to envision the transformation’s bigger picture and provide security, reliability, and scalability to the organization. Expert research says, 52% of companies surveyed, CIOs and CTOs are responsible for creating the organization’s digital vision.

CIOs have a distinctive opportunity to usher the digital strategy with the right skills and leadership quality. With a vantage to see the company’s position, they know how digital can alter the fundamentals of their company and participate in generating value by strongly shaping and improving the process.

CIOs with a goal to drive digital innovation in the organization are pushing the limits of their traditional responsibilities to become more than technology experts. Since digital is a capability, IDC predicted, 75% of CIOs will recognize the limitations of traditional IT and embrace a leadership approach that embodies a virtuous cycle of innovation by 2019 and 45% of CIOs will shift their primary focus from physical to digital and move away from BPM and optimization by 2018 to deliver the scale, predictability, and speed.

Challenges For CIOs

 

Leading digital transformation with so many disruptive technologies encountering the business world brings a massive challenge for CIOs. Chris Howard, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner said, “the biggest challenge is reaching escape velocity. CIOs must apply energy to reduce technical debt while converting innovations into scalable capabilities, all of this while resisting the gravitational pull of the pre- transformation organization. Top-performing CIOs use bimodal techniques and renewed influence to accomplish these goals.”

The most common challenges CIOs must be prepared to address

Gaining Tech Talent

Tech talent is one big concern of CIOs today to accomplish their goal and more than 28% of CIOs agrees. It has always been a company’s priority to retain and attract new talent and with the rapidly evolving technology, CIOs are finding difficulties to address this skill gap. Understanding the trends and adapting new technology is a challenge every CIO has, which needs to be foresight to add value in the future.

Drive Digital Environs

Driving a digital environment is substantially different from driving a tech environment. Culture and employee mindset is key and integral to a digital environment and hence would require a different approach and holistic leadership vision. Research report states that CIOs that have taken the “digital leader” challenge is booming, but still under 40%. 2017 has been the ideal time for CIOs to take over the challenge and drive digital transformation in their enterprise.

Security

This is the biggest challenge for CIOs to keep up with the security breaches. The more devices are connected, the more is the threat from hackers stealing company’s data. More than 36% of CIOs pointed security as their top concern and growing use of the Internet of things are bringing up a new aspect of risks for them. They are struggling to keep their organization away from a security storm. Cybersecurity firm McAfee reported 2.5 million IoT devices were infected by malware Mirai botnet in Q4 2016.

Innovate To Grow

Gone are the days when CIO’s only priority was cost savings. With the evolving technology, their priorities have also expanded to bring efficiency, improve processes and drive innovation in the enterprise. As the priorities expanded it requires more resources which are essential to growing innovation. Here’s where CIOs are facing a big challenge to keep up with the speed of innovation. But it’s not innovation, it’s the resources that are needed to bring innovation and the pressure to do more with less. They have to think about the innovation and calculate the risk of investing in new technologies while keeping the company’s budgets in mind.

Despite all challenges in digital transformation, enterprises are focused on their digital investment. Gartner’s 2017 CIO Agenda Survey says, 38% of CIOs are keeping analytics, cloud services, digital market management and security as their top priorities to invest in and enterprises who have already embraced digitization in their business models are spending 34% of the IT budget and will increase to 44% by 2018. With top dollars being spent on digital transformation, the role of leadership in digital transformation becomes crucial. The old style will bring limited results. CIOs need to reinvent to take successfully drive their digital transformation initiative.

Blog, Inmersive Tech

Immersive Technologies: How VR/AR Are Driving Innovation In Businesses?

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Immersive technology comprises virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), all of which merge the physical and digital worlds to create a unique customer experience. AR will naturally morph into MR, while VR will incorporate elements of MR. Virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies have been evolving for many years and are already demonstrating how they can prove to be impactful for businesses. Digital transformation and Innovation through immersive technology will be the game changer for a range of enterprises.

“We are making a long-term bet that immersive, virtual and augmented reality will become a part of people’s daily life.”–Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO ( Facebook)

Immersive technology provides many implications including ease of use, scalability, and new types of content and application experiences for customers and employees.Technology innovation leaders should consider integrating AR and VR to improve customer and employee interactions and business performance.

To achieve an impacting result over and over again, companies need to put the customer right at the center of their digital innovation and use digital technologies to create ‘wow’ experiences for them. AR and VR offer new ways for customers to engage with brands and for organizations to achieve efficiencies via devices like smartphone VR, head-mounted displays (HMDs), smart glasses and 3D experience rooms.

AR and VR will transform today’s user experience into a more continuous and contextual one that significantly changes how people interact with each other and computing systems.

“We predict by 2019, AR, VR and mixed reality (MR) solutions will be evaluated and adopted in 20% of large-enterprise businesses.”–Gartner

Two of the biggest technological developments attracting attention at the moment are augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Once merely indulged in science fiction films, AR and VR have propelled onto the tech scene and are taking the world by storm.

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AR—Immersive Beyond Science Fiction

Augmented Reality is poised to disrupt nearly every industry over the next decade by supplementing human instinct. Enterprise leaders should consider this space if they haven’t already explored it. Augmented reality can fetch digital information into your environment and make it seem real. It leverages and elevates the use of other technologies such as mobility, 3D content management, and location, imaging and recognition. It enhances the user’s senses via digital instruments to allow quick responses or decision-making and proves to be especially useful in a mobile environment.

Augmented Reality (AR) has come a long way into technology from the science fiction stories. This transformation has taken place over the recent years and immersive AR is driving innovation and transforming many businesses. The use of smartphones has increased tremendously in the past few years due to which the technology sector has put a deep impact on business and marketing.

Business owners and marketers are benefitting from these trends and are thus constructing innovative strategies to achieve a cut-throat edge from enhancing marketing communications. This has helped them take customer experience to a new level thus increasing the efficiency of their business operations. AR is proving to be one of the top impending game changers which can create a seamless customer experience and simultaneously bring rich, engrossing virtual content. AR can be leveraged to build an enduring relationship with your customers, increase sales and adding value to the customer experience. The future is already here, and it is virtual.

Impact Of AR On Businesses

AR favors business innovation by enabling real-time decision making through virtual prototyping and visualization of content. Although the adoption of AR in the enterprise is in its initial stages, AR technology has matured to a point where organizations can use it as an internal tool to augment and enhance business processes, workflows, and employee training.

AR will transform the structure of business within no time, the most important transformation for business being AR development for smartphones, tablets, and wearables. Industries are employing top most AR technological tools to provide superior customer experience. Many retail companies(eg: IKEA) are introducing AR tools for customers to try clothes without actually wearing it, and all this just with the help of an Android or iPhone AR app.
“Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality market is going to hike up to $150 billion by 2020. Moreover, AR has got a larger market share of $120 billion and VR gets only $30 billion.”
Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio and other virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects. The business potential for AR has increased through improvements in location services and image recognition. The increased precision of indoor location services has allowed businesses to use AR location features for vehicle, campus and in-building navigation and identification.

Processes that require staff to visually identify objects and parts and for real-time decision making, allow user organizations to use these AR capabilities because of their significant image recognition capabilities.

For instance, firefighters can use AR to find out ambient temperature or a building layout so they know exits, and potentially dangerous areas. AR can prove to be very beneficial as it acts as an internal tool for enhancing current business process, facilitating and optimizing the use of current technologies, and providing business innovation.

The augmented reality technology is still in its infancy, but we can see its steady expansion and evolution, one of the crucial reasons being the increased number of smartphones, tablets, and wearables. As an enterprise you should start analysing how you can use AR for your business or can run a brilliant marketing campaign and draw customer attention. IT leaders should examine the value proposition of AR as an internal tool to enhance business processes and provide business innovation.

VR—Making ECommerce More Immersive

VR enables you to bring the catalogue and rooms to life and it can make you feel transported somewhere else.

Virtual reality could change or completely disrupt the retail industry over the next 10 or 15 years, and cause a monumental shift in the way we surf, shop and experience the web, thanks to the pure power and imagination of human thought. It will dramatically transform the way we learn, live, communicate and connect with others around the world.Once this technology is acceptable, a whole world of possibility opens up to retailers, and many other industries, to reinvent the way we used to do business.
The number of active VR users is forecast to reach 171 million by 2018, according to a 2015 Statista survey.
Technically speaking, virtual reality is a computer-generated environment created in the third dimension that can be explored, and one in which objects can be manipulated. It is the creation of an artificial surrounding through the use of software such that it prompts a sensory experience affecting sight, touch, hearing or smell. It suspends a user’s belief to the point that they accept the simulated environment as a real one.

Over time, VR will transform every aspect of life. It has been around for some time, but it’s the mainstream transition and saturation of this technology that’s going to transform the world on a number of different levels. In fact, years from now, we’ll look back and wonder how we ever lived without immersive technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality, which are set to dominate the technological landscape in the coming years.

Impact Of VR On Businesses

VR will affect businesses both internally and externally. Internally, with more and more businesses conducting their affairs remotely, and often even further afield, an assurance on software such as Skype and Google Hangout to teleconference has emerged. However, with virtual reality technology creeping in, we are able to receive clearer interactions and non-pixelated faces. Due to VR in place, these intercontinental meetings have become more personal by incorporating facial expressions and eye contact, some of the human elements currently lost on Skype.

With the development and advancement of VR we may even see reduced business travel and costs as geography and location become less relevant. On the same note, the HR departments might become remote. This would mean that no matter where you are in the world, you will still have access to the necessary support and help of your company’s HR department.

The immersive nature of VR enables job interviews and training to be conducted remotely. Also, it will help candidates and trainees to get a better insight into what a job actually involves or deliver more experiential training.

Designing process of products will also be assisted by VR – it will create more efficient, life-like user testing and provide much quicker feedback at early stages of production. This will ensure less time consumption, and also cut costs. Businesses will better create and manufacture products that consumers want, the way they want them.

VR technology will create a tidal wave of change for online shopping. When combined with AR, it will help users imagine how items will “fit”. It might be with reference to a spatial arrangement (i.e. furniture for a bedroom) or a piece of clothing on a person. Virtual reality is capable of even bigger changes for businesses, beyond inner workings and processes. For instance, VR will create story-driven experiences for consumers to build relationships with businesses, allowing an individual to get emotionally tied to brands. Customers will explore themselves as active participants when immersed in a VR environment.

In the coming years, VR is also expected to transform the world of entertainment – bringing movies and games to life and totally immerse you when watching a concert or sporting event. And of course, it will revolutionise the way we buy cars, choose holiday destinations and even book hotel rooms. It could even reach as far as military training – putting prospective soldiers into virtual war zones to help better prepare them for combat.

While virtual reality is already impressing thousands over the globe , it’s important to realise that this technology is still is in its initiation phase and has a bit of a way to go. Over the course of the next eight to ten years, virtual reality will become more embedded in everyday life changing the way future generations are educated and altering how we interact with brands.

Virtual Reality Opportunities

Technology has given consumers more choice, and simultaneously made them more demanding. Hence, customer needs to be at the centre of digital innovation. However, organisations must not lose sight of the bottom line, and how digital technologies can drive the cost efficiencies.

Especially, mixed and augmented reality are proving effective in allowing consumers to engage with brands and interact with products like never before.Unlike virtual reality – which totally immerses the user in a new environment – mixed and augmented reality allows consumers to superimpose the world in front of them with virtual elements while eliminating the need for expensive headsets. From a commercial standpoint, this is proving more beneficial and cost effective for businesses because it is allowing consumers to visualise products in front of them, in the environments they would be used.

Before plunging into the pool of opportunities immersive technologies can present to the enterprise, it is necessary to see greater access to state-of-the-art immersive facilities to test and clarify the innovative ideas already being created across the enterprise. Everything we do is digital. Companies won’t see the full impact of their digital investments, until this digital mindset is reflected within an organisation. Digital technologies fundamentally change how companies get launched into the market, what they go to market with, and how they organise themselves internally. For digital technologies to deliver high impact, the whole organisation needs to be on the same page and needs to buy into this new way of thinking.

Blog, Inmersive Tech

The Digital Shop Floors- How Immersive Tech Is Transforming Manufacturing?

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Are manufacturers actually using immersive technology on the factory floor? Is the technology delivering beyond commercial and advertising applications?

Well, yes, actually it has! Immersive technologies have a huge impact and potentially changed the way businesses are done. It has helped enterprises to increase their internal productivity and minimized overall expenses. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), by 2020 the total revenues in the augmented and virtual reality market are predicted to reach over $162 billion.

 

How It’s Helping Manufacturing?

Immersive technologies have found a grip in the manufacturing industry, and are taking the business to the next level. Gartner reports, VR and AR are its top ten strategic technology trends for this year. Enterprises are using these efficient techniques to innovate and facilitate the production process.

In manufacturing industries, it is very essential to have the production process ongoing because every process has its own importance to deliver a final product and immersive technologies have a potential to simulate every little thing on the factory floor. The key benefits of using the immersive technologies in manufacturing industry are to present predictive analytics and boost the product development process.

As per the tech pro research, 48% of enterprises are considering adopting VR and 23% within the next 3 years. Their research also says 67% of enterprises are considering adopting AR and 30% within the next 3 years. According to tech pro the top areas of interest for using VR and AR are simulation exercises, employee testing and training, computer modeling and for use in product development.

Virtual Reality (VR) In Manufacturing

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that generates realistic images, sounds and other sensations that imitate a user to an imaginary environment. It is defined as “near-reality” where virtual means near and reality is what human beings experience in real.

Virtual reality acts as a fence between a tedious 2D experience on screen to a real experience and from improved worker safety to marked up efficiency. Even though its first impact was in entertainment, manufacturing industries are also benefiting from this technology. VR can predict the consequences by giving companies a valuable foresight and quickly help manufacturers find inaccuracy in a product blueprint and fix it! VR analytics can be used to pull out customers insights and help enterprises to focus on their point of sale by keeping the customers in the centered point.

The technology allows manufacturers to interact with the VR model in a practical way before building a real model. This is a cost effective approach, allows agility and saves time. This is why enterprises are interested in investing in VR and as per Digi-Capital report $1.1 billion investment occurred in Q1 2016 and its forecasted revenues of $120 billion for AR/VR by 2020.

Ford an American multinational automaker company was the first one to adopt virtual reality in its manufacturing process and the first one to build a VR model. They use Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to see the changes and how it can impact the model. Ford uses their own in-house solutions into virtual models to improve their automotive designs. Their designers utilize immersive technology to participate virtually from different part of the world to take a tour of a new car.

ESI group a virtual prototyping software company, newly introduced HTC Vive Business Edition equipped with IC.IDO upgradation. This solution is designed to have a performance advancement in functionalities that are used for prototyping, designing, planning, verification and validation. The update allows users to join the VR session from anywhere and interact with designed model.

Augmented Reality (AR) In Manufacturing

This technology adds a new digital layer to reality. It is a real-world environment whose elements are embraced by a computer-generated image such as sound, video, graphics and adds 3D effects on a user’s view.

Augmented Reality is revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. It is turning the factory floor into an interactive field by furnishing all the imperative data to make an analysis. The technology helps to cut down the production downtime and increase the performance efficiency. The technician can view KPIs in real-time, spot out any issues beforehand and resolve the issue to let the agile production process ongoing. It has established a huge potential in training field too, like in operations, aircraft pilots, advanced surgery and so on. Multiple manufacturers  have started considering the augmented reality benefits in the manufacturing industries, for an instance, it helps manufacturers to place all the complex components together in no time. Augmented Reality also can be used in maintenance of the manufacturing materials and to give an expert assistance to the technician.

DHL a German logistics company first used the augmented reality program in 2015. They used Google glass and other AR head-mounted displays for vision picking. The devices helped their workers with the navigation, find their allocated packages by simply highlighting in the displays, so that the packages are identified quickly. Initially 10 workers were able to pick 9,000 orders which allowed workers to perform more effectively and efficiently than before.

Manufacturing industry can use AR devices like Microsoft HoloLens, a headset that allows users to view, hear and interact with holograms within a real environment.Lockheed Martin a global aerospace, defense, security and advanced technology company, use augmented reality glasses that have cameras, depth and motion sensors to cover a digital images against the real working environment. Using the AR the technician was able to read the instructions on how to assemble a specific parts promptly and in an accurate manner. This has increased their accuracy to 96%, while working 30% faster.

Immersive Technology Prospects

Manufacturing industries are considering huge investments in augmented and virtual reality to have a digital work experience that includes, training, design, factory floor service, safety, repair and convenience. UI LABS and The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA) declared the world’s first augmented reality functional requirements guidelines for manufacturing industries. As per Credence Research report, the global AR market is expected to exceed $95 billion USD by 2023. Big Market Research reports says, the global augmented reality and virtual reality gear market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 37.45% between 2017-2021.

The guidelines were created in March at the DMDII workshop. Thomas McDermott, executive director of DMDII said, “Augmented Reality has immense potential to transform manufacturing, and early adopters are seeing impressive productivity and quality improvements. However, wide adoption of immersive technology requires collaboration among the industrial companies operating on the front lines and the AR providers designing solutions to ensure the technology under development meets the needs of industry.”

Immersive Technology will prove to be very promising in the manufacturing industry as we see its implications every now and then. It seems there are growing investments in this area, from Google, Facebook, Sony, eBay and HTC to list a few. While VR has been around for decades now, identifying a breakthrough consumer use case for the technology has not yet been achieved. The biggest roadblock for VR is its limitations to a single user or solo activity. AR has been a step ahead and appears to be surpassing the use case and solo activity issues. AR is an immersive technology that overlays a computer generated image on a user’s view of the real world; for example, in 2016 Pokemon Go, launched by Nintendo,  became a smash hit. Immersive technology has  already forged ahead in education, workplace on-the-job training, retail industry and will be spanning many more industries in the immediate future.

Blog, chatbots

Chatbots in eCommerce: How Smart Bots Are Boosting Customer Engagement & Revenues

chatbots in eCommerce

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” – Alan Turing (Computer scientist)

Digital technology has made it easier for brands to learn customer’s behavior, their needs and offer them the best experience. Technologies that include Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, mobility, wearables, IoT platforms, and analytics has taken the customer experience to the next level.

Chatbots or virtual assistants are creating an uproar in the digital market today. The Retail industry is embracing this technology majorly to redefine the customer experience. According to the Business Insider, more than 11,000 bots came online soon after Facebook released a bot-development platform for Messenger. Macy’s, an American departmental store has launched AI-based app, “Macy’s on Call” for their retail operations. This service is now available in 10 of its stores across the country.

Gartner predicts, by 2020 more than 85% of customer interactions will be managed by artificial intelligence. Also, chatbots are expected to be the subset of Artificial Intelligence technology in the next five years.

What’s chatbot?

Google defines chatbot as a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

According to Techcrunch, Chatbots are programs that respond to natural language text and, optionally, to voice inputs in a humanlike manner. They can execute tasks, give specific commands (think voice control, or most Slack bots), but their raison d’être is that they listen, talk and seem to converse.

Chatbots in E-commerce

Chatbots perfectly fits into the e-commerce space. The business owners are finding numerous benefits and are encouraged to use and create chatbots. Chatbots has grabbed all the big brand’s attention, as the study says, user penetration of messaging apps is estimated to be more than 68% by the end of 2019. It’s basically a messaging app that offers an amazing customer experience, boosts business opportunities, interacts with customers, retains them, and provides personalized shopping experience.

Dylan Bourguignon, CEO and founder of insurance startup So-Sure says, “My take on chatbots is always: ‘what do customers want?’ My answer to that is: ‘a quick, correct and complete answer to their question’. Until AI is able to do that, humans are the best respondents.”

Chatbots act as an interface between the customer and the brand by conducting an intelligent conversation in natural language. It not only automates customer service by helping customers to make a shopping decision, but also solves problems and answers trivial questions. Therefore, helping e-commerce to build a faster relationship with their customers. Spring, an e-commerce company was the early adopter of this technology. Similarly, Taco Bell’s also tested TacoBot where customers can order on chat. Other big brands like, Amazon, a giant e-commerce site has also launched their bot ‘Alexa’ to help customer have an excellent experience while shopping online.

Why Chatbots?

There are multiple reasons why chatbots have been able to establish themselves in e-commerce. It is completely changing the e-commerce functions, it holds multiple platforms that bring potential opportunities for the sellers. Once it’s integrated it makes the retailer’s job easy by driving sales. For example; you want to book a movie ticket with a chatbot— by simply opening your Facebook messenger and typing movie ticket, the bot will book it for you. It will ask your preferences like time, location, seats and show you some alternatives too. It also saves the order history so next time it will be more convenient for you to shop online! Chatbot cuts down all the extra apps, save lots of time and allow users to shop in a conversational way.

Also, helping sellers to generate more lead opportunities. For example; there is a chatbot for cooking recipes and 50K people have subscribed to it. The chatbot sends daily healthy food recipes to the subscribers. Now, a grocery store can target them and advertise its products on the chatbot or the chatbot can simply recommend the store’s product with a link to make the purchase.

Likewise, chatbot can also act like salesman and do upselling and cross-selling of your product. Based on the order history it makes the recommendations or shows complementary products that the shopper might like while placing the order. All these things will help sellers to boost the customer experience by engaging with customers and providing personalized, quick and convenient service to their users.

Survey

Retale, a technology company that develops mobile-first shopping experiences, took a survey among 500 Millennials ages 18-34. Their study says, nearly 60% of Millennials have used chatbots. 40% who have not used a chatbot when asked, more than half said they’d be interested in trying one. Dan Cripe, CTO of Retale said, “chatbots are a relatively new consumer application, but it’s a growing trend, especially among millennials. As we have seen with their embrace of other bleeding-edge platforms, millennials, as an audience, are early adopters – and they see real value in chatbot services.”

Among those who have used chatbots, 70% described their experiences as positive, with 39% of that group saying they were “very positive.” Alternatively, 21% have had negative experiences with chatbots. Of that group, just 6% described their experiences as “very negative.”

In recent years, major brands have launched their own chatbot applications. When asked whether or not they had any interest in trying chatbot experiences from consumer brands, 71% of millennials surveyed said that they are interested versus just 18% who said they are not. When asked if brands should use chatbots to “promote deals, products and services” to consumers, nearly 90% (86%) of millennials said “yes,” while just 14% said “no.”

When asked how likely they are to purchase items and services from brands via chatbots, 67% said they are likely to do so, with 36% of that group calling it “very likely.” Only 14% said that they were not interested and 19% were “neutral.”

E-commerce future with Chatbot

We are living in the most advanced digitally empowered world where the expert says this is just the start! Chatbots have become the engagement tool that is convenient, easy and fun to use. With further developments in the bot space and artificial intelligence becoming more advanced, chatbots are expected to become more intelligent. In the near future each brand will have their own e-commerce chatbot to interact with their customers, solve issues and connect with human on an emotional level. Experts research says, Chatbots or virtual assistants are going to understand human emotional state, analyze itself and give accurate responses.

Blog, Digital Strategy

Digital Transformation Is Challenging? Here’s How To Build A Winning Enterprise Digital Strategy

enterprise-digital-strategy

“90% of CEOs believe the digital economy will impact their industry, but less than 15% are executing on a digital strategy” – MIT Sloan

Simply focusing on the technology is not enough. The first step towards digital transformation begins with a solid strategy. A strategy that can haul the real value of digital technology to create competitive advantage and business growth.

This includes business strategy, customer experience strategy, product, and services strategy, digital technology strategy. Also, digital information and digital investment roadmap are required to provide a great user experience.

What Is Digital Strategy?

Enterprise Digital Strategy is a blueprint of digital technologies for digital initiatives to achieve business goals. A strategy that is focused on deploying digital technologies to improve business performance by creating new products or reimagining current processes. As per Mckinsey’s case study, a correct digital strategy can reshape every aspect of the enterprise and bring benefits. It will lead to high-level policies, business priorities, investment limits, innovative problem solving, and long-term goals. To build an enterprise digital strategy, an organization must prioritize the integration of technologies and adopt digital solutions into their business strategies to survive in the digital world.

Become An Instinctive Enterprise

The focus here needs to be able to use technologies to transform the businesses. As per the Interxion and IDC report, they have defined digital transformation as the use of digital technologies such as cloud, social media, Big Data, mobile apps to fundamentally change an existing process or to do something new that was previously unfeasible/impractical. A digital enterprise is defined as an organization that uses multiple digital technologies to transform a part or all of its business. On that basis, it is clear that companies appreciate how significant enterprise digital strategy is today and to what extent it will be in the future.

An organization must have an enterprise digital strategy to become an instinctive initiative and use the analytics and data to sense and reshape the opportunities to win over their competitors.

50% of CIOs believe that their business is experiencing digital disruptions from competitors through innovations in products/services and new forms of customer engagements in their sector.
17% of CIOs admit to not knowing where the digital disruptions are coming from.
35% of CIOs have developed an enterprise-wide digital strategy.

[Source: Harvey Nash / KPMG CIO Survey 2016]

Often, enterprises are mistaken by the buzzwords and they intend to use all the latest and most exciting technology to create strategies. This approach may provide short-term fuss, but if the strategy is not strong enough it may collapse soon. Always remember that digital is a tool and strategy is a fence to foster the business goal. It includes digital customer experience, digital marketing, digital analytics, etc., that help the organization to provide a consistent digital experience across all the digital channels.

Like any other, enterprise digital strategy comprises of –

  • It includes people who are of digital natives, like developers, designers, marketers, strategists, etc., who can reinvent your entire business.
  • Once the right team is placed, you need to integrate the strategy into their work and depending on your organization’s goals, you need to select platforms like cloud servers, content management systems, data analysis systems, or artificial intelligence.
  • Now once you have selected your platform it’s time to identify your digital products like apps, wearables, responsive websites, IoT smart products, augmented reality experiences and much more that will help you identify your digital strategy.

Considering the user experience it is important to streamline your employees, customers, business partners in your digital strategy framework. At the end, it’s all about people.

Digitalization is far more complex than we think. It becomes challenging when it comes to implementation of digital transformation strategies and of course, it’s not an overnight thing. For example, A store wants to increase its sale. The common strategy would be to pull out data analytics from the consolidated data to determine which buyer generated the highest invoices. This would capture the real data along with digitizing customer interaction. It doesn’t end here, new capabilities, and teams are required to process and maintain the consistency across the organization.

Enterprise Digital Strategies seems to work best when the customers are the point of focus. Enterprise leaders require a process to strategize and determine how to invest and become a competitive differentiator in the industry. Today customers are expecting a flawless digital experience every day, whether large or small, and one way to satisfy them is to have an omnichannel sales strategy. This will enable customers to have more options to place orders from any place, any time, any device and in any quantity. This becomes quite challenging for the manufacturers and service providers to have the efficiency of mass production and to customize it.

Let’s See How DBS Bank Leveraged Enterprise Digital Strategy

Singapore-based DBS bank was awarded the best digital bank. In the year 1968 Government established DBS bank and now it has around 22,000 employees. Their journey of the extraordinary digital transformation started when they brought Paul Cobban who is now Chief Operating Officer, Technology, and Operations for DBS in 2009.

The bank was at it’s worst when DBS CEO Piyush Gupta initiated a strategy that emphasized on the concept of ‘Asian-ness.’ According to Paul, they spent 6 months narrowing down the definition of ‘Asian service’ to respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable. This led to the acronym ‘RED,’ an adjective that became part of the corporate vocabulary. They adopted a customer-centric approach to understand the customer at a whole new level. The third digital strategy was to make the banking invisible. Paul says, “digital is all about the business model, enabled by emerging technology and data. Great user experiences based on ecosystem plays to make the banking component invisible.” he also added, “as banking becomes commoditized, we need to control the ecosystem. That’s how any bank avoids being a dumb balance sheet.”

The third approach was to identify the blockers and take actions like weekly decision-making meetings to discuss problems and present ideas. Paul noticed that the digital transformation is more about culture. He changed the culture to drive innovation within DBS. He says, “We recognized innovation was all about culture and behavior. So we took our leaders and put them in ‘hackathons’ with startups. Hackathons replaced the executive training budget.”

DBS recently launched Digibank in India, a mobile-centric banking service. In order to employ a small fraction of the back office staff, they utilized artificial intelligence-driven automation. This has helped Digibank to span across the subcontinent with virtually no additional investment.

Blog, Customer Experience

7 Key Considerations To Create An Omnichannel Experience

omnichannel experience

Let’s see how Walmart has blurred the lines between physical and online customer experience leveraging omnichannel strategy. It is known for its value-driven culture and creative acquisition strategy. Walmart drives a major chunk of its business through its app. It has accomplished this by revisiting the basics of user acquisition while simultaneously prioritizing the fact that customer habits drive customer engagement just as much as their online shopping experience does.

Walmart came up with an innovative in-app feature called Savings Catcher. This highly recognized feature guarantees app users the lowest-price-possible by scanning QR codes directly into the Walmart app instead of manually entering into the app the long form codes. This simple feature of the Savings Catcher influenced Walmart’s target market (who frequently visit the brick and mortar locations) and led to 10 million Walmart app downloads within a week of its release.  The growth was obviously immense as they considered the top-two reasons to compare: prices and redeem discounts for using retail apps in-store

Walmart understands that app longevity and scalability are closely related to customer engagement. By offering more ways to automate the user savings experience and earn rewards, Walmart customers have become eager to download the mobile app, and regularly check their balance, scan receipts, price items, and refer the app to friends (i.e. a real world example of social proof).

Technology is fast changing the way we live and work. People are experiencing high-quality digital engagements in their personal lives which has led to a paradigm shift in the way they think and behave as customers. Your customer today expects a similar engagement which he experiences in his digital life every day. This has led to companies focussing on transforming customer experience in sync with their customer expectations. Omnichannel strategy helps brands deliver a consistent experience & engagement across multiple channels- in-store, web, mobile or kiosks.

Omnichannel experiences are all flared up these days. From customer service to marketing to sales strategy, the omnichannel experience is becoming central to business strategy and success. “Multichannel support” is sometimes used mutually with “omnichannel support.” Although both indicate customer support across channels, the former does not include a holistic view of the customer experience. Omnichannel experience is about having a continual conversation and relationship across channels, not just being available on multiple communications platforms.

The key to omnichannel experience is realizing that it’s not about channels, but about the consumer. It’s not about messages, but about utility and experiences. It’s about helping consumers to make reliable choices, and uncover an enjoyable experience for themselves throughout the year.

Here’s a glimpse of seven fundamental considerations with which you can create a consistent omnichannel experience for your customers.

1. Monitor, Scale & Strategize

A contingent commerce strategy enables customers to shop anywhere, at any time, simplifying increased interactions between dealers and consumers. However, having every channel open is not always achievable, making it necessary to gauge demand in each channel and distribute the resources accordingly.

You can learn more about your customers who are outside of basic geographic information by focusing more on behavioral data and asking the right questions leading to deeper meanings and understanding. Insights obtained from various data sets can help brands know their customers better.

However, it’s important to figure out which data requires more consideration. When retailers can successfully measure their social outcome, they will be able to attain the actionable judgment that they need to formulate their strategic business plan.

Armed with the analysis regarding consumer preferences and engagements, merchants can avoid misusing resources on less-effective platforms while potentially underutilizing channels through which more customers arrive. By auditing quality across multiple channels, businesses can learn from their customer interactions and modify their omnichannel strategies accordingly, leading to better customer assistance and experiences.

Still, allocating resources based on past data is only half done. The fact that omnichannel retail changes so quickly means the only way to lead is to be ahead of the curve and plan for new developments. Businesses will find themselves losing time and resources if they do not take scalability into consideration while laying the foundation of their infrastructure.

2. Integration Of Physical And Online Experience

Apart from analyzing customer behavior and setting up appropriate triggers, there should be a strong relevance between the brand’s physical and online stores. Customers today expect easy transitions between physical and online stores.

Retailers and brands should leverage innovative new technologies to help cohere the gap between the physical and online worlds to deliver uninterrupted and consistent customer experiences.

Online-only stores will lose out on a huge section of customers if they do not have a presence in the physical world and vice-versa. Even today, customers are motivated by touch and feel and a majority of retail sales happen in physical stores.

3. Consistency In Customer Experience

Shoppers are ardent to their favorite brands due to their consistency and predictable services. Customer behavior and consistency in the omnichannel space is relatively more complicated. Customers expect persistent experience across all devices they use to engage with the brand.

With several influencing factors, purchases can be made at any time of the day or night, either directly at physical stores, or at online stores. This requires enterprises to develop sound omnichannel strategies that take into consideration the different customer paths and expertise across all channels. Understanding the customer’s decision-making process is crucial to developing an omnichannel experience strategy.

A consistent, superior experience across all interaction channels provides a great opportunity for brands to build loyalty. It is something that customers not only expect, but they demand it, and the brands that can best meet this demand will build an exemplary customer relationship.

4. Get Customer Feedback

It’s important to gain an insightful view of the customer to get a complete picture of their likes and dislikes, as well as their buying habits, preferences, and how they behave across all channels. This data will help create an enhanced customer experience. By collecting and analyzing relevant customer data, a brand can build buyer persons, which will help them to use the right tools and technology at the right time in the buying cycle. It’s also critical for a business to test out the buying experience they offer through their customer’s eyes. Make sure the experience is seamless, user-friendly, and free of barriers.

Understanding the customer decision-making process is key to developing an omnichannel experience.  The rise in mobile use for product research provides retailers with the convenience to harness product reviews in store. For example, an app that scans an item’s barcode, and pulls up all the customer reviews related to that product. Retailers could use the app to then provide added incentives to purchase, such as discounts or free gifts and surprises.

5. Blend Local And Social Media

Social media is pitted to be one of the strongest influences in today’s retail space (both online and physical stores). Consumers today not only seek multiple channels to shop but also value product surveys and feedback on social media platforms. For instance, when customers visit Amazon.com, they would not purchase products that have only one star. Social media review platforms have a huge impact on brand loyalty and bad/poor feedback could lead to long-lasting negative effects on retailers. A well planned omnichannel experience strategy will definitely integrate social media and e-commerce in order to ensure retail success.

In-store experiences can also be reinforced by integrating with social media platforms. Retailers can have screens or walls that relay live social media feed or commentary. This can also include images, tweets, and videos in order to drive customer engagement. Dressing rooms can have displays that allow customers to obtain real-time product reviews from social media platforms on the products they intend to buy. Such integrations will also help store staff to monitor in-store social commentary and respond in real time.

6. Personalize Experiences

Retailers can maximize their interaction with customers by personalized emails, recommendations, and promotions. In order to establish a worthwhile connection, consumers are likely to be bombarded with marketing messages. Here retailers need to make sure they deliver information on the products their customers are interested in, and not the ones that the retailer wants to push.

Utilize social media channels to encourage shoppers to share physical experiences with one another. Personalized technology can help create customer experiences that will far surpass less tech-savvy brands.

If your business is majorly online, personalize your store’s checkout experience and provide product recommendations to increase average basket size and improve customer involvement. To add a human touch to an otherwise impersonal shopping experience you can invest in 24×7 phone support and live chat services.

The advantages of selling online versus in stores differ in a few important ways. With online sales, purchasing is only a click away, and customers can buy from anywhere and at any time. In-person, consumers receive specialized assistance from employees who not only help with the sale but also leave a lasting impression on the customer.

7. Stimulate In-Store Technology

In-store technology encourages customers to shop while promoting brand reliability. It also enables consumers to interact with products that create unique shopping experiences.

Being greeted by a trusted associate at a favorite store, having someone remember their buying preferences and being shown what they want rather than sitting through the generic sales pitch, all makes shopping more promising. Most consumers want the in-store experience to have more features like they find online –convenience, ease of use and personalization. Some stores are rolling out apps that help their employees accomplish these things with each customer. There are other apps being developed that deliver information about in-store sales and events to customers as they shop. Physical stores can help in creating fulfilling omnichannel experiences, by also acting as fulfillment centers for the stores’ online counterparts, hence, traditional marketing strategies cannot be ignored.

According to a report by Cisco, 48 percent of consumers use a smartphone to help them shop while in-store. Customers still like to shop in-store, even after the digital world has taken over, so it makes sense to merge the two together.

For instance, the UK fashion retailer, Oasis, have equipped their retail stores with iPads so that shoppers can find out a plethora of product information. If the shop doesn’t have a particular item in stock, the customer can place an order online. As a matter of choice,  they can use their “Seek & Send” service which allows the retailer to locate other stores that have the product and get it sent to the shopper. The customer receives an email with all the information and is notified when their product is on its way.

A well planned omnichannel strategy must seamlessly accommodate social media and e-commerce in order to ensure retail success.

With the emergence of omnichannel experience retail, brands and businesses have to reconsider their strategies in order to meet the requirements of today’s demanding customers and reach them with the most fascinating, flawless, consistent and contextual experiences across all channels.

With ever-increasing customer expectations, omnichannel customer experience is now an important part of the small business approach. Although large retailers have dedicated resources for multichannel selling, new and innovative mass-market solutions now enable smaller businesses to compete more effectively with larger retailers. By carefully considering and implementing some of the tactics shared, you too can access a wider range of consumers and achieve omnichannel expertise.

Blog, Digital Strategy

7 Considerations To Your Digital Transformation Journey

 

Digital-Transformation-Considerations

This new era of digital transformation brought about by the emergence of new technologies like mobile, cloud, analytics, Internet of Things etc., is highly reminiscent of the e-business era. There are many business opportunities to pursue, enabling technologies to be utilized, and customers to be influenced.

The key difference, however, is that IT is becoming a core and essential part of today’s products and services and is opening up, even more, possibilities for business innovation. One of the most important aspects of the disruptive trend that is being observed is its ability to enable digital transformation across the business.

The major focus area within this transformation sphere is the development of “omnichannel” or “digitally connected multi-channel” capabilities. To deliver a seamless, consistent, integrated and holistic customer experience is the goal today.

Figuring out what digital means for your business is hard enough. However, translating that into what you need to do, in what order and subsequently driving the enterprise-wide transformation makes for a daunting challenge.

This discussion delves into the key considerations that underpin a successful digital transformation in virtually any organization. The following seven initiatives serve as building blocks to a successful and profitable digital transformation strategy:

1. Digital Is A Fundamental Change

It’s an elemental change in traditional siloed businesses evolving to become truly agile, flat and much more accessible. You need to expedite new business models.

There is quite a bit of widescale digital ratification happening right now – and a large part of the market is planning and executing efforts. Seize the opportunity for innovation, but you need to plan for quick adoption to gain the maximum market advantage. The need for agility has never been greater and the embracement of new technology has never been faster.

However, unlike other traditional marketing methods, the successful adoption of digital necessitates an intelligent cultural change. Change does not come easily. It starts with concrete steps and actions.  And, those behaviors and actions must be adopted, in priority, by top management.

2. Simple Yet Different

In an era of unprecedented ramification,  businesses are becoming more dynamic and distributed with trends like cloud, mobile and social. All this leads to complexity so, we need to simplify to deliver the messages we want while making it easy for audiences to listen without having to connect the dots along the way.

Simplify everything in order to deliver IT as a service.There is a need for simplicity in infrastructure. And, it is not just the channels serving the customer that need to be simple. The services portfolio, pricing and network availability all have to be in sync to be able to deliver the expected simplicity. Bridging the gap between an ever more complex IT and network environment and a simple customer experience requires a holistic approach to digital transformation that must be grounded in strategy throughout.

Simplicity is the foundation of Digital Transformation. If businesses cannot simplify they cannot react to the market faster and cannot innovate.

3. Build Quick And Automate

Automated build, configuration administration, and translation  tools are already being adopted, but many still require extensive, time-consuming scripting, which is prone to human inaccuracies

Rapid product release cycles include real customer understanding and real customers. These digital sprints create visibility and credibility for your digital transformation. More importantly, as you release these improvements into the market, you’ll listen to real customer feedback which will allow you to kick off your own righteous cycles of continuous improvement to your processes and iterations of your digital strategy. One of the most critical success factors for any digital transformation is gaining cross-functional patronage.

4. Attract Talent For Digital Transformation

The success of any middle market digital transformation plan articulates on the ability of an organization’s workforce to implement it to full capacity. As a host of new digital channels and technology are introduced, it’s essential that the right people are in place to operate them and make sense of the greater incursion of customer data. All the technology in the world won’t deliver results without the people to drive it.

On the marketing side, new potentialities are required to build coercive content, leverage new channels and analyze customer data. An overall shift to a more viable approach also needs to take place for marketing to deliver lead flow and revenue.

For sales, reps need to be prepared for a higher level of interaction, delivering greater value and insight. Sales must possess the commercial acumen and tech savvy to effectively leverage this data in order to deliver a new level of relevance and value.

Plans for digital transformation should strategically address talent retention, with steps in place to either expand the skill sets of existing employees or to target experienced consultants and technology resources to speed and optimize the digitization process.

5. Maximize Data & Insights: Data Integrity and Integration

The process of designing end-to-end customer experiences that are digitally enabled kicks off when a customer is made aware of your offering and closes out at fulfillment, only to start again (or never stop) in an endless stream of feedback loops. This generates insights and leads to improvements.

Every part of your business can generate data, which provides intelligence for other parts of the business, whether these are customer experience metrics or process improvement stats from your production facilities.You need to deliver data that informs business decisions.

It’s imperative that companies who want to go digital understand that digital businesses are data-driven. The virtuous data cycle is one of the continuous improvements and is constantly evolving performance and customer satisfaction.

6. Know What Your Customers Want…Adopt Continuous Delivery

In today’s internet-enabled world, it is no longer optional to be customer centric.

Companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter have delivered a high-quality user experience to today’s consumer. Quality becomes paramount in an era when a customer of several years can be lost overnight if an app crashes or there is no continuity between the physical and online store.

In e-commerce companies, communications must be even more personalized and relevant to increase the chances of opening emails, clicking on links and engaging in conversation, much less in creating conversion. Choose one or a few projects that offer a mix of both, least effort and great value to your customers.

7. Planned & Thoughtful Digital Strategy

The organizational transformations and the digital strategy required for your enterprise are not only a business plan with digital added in, it’s a digital operating system for your business. Hence, it has to focus, not just on technology or marketing, but on the whole range of people, processes, and policies that will allow you to operate your business successfully in a digital world.

The digital transformation journey often marks a pivot or a move into unfamiliar territory for most existing organizations. As the digital market is moving so rapidly and in such unpredictable ways, it’s essential to get strategic advice from experts who have helped other organizations disrupt themselves profitably.

Ultimately, your digital strategy will come into focus when you don’t just ask, “What will digital do for my company?” but rather, “How will digital add value to my customers?”

Possible Challenges In Your Digital Transformation Journey

– Why is a change needed?  Creating a vision for the digital transformation journey

– Enterprise leaders need to share and buy into that vision

– The cultural transformation required to get the entire enterprise focused around the execution of that common vision.

– Need for new skills and competencies (such as data scientists and analytics professionals) that are in short supply.

The pursuit and embrace of revolutionary gains in efficiency and automation have long been cornerstones of business success. The ability to keep up with the rapid and sometimes disruptive pace of change often determines the degree to which an organization both thrives and ensures its pertinence into the future. Companies must compete against similarly-sized counterparts, and also against larger enterprises able to fully leverage economies of scale and smaller industry players capable of the nimblest of operations.

To meet these challenges, many organizations are considering digital transformation strategies that maximize the use of technology across the enterprise. It’s imperative that the shift towards a fully digitized and automated environment must be approached with careful consideration to ensure long-term sustainability, full-scale user adoption and maximum return on investment (ROI).

Digital-Transformation-Challenges

Without a doubt, enterprises that have digital DNA embedded in them have turned out to be leaders in the past year. However, the pace of transformative changes will continue to sweep the market and only the toughest and the most ‘digitally innovative’ will survive the onslaught. Not having a digital blueprint is a risky game to play right now. You’re encouraging disruptive competition into your business. Remember, those “born in the cloud” will always do it economically. If your approach to transformation is to launch disintegrated initiatives that don’t adhere to a single vision or blueprint, it will never get off the ground.

The journey to Digital Transformation demands enterprises to take immediate action while also planning a strategy for sustained improvement down the road. Thinking through the key shifts mentioned above, taking the time to educate the business and then creating a clear transformation vision and guideline will be the key to delivering organisation-wide transformation success.

Blog, Customer Experience

Customer Delight in the Digital Age

 The “new renaissance”, as we speak is primarily experience driven. Over the last decade or so, we see that design has acquired a prominence that eluded it for decades. Apple under the direction of Steve Jobs has always been a design and usability oriented company. While these values brought in a lot of buy-in from certain segments of the population, it has been by and large a specialized phenomenon. It’s only after the emergence of the iPhone and its torrential popularity has the appreciation of design become so mainstream.

We now see a lot of apps and initiatives that are created completely fresh and spontaneous across a variety of industry verticals. A classic example is the seamless customer experience that an Uber app provides, which is extremely simple and intuitive to use and provides real-time updates on what’s happening with your ride and the driver. All of this is being taken up a notch higher by the new Amazon GO retail outlet which uses a cocktail of new age technologies to make shopping so easy, you never have to stand in a queue to pay the bill.

In this article, we explore some of the key principles that dictate a high-quality customer experience in today’s world.

Follow your customer

In today’s world, the opportunities for the number of channels to engage your users has exploded. While earlier it was primarily in person, phone and later the web, you have a lot more channels today. This presents a challenge as well as an opportunity.

Today your customer can be on Facebook, on your website, using the mobile app, or an apple watch or the person can be in your store browsing products. The opportunity here is to lambently engage with your customer irrespective of the channel. Apart from all the customers’ personal devices like mobile phones, wearable etc, there can also be opportunities to use commonly provided assets like a touch screen based station in a retail outlet that helps the customer get more information about your products or overhead displays that promote a specific product or offer. Every successful channel has a clear purpose and brands should create a strategy accordingly.

Anticipate needs and anxieties

While the ability to access on multiple channels, whatever grasps the customers’ attention in the moment, is extremely important. The experience that is being provided matters a lot too. One of the ways of achieving this is to be able to anticipate the needs, wants and anxieties of your customer ahead of time, and cater to them. A lot of this information can be gathered by doing extensive user studies before you start building your product.

Provide continuity

A cardinal aspect of creating a wholesome customer experience is to provide continuity for your activities irrespective of the channel. For example, I could be watching a video on youtube on my laptop. The minute I switch from my laptop to mobile and I start watching youtube again, I should be able to watch the video exactly from the point where I left off watching it on my laptop.

Integrate information

Engagement data from how a person is using a website can be used to influence his experience on a mobile app and vice versa. It’s quite important to be able to integrate engagement information from all channels, combine that with data from transactional systems like CRM so the best possible experience for each specific situation can be created.

Be instantaneous

Customers make buy/ no buy decisions, or form impressions in a matter of milliseconds. It’s therefore quite important that any intelligence that you’re looking to drive customer experience should be able to react immediately and in real time to any initiatives that the customer could be taking on your platform.

Personalize your interaction

Technology today has made it possible to create a million different experiences for a million different people. This is going to be very important as people like to be treated as individuals with specific needs, wants and personality than as a group. The sense of individuality happens to be core to every person and solutions that cater to this need and personalize the conversation, experience, and interaction has a higher chance of being successful.

Create high points

A smooth customer experience can at times be a bit different from customer delight. Customer delight happens when you exceed customer expectations so much that she goes about talking positively about your product to all her friends. It’s important to do user research, find the high and low points, accentuate the high ones and smoothen out the low experience points.

Blog, Customer Experience

5 Tips For Customer Experience Transformation

Customer-Experience-Transformation

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” –Steve Jobs

How can you make your customers want to come back to you? By promoting your products/services aggressively? No! Remember, there are other competitors in the market who are sharing the same space and they too can fulfill your customer’s need.

Of course! Promotions are one important way to let your customer know about your products and services, but also your processes, policies, skills, and motivations have a lot to do in prioritizing your customer’s needs and expectations. That’s when they want to come back to you.

Customer experience is not immobile, it’s a process that needs to be transformed with innovation. You need to keep on innovating customer experience by developing new product ideas, making processes and policies that are convenient for your users and creating new ways for customers to access value. So, what you deliver to our customers is not just enough, it’s how you deliver.

Here are the 5 tips which will help you gain momentum to reinvest in your customer experience transformation

1. Enhance Your Customer Experience Vision

We all are in the customer experience business. Whether it’s Amazon, the online retails giant, or Uber, an American worldwide online transportation network company, every organization is bound to this principle for their success as businesses. To build a unique customer experience, every organization must deliver the conviction and should know their aspiration pivot on what matters to their customers and how it can affect their business. A shared aspiration serves as a guiding light for strategic decisions and execution. Every company should have a shared aspiration, that can unify all interested employees to work together towards a common purpose to have the desired outcome. To build a shared aspiration you need to engage frontline leaders who can fully engage with the problems and are committed towards the goal of promoting change in the organization.

2. Identify Opportunities Within Customer Feedback

To start with, an organization can gather and segment data, which is the typical way of understanding customers. Sources like social media can be used to gather customer’s feedback. This will help an organization identify opportunities to improve within functions, and also help them to identify upstream and cross-functional issues and address the root cause of problems.

Collecting data is not enough though, it needs a human filter, which means, the collected data needs to be analyzed. With the help of the analyzed data, the company can pull out who are their audiences? What motivates them? What can they do to meet and exceed their expectations? The benefits of this approach are that it emphasizes answers to all the questions and then the plan of action can be implemented to embrace the company’s goals.

3. Set Priorities For Customer Experience

Every action will have its impact, whether it’s high or low, so it’s important to set priorities first when planning for your company’s future goals. Should you pick the low-hanging fruit first, which may have less impact, or jump on high impact which may have revenue growth and reduce costs immediately. Again, the impact can be measured in both short and long- term impact. For example, when an organization abolishes some of their policies that might cut down the cost, but it doesn’t really benefit their customers, likewise, when an organization takes pricing actions that can have a quick impact, however, it will reduce the company’s revenue. Impacts are often measured operationally, and other costs are measured through simplifying the business.

By having customer experience data from the customer’s feedback, companies might have to change or eliminate their old policies to drive the long-term impact. This approach will help to create more promoters for the brand. Find the existing problem and fix it! Appreciate each customer for giving their valuable time. This will help you gain more customer experience and exceed their expectations.

4. Digitize Customer Experience Transformation

Advanced technologies and the digital channels have changed customer’s behavior. Digital has transformed the traditional way of doing business along with the quality of the customer experience. It has made products easier to commoditize, bringing in immediacy, personalization, and convenience. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and give them a delightful experience. For example, if you provide a banking service, then improve or minimize the process for your customer and surprise them with some rewards to exceed their expectations.

For the established businesses, it requires following a new method to drive customer experience transformation through digitization. They have to transform their digital customer profile and try to achieve a quick digitization process using concurrent-design approaches. The company also has to keep adding and refining elements in their cycle of testing and learning. This process will result in the company to know what action will have what kind of impact. For example, Starbucks has introduced an app where their customers can order coffee using the app. The objective is to make the coffee-buying process a unique experience. They created a new set of processes that integrated the company’s mobile loyalty program and point-of-sale applications. They re-engineered the flow of line operations and they also built a fully functional mock store within the company’s Seattle headquarters.

5. Measure Employee’s Performance

The collected data helps to determine what programs failed and where did they go wrong? Also, with the help of the same data, they will be able to bring out a solution and motivate leaders to take actions. Measuring the performance, as an organization, will engage their employees to know their goals and encourage them to bring a change. To help employees realize their goals and identify their strength areas, it’s important to understand and plan strategically important capabilities. Based on which they can intervene, like leadership, role modeling, training and career-development programs, etc.

It is vital for an organization to make each individual’s effort count in the process of achieving the business goals. At the same time company must establish a customer experience transformation, by aligning its functional and cross-functional initiatives with metrics.

Case Study

“You’ve got to develop relationships. You can’t do things just in a formal context.” –Kenneth Chenault, the CEO of American Express.

American Express, the financial services brand, established in 1850, best known for its credit card and traveler’s cheque businesses. The company that is roughly worth $15 billion and acquired 22nd rank as the world’s most valuable brand in the BusinessWeek magazine, is extremely focused on providing excellent experiences that enrich their customers’ lives and build business success. They believe, with a heritage built on service and sustained by innovation, the company ably lives up to its reputation, ranking at 16th place in the 2015 US customer experience excellence rankings, with scores across The Six Pillars that are 16 percent higher than the American average.

They changed their business practices and their contact center employees are now referred to as Customer Care Professionals. The employees are specifically taught to adapt their interactions depending on the personalities of the individuals and trying to resolve customer’s issues at first contact. Employees are empowered to take necessary actions to ensure the customers are satisfied.

The key part of American Express’s customer experience transformation is ‘service recovery paradox’, which means, recognizing issues beforehand and finding a process that ensures the swift resolution of customer issues. The company has learned how to harness the pillar of resolution to build its business and reputation. It describes itself as one of the most “respected” and “trusted” service brands in the world, laying down a list of Blue Box Values that remind customers and employees of its core beliefs. These include

A Customer Commitment – “We develop relationships that make a positive difference in our customers’ lives.”

Integrity – “We uphold the highest standards of integrity in all of our actions.”

Respect for People – “We value our people, encourage their development and reward their performance.”

Personal Accountability – “We are personally accountable for delivering on our commitments.”

For Tamsin Jenkins, head of Customer Experience Excellence, KPMG Norwood, the consequences of the brand’s improvements are far-reaching. She says, “American Express’ switch from call duration of engagement has benefited both customers and its business as a whole. The brand’s emphasis on more authentic conversations has optimized customer loyalty, leading to a 400 percent increase in retention. In addition, the company’s stock price is now higher than it was before the global financial crash and as such, demonstrating the impact of such customer experience transformation.”

Source: engagecustomer.com
An organization requires to frequently transform their customer experience efforts to meet their customer’s expectations. Keep redesigning the program, see what goes well, engage your customers and minimize the inevitable resistance. The Customer Experience Transformation program helps you to identify, design, and implement strategic solutions to the customer management issues.

Blog, Gamification

5 Ways Enterprise Gamification Can Help You Build An Engaged Workforce

Enterprise-Gamification

“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled.Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers,which leads to profitability.”– Anne M. Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox

Digital transformation has transformed every aspect of a business today including product development, customer experience, and even employee engagement. Today’s millennial workforce wants to work in a lively environment which is at par with what they experience in their personal lives. A recent Gallup study shows that only 31 percent of employees feel engaged at work, 51 percent disengaged and 17.5 percent actively disengaged. The least engaged workers are Millennials. Since this group will reportedly make up 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, it’s a problem you can’t ignore. Today digital technologies have come up with a range of solutions that can transform employee experience and make work fun.

Enterprise Gamification is a process that can help organizations to build an actively engaged workforce with game mechanics. It motivates employees and inculcates a sense of competition at work. This approach recognizes employees who have achieved points for the reward. A 2013 survey by the Aberdeen Group showed that organizations using gamification improve engagement by 48 percent and reduce turnover by 36 percent, compared to 28 percent and 25 percent (respectively) of companies that don’t use this approach.

Gartner defines gamification as, “the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people, driving the achievement of business goals.” Gamification implementation, when done correctly develops new skills because it’s isn’t just having fun. It’s about encouraging learning behaviors that will lead to improved performance.

1. Motivate Employees

What motivates employees at work? Once you learn to inspire your employees and instill the importance of the intrinsic motivation, you can implement your strategies accordingly. “People might get motivated by receiving a gift card, but what actually drives them is recognition [as well as] status, appreciation, and an identity,” says Gabe Zichermann, author of The Gamification Revolution and founder of Dopamine. You can motivate your employees by giving them power and tell them where the job is done well. Likewise, there are different ways how employers can use the appreciation tool to motivate their employees in the long term. Some are motivated by achievements, hence keeping a centralized reward system can create an objective workforce among the employees and it also maintains the enthusiasm with proven, quantifiable results.

2. Engage Employees

Gamification is one of the most proven techniques among the various ways to drive learning which engages employees. Both gamification and eLearning work together towards building a team and driving performances. Also, it creates a healthy work environment where employees get to know their areas of improvements. Gamification can help each employee to track their performance, know where they or their team stands and the goal that needs to be achieved. Designing gamification apps can break the communication wall and thus improve the team spirit. So, you can keep your employee engaged as well as measure their progress on the projects. “Oftentimes, employees know when they’re in a rut. They may not want to acknowledge it or address it, but typically employees recognize it. The gaming side of gamification gets employees motivated, but the analytics side of gamification gives employees and managers deeper insights into productivity,” says Gimbel.

3. Transform Performance

Introducing gaming into the workspace will create a certain level of competition among employees. It sets performance goals for the employees. They will compete to win among their peers as well as try to outperform their own best. This in turn will improve the company’s performance and help the employee to gain a sense of expertise and autonomy at work. Introducing gamification like gamified virtual apps, team quiz, company culture quest, questionnaire to spread the safety awareness will keep your employees engaged. This will change the laid back attitude of employees and also the way performance is managed, thus elevating the production level.

4. Attract Talent

Now everyone has the chance to freelance and have multiple sources of income. To keep up with competitors, companies need to get creative to attract fresh and brightest talent. Gamification can attract young professionals who think out-of-the-box, it also helps to find new ways, blend company’s objectives with a touch of fun and excitement. It not only attracts prime talent but also motivates employees for the challenges.

5. Meet Objectives

Understanding goals and staying focused is a huge challenge today. Multinational companies, especially contact centers have integrated gamification and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) software solutions into their workspace to overcome this challenge. It’s a cost-effective tool that helps them develop, share and communicate. It also keeps the track of goals in a timely manner with reliable data. This process falls under SMART criteria associated with Peter Drucker’s influential Management Objectives theory, i.e., Specific Measurable Assignable Realistic Time.

To adopt enterprise gamification in your business you need to first identify your employee’s ability and their area of knowledge. Take a look at the metrics and compare the results. Design a gamification approach and then integrate the gamification tools with your systems for employees to focus on strategic goals and work to surpass them. Finally, an effective enterprise gamification platform can incentivize the process and inspire employees to take a required action in your company’s favor.

Case Study- How we helped Tesoro leverage gamification for employee engagement

Tesoro, a Fortune 100 oil and refinery company, partnered with us to build a serious game that would simulate their day-to-day operations and make it easier for schoolers, job aspirants and employees, to understand the oil refining process.

The Tesoro introduced a simulation game, where players have to manage a virtual refinery and marketing company. It takes the gamer through the entire oil refining and marketing process, roles of various stakeholders and what it takes for them to be a part of the industry. The main motive of this game is to educate the employees by showing the bigger picture so that they understand their responsibilities and let them interact with various units at work and simultaneously learn the functioning of the industry as a whole.

The game was designed wherein users will gain points by taking quick actions for alerts and maintaining equipment. The user will also earn points for successful deliveries and each time a new supplier or customer is added. The gamers are penalized when vehicles and aircrafts (customers) run out of fuel. At the end of the game, other bonus score elements are added to make the final score.

The Tesoro Refinery Sandbox Game has brought a deeper engagement amongst the employees which in turn has increased efficiency and safety ratings in the workflow. It has helped to deliver high engagement scores across its target groups. The game helps Tesoro to comprehensively assess the skill set of the job aspirants and filters high-quality talent for them. The game is also helping the company to get optimized value from its training programs with employees reporting higher retention scores.

Digital Strategy

Digital factories and the next industrial revolution

digital-factories

First, there was the tools revolution. Humans invented things like hammers, spears, and knives to help them do what they wanted to do faster and in a more elegant manner. That went on for millions of years.

Then the man, or in this case a certain gentleman named James Watt who figured out that burning coal can create steam, and steam, when constrained and well directed, could get a lot of things done. This, of course, changed the world dramatically over the last few hundred years. The entire social order and global order were up-ended.

The rate of production was no longer constrained by the training and constraints of individual human beings. Social order was upended as the concept of factories came into being. Global economic orders were upended as erstwhile leading economies like China and India were taken over by western Europe.

This saga got a further fillip when electricity was invented and made its way into factories. Now it’s not just one machine that was getting powered, but all the machines in the factory were getting powered from a single highly transmittable source. This was of course magic and contributed in productivity improvement manifold.

The next big change was the invention of the industrial automation technology, which was a direct offshoot of the innovation in electronics and software. You can now use electronics to communicate between one machine in the factory and another, and you can even look at a central unit communicating with and controlling all the machines in the factory.

So. What’s the next big thing? This thing is called industry 4.0 and this is all about driving extreme intelligence into the factory. Now, what’s that again?

So, we have most of the machines in the factory already being connected in some way to a centralized control unit that can monitor production levels, raise alerts and so on. This is like a system that provides a certain degree of control, but it is limited in its scope. This system is unable to take into account the entire historical data related to the factory and try help you the factory better. This is unable to perform simulations and explore the conditions the factory should be operated in.

Outside of the factory, in the consumer and the business space, you’re witnessing some rapid improvements in technology and its usage. The internet has become all pervasive and people are using it to connect with each other using messaging apps, social networks etc. New devices called wearables have been invented that monitor various parameters of an individual like activity counters, heart rate counters etc and make historical information available to users and neatly presented. The ability to ingest humungous amounts of data and make sense of it in a sub- second interval has become the commodity.

It’s not a surprise that some of these technologies will find their way into the factory. Factories apart for the productivity and quality benefits that they provide are rife with too many problems. Machines break down with no advanced notice and millions of dollars are lost every day in productivity because of that. The wrong kind of products keeps getting manufactured in the factory leading to capital being sunk into products that are not generating revenue. Sales orders are missed out as the factory has limited production, and factory managers are finding it difficult to reconcile how to meet the demand with existing production lines. A number of finished goods that are produced that don’t meet quality norms lead to losses.

A small change in any of these parameters, even something amounting to 1% can create a big impact on the business as a whole. That’s what industry 4.0 or the Industrial internet as its called is looking to achieve. The objective here is to be able to connect up all the machines in the factory, collect a lot of real-time data from them, and mine the huge volumes of historical data that has been generated to generate intelligence which can then be applied to running the factory a lot better. That, in essence, is the goal of the Industrial Internet.

Today, the performance and environment data from each machine are being used to predict when the machine is going to fail and more specifically which part. This means factories are able to replace them early and ensure continued and smooth operations. You are able to simulate and find out what the optimal conditions for operating the plant for a given production target so that you’re using the right amount of power and raw material and no more. This helps in reducing costs. You’re introducing a variety of sensors at each stage in the manufacturing process to identify and then eliminate low-quality products earlier in the production cycle, thereby increasing productivity and containing costs. You’re looking at data to help you with the right configuration of the assembly for a specific period so that multiple product lines can use the same machines to meet sales order and optimize productivity.

There is, of course, a cost attached to implementing Industry 4.0 solutions. However based on industry data the benefits look to far outweigh the costs, and besides its the new normal. Just like we use messaging apps in our daily life, factories are expected to adopt the Industrial Internet.

Digital Strategy

All you need to know about Block Chain technology

Programming editor for CSS language

Double entry book keeping first originated in the western world in the thirteenth century and Italy and was brought into prominence in later years during the Renaissance by the Medici family of Florence. It is said that the world of global commerce changed permanently after that. It’s now possible to do serpentine transactions with multiple parties over a long period of time, and still make sense of it all decades or centuries later. Double entry book keeping created a permanent revolution.

A movement of similar impact was being given birth to when someone with a pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on building a currency system which is beyond the control of any formal central bank and that is autoregulated using software. That became the now very popular financial system called Bitcoin.

There’s something of far more importance that hidden away in the Bitcoin story, and that is this wonderful technology called blockchain. I’m sure all of you have heard about this technology, so let’s try to understand this a bit more, and why this is so revolutionary.

Blockchain is a completely different way of doing things from a lot of different perspectives:

Decentralised control
Any formal systems in today’s world need to work with some kind of an authorization system. Let’s take a financial transaction for example. You spend hundred rupees in the shop and buy some vegetables. You hand out a hundred rupee note, and the shopkeeper accepts it. The shopkeeper is accepting it because the Reserve Bank of India, is guaranteeing the shopkeeper that he can return the note to it at any time and reclaim value. The Reserve Bank of India controls how many notes are printed every year what new notes need to be introduced and in recent times, taken out. Or if you buy something from an online portal like Amazon, and if you need to return something, the people at Amazon check whether you really bought it, and allows you to return it as per their terms and conditions. When you apply Blockchain technology to this problem, you are essentially taking the human or organisational element out of control. The software controls the issuance of new currency or the validity of a transaction, which is revolutionary,

Distributed Accounts
A lot of the decentralized control is being achieved because there is no single server or set of servers in which all the data related to transactions are being stored. For every transaction that occurs, the records of each transaction are stored on as many nodes as possible. This means that no one can really control the record store, that makes it very difficult to do some faulty accounting, and also there is no single point of failure. Today a lot of large companies own a lot of your personal information whether it’s your demographic, financial or behavioral history. You can potentially have a hostile takeover in which a real nasty man can take over your favorite bank and destroy all its records. In the blockchain world, that is not possible as every customer has the complete database of all the transactions that happened in this bank available on her personal computer.

Indelible transactions
Another deviation that can happen in a controlled environment is tampering with data. If for example, you buy stuff at a large e-commerce store, and people in the company want to change the details of what you bought, they can do it today by tampering with the database. In a blockchain world, each and every transaction that is recorded also records with it, all the previous transactions that happened between these entities. Therefore there is simply no concept of deleting or modifying a record. Records can only be appended to, which brings about dramatic changes to a lot of industries.

Now that you have explored the core concepts of blockchain technologies, let’s look at some of its applications:

Governance
Let’s look at voting for example. Today there are a lot of issues that are being raised about the hacking of electronic voting machines. In a blockchain world, each and every vote that is cast will be recorded in a manner that is simply tamperproof. You cannot change the vote once it’s recorded, and in a connected world, neither can it be destroyed. This makes the whole democratic process even more powerful

Supply Chain
Today there are a lot of situations where ingredients that are being transported always need to be maintained under certain climate conditions. At the point of delivery, you never know whether these conditions have been met during the course of the journey. With a clever combination of the Internet of things and blockchain technology, you can authentically track whether the climate conditions have been enforced. This also goes towards ensuring that the right ingredients have been used in manufacturing medicines, organic food etc.

Digital Goods
One of the problems with digital currency and digital goods is that they can be replicated at no cost, unlike in the physical world. All I need to do if I want to pirate some software is to copy a license key and share it with a friend. With the application of blockchain technology, it is no longer that simple. Smart contracts can be drawn up to ensure that the digital goods are being used in a specific manner and piracy can be reduced. This can also enable a secondary market to open up for digital goods where I can pass on my access to a digital good to someone else, for a price. At the point, each digital good can be verified by anyone for authenticity a completely new economy can open up.

These are but a few applications of blockchain technology. Keep looking forward to a world of increased authenticity and decentralization, where it becomes even more important for you to walk the right path, as every action of yours is stored somewhere and contributes to your reputation.

Digital Strategy

12 Experts Share Their Winning Secrets Of Successful Customer Experience Transformation

Customer-Experience-Transformation

Increased adoption of digital tools by customers has led to a massive shift in their behavior and expectations. No longer a customer is satisfied by traditional benchmarks like cost, timely delivery etc., but also expects personalized and rich experience every time he engages with your brands. This massive shift in customer expectations has led to businesses transforming their customer services and experiences. Transforming your customer experience is a daunting task requiring massive resources and deep planning. If your business is thinking of transforming customer experience then we have tried to make it easier for you. We’ve reached out to 12 leading experts in customer experience transformation, asked them to share their thoughts and listed out 12 winning secrets for successfully transforming customer experiences.

Secret #1 Customer Experience Should Be Part Of Your DNA

It is essential for an organization to know their aspiration pivot on what matters to their customers and how it can affect their business. A shared aspiration is a very important thing that requires in customer-experience programs. Shep Hyken customer service and experience expert, keynote speaker and NYT bestselling author, advises:

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken,
Customer Service & Experience Expert

“There is a lot that goes into creating a customer experience transformation in an organization. Step one would be to recognize this:

Customer service is not a department. It is a philosophy to be embraced by everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the most recently hired.

Brands that deliver amazing customer experiences make it part of their culture. Take a look at the companies best known for service and experience, and you’ll see it is in their “corporate DNA.”

It starts with leadership defining what the brand’s customer experience looks like. That’s the customer service or experience vision. It has to be a simple message that is easily understood and followed. From there everyone (not just customer-facing employees) is trained to the vision. And, leadership must lead by example. They set the tone and example for others to follow by the way they act out and support their vision.”

Secret #2  Great Customer Experience Transformation Means Collaboration, Commitment and Transparency

To run a successful business and remain competitive in the digital era, one must understand that the secret sauce of any organization’s success is ‘Teamwork’ and staying focused. Ian Golding, Certified Customer Experience Professional, speaker and blogger says,

Ian Golding
Ian Golding,
Customer Experience Professional/Blogger 

“My biggest advice to any organisation is summed up in three words – COLLABORATION, COMMITMENT, and TRANSPARENCY! The only way any organisation will be able to sustainably transform putting the customer at the heart of everything they do is if everyone in the business, from top to bottom, is prepared to work TOGETHER to achieve that aspiration. To that requires a huge amount of courage and COMMITMENT – it is a long-term business strategy that will require the will and effort of leaders to keep going, whatever barriers are put in their way. Finally, if the transformation is going to work, every decision and action made in relation to the customer AND employee experience must be made TRANSPARENTLY – all employees of the organisation need to know the what, how and why!”

Secret #3  Transformation Is About Change

Adapting to change is a must for any organization. And one cannot bring the change overnight. It is a more daunting task to implement the changes, but not impossible. Your frontline employees hold the keys to boost your Customer Experience. Chip Bell, Customer Service Expert, Keynote Speaker and author of Kaleidoscope opines:

Chip Bell
Chip Bell,
Customer Service Expert

“The biggest mistake companies make is not actively involving their frontline ambassadors who are armed with great insight into what matters to customers. Transformation is about change. People do not resist change; they resist the prediction or perception of “pain” over which they have no control. Involving the frontline helps gain their commitment (not just compliance). People are more likely to care when they share.”

Secret #4  Customer Experience Transformation Is a Long Game

Customer Experience is a long term business strategy. If you are looking for short term results, then Customer Experience transformation will not be the way to achieve it. Todd Bouldin, Trainer, coach, blogger, author says,

“My advice is to make sure you have passionate and authentic commitment from the C Suite. If not, short term sales and profit goals will get in the way because CX requires long-term thinking.”

Secret #5  CX Is About Strategy and Culture

The biggest fence to transformation is not just technology, it’s strategy and the culture. Technology provides the opportunity to do things better, it’s people who need to extract gains from the technology. Tim Hughes, #1 Global Social Selling Pioneer and Innovator, Speaker – Co-Founder of Digital Leadership Associates has his take on this:

Tim Hughes
Tim Hughes,
Global Social Selling Pioneer

“There are three things that people need to take into account when they look at any transformation; People, Process and Technology. It is the people, the process, and the changes in behaviour that will have the most impact and not the technology. Don’t forget that any change needs to imbedded as people will always revert, initially back to what they did before the change.”

Secret #6 Both Customers and Employees Matters

Employee experience and customer experience are real. Listening and fixing issues will increase the satisfaction level of both customers and employees. Adrian Swinscoe, Customer Experience/Service, Consultant,  Best-Selling Author/Speaker says:

Adrian Swinscoe
Adrian Swinscoe,
Customer Experience/Service, Consultant

“My quick piece of advice is to start by listening to your customers and your frontline staff and fix what they say is broken.”

Secret #7  Empathy Is the Key to Great Customer Experience

The best way is a customer-obsessed approach to innovation and excellence. It requires commitment and the leaders should be able to persuade and be resilient and act as the authority for the end-to-end customer experience. Joakim Thörn, Customer Engagement Transformist & Speaker, suggests:

Joakim Thörn
Joakim Thörn,
Customer Engagement Transformist & Speaker

“Customer Experience Transformations is all about three things to reach success:

1. It´s all about TLC: Total Leadership Commitment around CX as a business discipline and the only sustainable competitive advantage

2. It´s all about embracing the outside in perspective, in the whole organization, and to gain deep understanding and empathy about your customers need, wants and desires with Customer Journey Mapping and strong personas.

3. It´s all about emotions. When companies are able to identify, measure (Voice of the Customer Program), and tap into these emotional motivators, they have a winning strategy to create loyalty, where customers stay longer, pay more and recommend your brand to friends and colleagues.”

Secret #8  Emotions Are the Best Customer Metrics

Gallup research says, companies that have optimized emotional connection have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth. Their customers spend more, return more often, and stay longer and companies who failed to build an emotional connection they are long forgotten. Maurice FitzGerald, VP Customer Experience HP Software (rtd.), HP, Compaq, DEC, Wrangler, blogger and author shares his thoughts:

Maurice FitzGerald
Maurice FitzGerald,
VP Customer Experience HP Software (rtd.)

“Here are the two main ‘secrets of success’ that I learned over many years. I learned the first one a long time ago. I learned the second one about two years ago and wish I had understood it much earlier.

1) It is essential to position the enemy as outside the company. The purpose of any strategy, including a customer experience strategy, is to win. Understanding what competitors are doing and how you compare helps sales people and facilitates communication.

2) Communicating progress using numbers is ineffective. You must grab your audience at an emotional level. A security software company could talk about numbers internally. It is more memorable to show a photo and say “This is John Smith. We lost his data. He lost his job.”

Secret #9 Develop Customer Experiences with Human Centered Design to Create Advocates

Customer experience is human. If any company overlook this then this is the biggest mistake they are making.

Jeofrey Bean, customer experience expert and author of ‘Customer Experience Rules’ and ‘Customer Experience Revolution’ says,

Jeofrey Bean
Jeofrey Bean, Customer Experience Expert and Author

“HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN is a simple and effective way to create a virtuous feedback loop to develop the total customer experience, from discovery to advocacy.

Design every part of the customer experience continuum with input from real people who closely match your present and future customers (Personas) to improve your CX interaction continuum including your people, messages, technology, products and services.

At every stage of development, from prototype to market, have real people test it. Refine the each part of the experience with their feedback until actual users report that it is as good and easy to use as it can be.

Modern companies such as Warby Parker and Etsy have embraced human-centered design to improve their products and services.

Keep people in the loop to determine and develop a complete customer experience for them. One that creates high levels of customer advocacy!”

Secret #10 CX Requires CEO’s Commitment

Culture change is one of the requisites to run a successful customer experience transformation. To do so, we need a clear vision and CEO’s commitment to do bring people together and extract gains from the technology. After all, customer experience is all about culture. Andrew Witter, Adviser in growing the small business and improving customer experience, public speaker on consumer behavior says,

“That has to be executive commitment. Without commitment from the CEO you’ll never change the culture geared to superior customer experience. It’s not about strategy, it’s about culture from the top down.”

Secret #11 Customer Experience Transformation Is Done Right If You Focus on the Word ‘why’:

Before embarking upon the journey, you must set attainable goals and know the purpose behind. If you ask why behind every change, then you can perform better. Adam Toporek, Customer Service Expert suggests:

Adam Toporek
Adam Toporek,
Customer Service Expert

“Embarking on a customer experience transformation? Then make sure to focus on WHY. At a strategic level, WHY clarifies your purpose and helps define your goals. At the executional level, sharing your WHY with those who will be driving the transformation throughout the organization is essential to getting not only buy-in but motivation as well. Too often the WHY is “we need to improve our customer service.” If you show your team what the changes will mean to customers, the organization, and them, it will help align you around a common purpose and set you up for success.”

Secret #12 Customer Service Begins at Home

Technology has made a huge impact on consumer behavior and their expectations. Customer experience begins even before the customer pulls into the parking lot. In order to meet their expectations, concentrate on your employees first, because they hold the key to success in transforming the customer experience. If the employee engagement is done correctly, then it will help companies adapt to fast-changing customer expectations, as they both work conjointly. Karolyn’s Corner, Teacher, Speaker, Customer Service Blogger/Coach says:

Karolyns Corner
Karolyn’s Corner,
Teacher/Speaker/Blogger

“Customer service begins at home. Don’t reach outward until you reach inward. Take care of your employees and they will take of the customer.”

Technology

Develop software faster with DevOps

DevOps-software-development

While it is not a panacea that can resolve all problems, DevOps is an emerging practice that comes close to it

Devops is the new discipline that allows you to develop and run software faster and better. Traditionally Business and IT in the enterprise have always had this love – hate relationship. In a world where digitization is becoming more and more relevant, they rely on each other for their individual successes. Having said that, often times their priorities can differ and that can be a source of unending friction.

Business wants IT to deliver things quickly. They want to make changes to the existing system overnight and have people using the new features in the morning. They want IT to be reacting too slow for anything they would like to get done. IT has different priorities and constraints. It needs to ensure that all the right processes are being followed for development, testing and deployment. It needs to ensure that the best practices and technologies identified by it are being used for the new initiative. All of this takes a lot of time, effort and money that business is generally not appreciative of.

While it is not a panacea that can resolve all problems, DevOps is an emerging practice that comes close to it. Its helping create the much needed agility in the software development process and also helping in improving quality of the end product. Traditionally software is developed in three stages.

Development

Once the requirements for a project are complete, the software architect designs how software needs to be built, and developers build the software. Once the software is complete, and assured of reasonable quality it is sent to the testing team to ensure that it is defect free.

Quality Assurance

Once the software has been built, the QA team performs a series of manoeuvres to ensure that the it is ready for being deployed for access to the users. It its not found suitable, it is sent back to the developers to fix the defects.

Production

Once the testing team has certified that the product is ready to be released directly to users, the production team is responsible for deploying the software on various machines so that the users can access it. It is also responsible for ensuring security, performance and uptime. So it continuously needs to monitor the system.

Each cycle of software in traditional process takes many months and sometimes years. In recent times, newer development methodologies adhering to “Agile Principles” have brought that time down to weeks instead of months. As part of this there have been some innovations focused on reducing the software development cycle time while maintaining quality. Some of these innovations include processes that blur the distinctions between development, testing and production. A collection of such practices and technologies that aid those practices are together known as “Dev Ops”.

Let’s look at how things change with the DevOps model. The first impact is on the development phase. Increasingly the trend is to develop software in smaller iterations of one-two weeks. This is inspired by the “Agile Methodology” in software development. There is another big wave of practices and tools that is a subset of Devops called “Continuous Integration” or CI. More on that later.

Devops also tries to achieve efficiencies in the testing phase of the project by encouraging developers to adopt automated testing. By using automated testing, the biggest advantage is that the manual effort involved in testing each and every release that is made available to the user decreases considerably. This leads to shorter timelines and better quality.

The third and most important difference is around operations and the production environment. In earlier times, teams were operations heavy. You needed operations team members to configure servers, configure them, ensure that deployment is happening currently, keep monitoring the servers constantly for anomalies and keep scaling up the servers and scaling down whenever needed. It was a full house and I’m not even touching the tip of the iceberg.

Things have changed with dev ops. Now large companies can do ten or hundred or more releases every day, because even a small feature can be released in isolation. Further developers check-in code to the repository on a daily basis, and a build is generated quickly. Any compilation errors, or failed test cases during the build or automated test that follows the build are immediately flagged to the developers for fixing. This ensures that the code base is stable and well tested.

Once the build is generated, configurations for the servers are automatically created by tools, deployment happens automatically and so does the server monitoring and scaleup/Scale down.

All of this ensures that software is being developed at a much faster pace and with a higher quality, and I’m sure this makes all of us addicted to our smartphones, so happy!

Blog

The Neural Link

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Last week in my article titled “Scenes from the future”, I mentioned how recent advances in brain activity sensing technology are making possible what Prof X from the series “X-Men” can do. Basically, interpret what someone is thinking from a distance and also to control activity from a distance.

It’s quite interesting to note that this week on Monday, Elon Musk announced the launch of his new startup ‘Neural Link’. The new company is expected to design networks to link human brains with computers, and this will be achieved by a technique similar to embedding small electrodes in the brain. If you’ve been following Elon Musk on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, you will notice that typical to him, Elon has a contrarian view on whether AI is useful to human society in the long term.

Speaking to a select audience at MIT in 2014, he mentioned: “With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon”. His notion is that with time we will be creating ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence. This is intelligence which is millions of times smarter than humans. What we will need to take a few decades to comprehend, ASI can do it intuitively. At that point in time, humans may no longer be in control of machines nor are we in a position to interpret their actions.

Irrespective of the number of safeguards that we build into these systems so that no accidental harm will be caused to the human civilization, it is extremely difficult to predict or control 3rd order and 4th order effects of an action. Therefore it’s very likely that a safeguard that we might put in the core operating system for protecting human beings, can turn out to be something that creates massive problems.

The strategy that Elon seems to be going after is to augment human processing abilities with that of machines. While human brain takes hundreds of thousands of years to make significant evolution, computers are doubling in capacity every two years following Moore’s law. Even this growth is set for exponential growth once quantum computing technology becomes mainstream. Therefore humans can augment their processing abilities by partnering with machines.

We’re already in partnership with machines for a few hundred years. However, this partnership is slow and requires intervention by using one’s fingers or voice. The promise of the “Neural Link” technology is that this can now happen instantaneously or at “The speed of thought”. All one has to do to change the channel once the technology becomes mainstream, is to “Think it”.

This for sure is quite amazing, but as with most technologies, Elon is not the only one working on this. In an article in Nature Nanotechnology in 2015, a group of engineers in Nanotech reported a successful experiment in which they injected sub-micrometer thick, centimetre-scale macroporous mesh electronics through needles with a diameter as small as 100 μm into the brains of mice. No noticeable negative impact on brain functioning was found, and interestingly the electronics was able to record the activity in the neurons.

While solving for Elon’s grand vision will take quite a while, comparatively simpler applications like handling prosthetics with more ease and potentially fixing neurological problems like epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease appear to be closer on the horizon. There are also more near-term opportunities like doing away with more surgically intensive alternatives for real-time brain wave monitoring

There are multiple institutions taking interest in this research including commercial institutions like Fidelity BioSciences and US defense. Last year Bryan Johnson the founder of Braintree invested USD 100 mn of his own money in a company called “Kernel”, that aims to solve the same problem as Elon Musk, though their focus is more medical.

While Elon Musk is looking at humans being able to augment human cognitive abilities by pairing with machines, a flip side to all this is that the Artificial Super Intelligence of tomorrow can potentially use this same technology to gain more instantaneous control of human beings. The conundrum remains.

Blog

Scenes From The Future

 

Three themes from the future for you to ponder over during this week

1. Tech Driven Lockouts

You would have experienced situations like the electricity department engineers coming home and switching off the power supply if you default on payments, or telco operators disconnecting you from the network if you haven’t paid your bills for long. It’s easier for them to do it as TELCOs primarily provide all connectivity. What happens tomorrow if your bank can lock you out of your home automatically, and your car stops working if you don’t pay your bills on time?

What are the safety implications of such a situation? Who pays for the technology and the money that needs to be spent in running this technology? What commercial sectors like collection agencies, etc get impacted because of these changes? How will these technology maneuvers affect the profitability of lending companies?

What if televisions, fridges and everything can be rented instead of being bought, as is happening today? What kind of legislation does the govt need to bring in to ensure this is not abused?

2. Electricity Without Wires

It was Nikola Tesla’s dream to generate millions of volts of electricity through the air from the Niagara Falls and transmit it around the world by setting up towers that work as power receivers. Very similar to how television signals have been broadcasted before the emergence of cable and satellite TV.

It has taken a long time to make that happen, although in a limited way, but there are a lot of companies making investments in this space. Recently, Disney’s research team designed a “Quasi-Static Cavity resonance” room. It is simply a specially designed space that generates quasi-static magnetic fields that can power devices located within the space.

They used a copper conductor, capacitors and electroplated room that transmit around 1.9 KW of power without violating federal safety guidelines.

It will be interesting to explore what the impact of such technology can be in our day to day life. We will no longer be worried about carrying adapters that can plug into the different power outlets in various parts of the world. Finally, all the appliances at home can be placed wherever we would like to use them, instead of worrying about where the plug points are. How does this impact the job of the home electrician whose whole job has been laying out the wires and setting up the power sockets? Will all this be really possible, and can humans endure living constantly in an environment saturated with electromagnetic fields? Interesting ideas to explore.

3. Want To Be An X-Man?

Professor Charles Francis Xavier (aka Professor X) is a fictional character in the popular series X-Men. He’s also the leader of the X-Men a set of human mutants with remarkable properties. Professor X’s key mutant skill are his extraordinary powers of telepathy. He can read what’s happening in the minds of people from a long distance, and he is also gifted with the ability to control the minds of people from afar.

In the not too distant future, this will no longer remain a work of fiction, and the technology can be made available to ordinary citizens. Experiments have been performed successfully where an expert video gamer is playing a game. However, his maneuvers with the mouse and keyboard have no impact as they’ve been disabled. An EEG (Electro Encephalogram) device is placed on his head, that captures all the brainwave activity. Simultaneously, another individual has placed a mile away from the original gamer. He actually has a mouse and keyboard that work and is connected to the game computer remotely. This person can’t see anything that’s happening in the game. He is wearing a headset that has Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation(TMS) technology.

So what happens now is that the original gamer sends a brain command which is transmitted electronically to the headset of the other person who actually has access to the controls. His brain interprets the brain signal generated by the original gamer, and he makes the finger movements and maneuvers needed to succeed in the game.

A new technology initiative being funded by DARPA called Atomic Magnetometer for Biological Imaging In Earth’s Native Terrain (AMBIENT) can actually make it possible to capture and analyze the brain waves being generated by people without actually placing an EEG headset on the subject. This makes the future even more potent and scary. While there are lots of opportunities for us to make life very easy and interesting with this new technology, it also has the potential to invoke situations like in the movie “Minority Report”

Happy mulling over these scenes from the future for the rest of the week.

Announcements, Blog

[x]cube To Showcase It’s Digital Innovation Lab At Gartner Symposium/ITXPO Goa

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Hyderabad, November 11th, 2016: Leading Digital Strategy Consulting company, [x]cubeLABS will be showcasing its digital innovation lab at Gartner Symposium/ITXPO. The lab will showcase to visitors [x]cube’s patented digital transformation accelerators in Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Customer Experience Transformation and Enterprise Gamification etc.

Commenting on [x]cube’s participation in the summit Mr. Bharath Lingam – CEO, [x]cube LABS, said, “Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is a perfect platform to exhibit our digital transformation capabilities and patented products. These products and capabilities have enabled leading enterprises to achieve digital excellence and transformed their business. Visitors will get the first-hand experience of some really cool digital products that promises to change the future of business.”

The key highlight of the Digital innovation lab will be demos on Virtual Reality that enable you to experience driving a top end car virtually. [x]cube will also demonstrate, its Digital Transformation acceleration product UpShot.AI. Other [x]cube capabilities showcased in the booth includes digital transformation capabilities, enterprise gamification offerings, IoT and mobile services etc.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Goa is the most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives themed this year on digital technologies and business and highlights a rich assembly of forward-thinking guest speakers and luminaries including Mark Bowden, Guy Kawasaki, Magnus Lindkvist.

[x]cube is one of the first 13 companies globally to be certified as a Google Developer Agency and has several Fortune 1000 companies like GE, Honeywell, Amazon, Nokia, Tenet, McIntosh etc., among its client lists.

Blog, chatbots, Digital Strategy, Digital Transformation & Innovation

How Chatbots Are Ushering In A New Revolution In Enterprises

ChatBot - Digital Transformation Consulting Services

Chatbots are simple text based services powered with artificial intelligence and designed to interact via a chat interface. This can be used as for functional or fun purposes like virtual assistant siri, Cortana etc.

Currently, chatbots are very popular in the consumer space. From the business perspective, e-commerce, delivery and transportation businesses boost their business opportunities by letting their end users order goods and services even more conveniently.

But if you look very closely, you will see that bots are slowly taking over the enterprise space as well.

Industry observers say, momentum for chatbots is growing as companies seek to improve services on top of the data that’s available to them. Companies from KLM Airlines to Taco Bell, Sephora, Expedia and Whole foods among others, have all rolled out chatbots to let users order food, book flights, inquire about services and browse online stores.

How Can Chatbots Generate Value And Enhance The ROI?

Chatbots would enormously improve the user experience for both your customers and your team when it comes to CRM, for instance. An extension or third-party service could speed up and automate data entry, preventing data leakage in the process. ‘Slackbots’ like Troops connect CRM software with Slack, easily pushing and pulling data with the goal of allowing Slack to become the communications hub for your sales team, letting them interact with each other and the CRM through the same chat interface quickly and efficiently.

Chatbots and Digital Transformation

So what do you need in order to start being able to gain some of the competitive benefits that chatbots can offer?
There are numerous ways this can be approached and it does not have to mean all or nothing.The increasing popularity of messaging and broad trend towards chat interfaces being the user preference means that this is a significant shift. However, savvy organisations looking to increase their ROI are already engaged in wide-ranging digital transformation, representing the growing importance of digital in enterprise and in the world in general. If you are in this category, you are already building strong digital foundations and developing a flexible digital strategy. This will certainly encompass some of the prerequisites for taking advantage of the emerging chatbot revolution.

Challenges

Companies should be able to make the interfaces work much better — and that has huge implications as it will help them to interact with customers. To succeed, however, they’ll need to overcome a number of challenges.

  • Natural language processing: Right now, chatbots require us to master their syntax. If you ask them “What’s the weather?” you’ll usually get an answer. If you ask “Could you check the weather?” you might not. To get around this problem, companies need to enable bots to understand all the ways we say something — and how context changes what we mean. This is known as natural language processing, and it’s an object of considerable focus for companies like Google, with SyntaxNet, and Facebook, with its DeepText A.I.

  • Machine learning: To get truly natural responses, companies need to improve machine learning. With exposure to enough conversations, the computer on the other end of the line should slowly learn what the correct response should be. Of course, the challenges involved are far from simple, as illustrated by Microsoft’s short-lived experiment with its unintentionally racist chatbot Tay.

  • Providing value: Companies have to figure out what they can offer through A.I. The possibilities here are great. If Uber recognizes the right time to offer a taxi, why can’t banks recognize and facilitate money transfers between friends?

  • Human intelligence: The technologies themselves are only as capable as the programmers who build them. This reflects a larger trend in which digital players are shifting their focus from traditional engineers to machine-learning experts. Rather than teaching humans to understand machines, we’re now teaching machines to understand us.

  • Staying simple: It might seem like a “natural” chatbot needs to be infinitely vast in order to succeed. That’s not true. Most successful innovations, like iOS, are simple and easy to use. For companies to succeed, they’ll need to look for the least common denominator in their services.

  • Preparing an exit: This means companies also need to hand the experience off at some point. Currently, chat-like services such as Siri and Alexa have mixed track records when it comes to solving this problem. Most of the time, when they don’t understand you, they simply take your text and turn it into a web search. With intelligent A.I., we’ll need an elegant way to send people to a system that can understand them when they’ve exhausted our possibilities.

  • The Future: Chatbots are like toddlers in the enterprise world who are trying to speak their first words, but businesses are confident that bots will be here to stay. With further developments in the bot space and the use of technologies like artificial intelligence, chatbots are expected to become more intelligent. Right now, intelligent chat is still a little ways off. But with work moving forward on all fronts, companies need to start thinking about what they can do with these new technologies. It’s time to keep an ear to the ground and start working on the future.
Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation

Why You Need A CDO For Digital Transformation Success

Digital Transformation Agency - [x]cube LABS

The CEO represents the power of the present and the past, for the opportunities of tomorrow, it’s the CDO. As the enterprises are trying to catch up with the Digital future, they are focusing more on what kind of leadership they need to guide their business in the new-age. So, more and more companies are finding that the Chief Digital Officer or CDO is the right choice. Although there are variations in the title, the duty of a CDO is to define the enterprise’s digital strategy and implement its cross-functional transformation into a fully Digital enterprise.

As organizations recognize the value of a digital strategy, many senior execs are asking what kind of expert it takes to lead the strategy. Well, that’s not the correct way to begin, instead even before they try to identify the right person to be CDO, they should determine what that person will need to achieve.  What are the objectives of their digital strategy? Creating new user experience? Increase in operational efficiency? Entry into new markets? Cost reduction? Or some combination of the above? Every organization must be clear on its specific needs and strategic objectives and then appoint a CDO who can be a best fit to reach its goals.

So to take charge of leading the enterprise’s transformation you need a CDO who will be a strong base to your digital strategy. A CDO need not be a techie but rather a digital leader with all required skills to manage a lot of external as well as internal changes. Adding an Executive to a group of employees across the organization i.e., from IT, Marketing etc., and forming a mixture of talents helps the CDO in the business and at times to build out new revenue streams or new businesses and enhancing the existing ones. In short, they will be in charge of Digital Transformation in an enterprise.

But, Why Do You Need A CDO?

The answer to this question will very much depend on the size of your organization and the sector it operates in, as well as its current position of digital development.

“Only 6% of companies have a chief digital officer, which in part is explained by the fact many businesses are too small to require such a position. Contrast this to the proportion of businesses with another type of CDO, the Chief Data Officer, which Gartner estimates will reach 90% by 2019.”

Companies Bring In A CDO For Two Main Reasons

1. When they need to approach the most complex root causes that must be understood and addressed before any progress on digitization can be made.
2. When the C-suite realizes that the organization can’t meet the basic challenge of creating integrated transformation within the present construct.

All the enterprises are being pulled into the digital age. Users now expect seamless experiences with online products and services and they will tend to leave behind businesses that aren’t meet their digital expectations. As Digital’s importance has come to limelight and a stage where every organization is ready to face digital, the role of a CDO has become more prominent. This year, there were many enterprises who appointed CDOs for the first time. When the role of a CDO is pushing its way into the the boardroom, the CEOs realize how intimately tied digital and corporate strategy now must be. If your organization doesn’t make the right move or hire the right talent, get ready to be outwitted by your challengers.

“A recent PwC’s study on the CDO role found that the position has been implemented primarily at organizations in consumer-focused industries such as media, entertainment, food and beverage, and consumer products. The study also suggests larger companies are ahead of the curve with CDO positions.”

Any large enterprise which doesn’t already possess a digital approach in its DNA or If you’re not Apple, Google or a tech company, you should be looking at bringing in a CDO. Not only a large enterprise, a startup which wants to take a leap towards the digital future with right strategy can also have a CDO. Having a CDO to an enterprise is an asset to the company. CDOs help their organizations usher in the digital age, or guide them through some digital transformation.

The focus on Digital transformation is charged by concerns that organizations are not responding to market challenges quickly enough thus missing out on chances presented by a swiftly growing digital economy. Hence, calls for hiring of a CDO often rise from insecurity about an enterprise’s digital future.

A CEO might not be digital enough to run the company as if it was one of the leading businesses. There has to be a strong partnership between a CEO and CDO to avoid awkward situations and perhaps even tensions.

However, the CDO role has been around for some time, but the position evolves as the C-suite becomes over crowded. The CDO identifies the key areas where digital transformation can drastically improve the user experience and must drive that change to happen in the organization. Having an immense knowledge about most IT functions of the organization, given that today’s tech management is drifting into the cloud, the role of a CDO is a natural next step for digital transformation.

Finally, whether or not your organization needs a CDO will depend on whether digital is the norm or not in your organization.

Capabilities Of A CDO

  • Charismatic leadership to align all stakeholders to make Digital Transformation happen.
  • Parting down the cliched procedures to create transversal enterprise with new hybrid ideas.
  • Embracing to the internal policies and speaking the languages of marketing, IT, finance and strategy.
  • Challenging everything that is already in place on a operational, strategic and process level.
  • Excellent knowledge in: transactions, e-commerce, marketing social media and big data.

The role of a CDO is more transformative and usually finite. The CDO is brought on board to guide the organization through the digital transformation storm until such time as digital has been fully integrated into the operations and thinking of the organization. The shift to digital has made the job of the CDO even more multifaceted. The job of the CDO is not one of revolution, particularly within larger organizations for which change is more frequent- rather ensuring the company sticks to its vision.

Of course the CDO can’t transform the organization all by himself. It needs a team to get things done right. And it will be the CDO defining what needs to be done and the CIO determining how to make that happen to achieve Digital transformation. But in conclusion, the rise of the CDO across all organizations appear to be moderate after the breakout year of 2015.

Blog, Inmersive Tech, Technology

9 Features, The New IPhone 7 Brings For App Developers

9 Features of iPhone 7 - [x]cube LABSImage Courtesy: Apple.com

 

Whenever a new iPhone is launched, there’s alway one question in every app developer’s mind- How will it change app development and usage? Apple unveiled its much awaited iPhone 7 and 7 Plus on September 7th, 2016 at  Bill Graham Auditorium, San Francisco.

Though the visible hardware design has not changed much, the new devices are refined from inside and offers a lot for iOS app developers to build high quality apps.

The phone packs in a lot of new features.  It comes with two 12 megapixel cameras, one for wide angle photos and another for telephoto. Apple is known to be one of the courageous companies which annoys its users with deliberate decisions to dump things and move forward, obviously for the better. And that comes with the second major hardware change, replacing the decades old I/O port 3.5mm audio jack with a lightning connector of it’s own, for earphones.  The device has become water resistant with the removal of the audio jack.

The architecture of the new processors are reengineered and includes the new A10 Fusion chip which is a 64-bit, quad-core processor that Apple says is 40 percent faster than last year’s A9 processor. Two cores are high-performance, the other two are high efficiency, which will toggle depending on tasks to provide you both better battery life and performance. Apple reckons its 240 times as fast at graphical processor as the chip in the original iPhone. These various virtues and abilities add up, according to Apple, to console-level gaming and the longest battery life ever on an iPhone.

How will it impact developers?

  1. Some of the major features developers can take advantage of with iOS 10 is the power of Siri, Apple AI based assistant, and it’s Map which are now open to developers for better assistance of the user.
  2. Apple also revamped its Messages app with full screen effects and bubble effects. A new app category is introduced for Stickers to be used in the Messages app which will be useful for the designers to bring their ideas to life using innovative stickers.
  3. Developers can now enjoy the benefit of Xcode 8, while debugging, to track leaks, threads, views and potential issues at runtime. Xcode8 gives more control over the flow and analysis in real time for your code. This is a huge advantage over other platforms. Tracking bugs has been totally refined and it will help you to pinpoint where the problem is or could be.
  4. The interface builder is way better than its predecessors and can now be edited at any zoom level. The constraints have become lessened with the introduction of stack views. If you are working on an universal app, portrait, landscape, split screen, you will have to overcome less hurdles while using it.
  5. One of the major things which is improved, according to Apple developers, is the indexing time. So if you’re opening a project you don’t have to wait long before starting to work on it.
  6. The automatic certificate signing ensures that there are no more problems if you have a lot of development or distribution profiles or, you are missing some for your devices. Automatic certificate signing will handle it for you.
  7. Apple has incorporated an improved set of tools that help you minimize the errors that you could encounter with. Its Unit testing, UI testing, Bots, Scripts and Continuous Integration, testing environment with OS X Server can make you feel  more comfortable, greatly reduce the errors and optimize what you are doing.
  8. The swift language is also gaining much accolade from the developers community. With the launch of iOS 10 and Xcode 8 release, Swift has reached the version 3.0 with lot of enhancement.
  9. The API’s are renamed completely, dropping the NS prefix, which was two decades old.

With the new programming language, features of the SDK, bundled with Xcode will provide developers more capability and enhance productivity. However there will be things unknown to explore and enhance, always. Sometimes your tests may fall short even after using the tools’ abilities or a bug in Xcode might make you bang your head to wall. There will always be something new to discover. No matter how convenient these tools are, they will fall short at times. That keeps the hope alive for the next release.

Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation

5 Experts Share Their Winning Tips on Successful Digital Transformation

Successful Digital Transformation - [x]cube LABS

In the world of technology, change is the only constant. But that’s old news, you might say, nothing has changed on that front. Or, rather everything has. Or–well, that’s a muddle we’ll never get out of, so let’s move on. Be it technology or organizations, everywhere there is the euphoria of change, where everything is unpredictable and dynamic. And to cope with this pace of change, organizations are now taking up the arduous but exciting project of digital  transformation.

Netflix is a great example of a successful transformation. Netflix originally started as a DVD by mail business. In 2007, they expanded business with the introduction of streaming media, while still retaining the DVD and Blu-Ray rental service. As of 2016, Netflix serves over 190 countries. In 2013, Netflix entered  itself into the film and television industry with its first series, ‘House of Cards’ debuting the same year. It greatly expanded into film in 2015, and now offers its “Netflix Original” content through its online library of films and television. As of July 2016, Netflix reported over 83 million subscribers worldwide, including more than 47 million in the U.S. Netflix disrupted the home entertainment industry with its out of box concept and focus on constant transformation with focus on going where their customers needed them the most.

This type of transformation requires not just new tools, but a new mindset, new culture and brand new organizational capabilities.

A recent Forrester Consulting study looked at how companies approach digital transformation amid evolving customer demand and expectations. The result was that organizations are barely scratching the surface of their digital potential. It’s clear from the research that businesses recognize the need – and are working tirelessly – to harness digital technologies.

However, they are hamstrung by an outdated, constricting organizational structure. Organizational issues are viewed as critical barriers to successful execution of digital strategy. Specifically, lack of digital expertise and skills (57%), functional disagreement on digital ownership (52%) and overall organizational inertia (51%) topped the list of hindrances.

Although digital investment is almost unquestionably the right course of action for most firms, organizations still struggle to create the desired results. Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. Such a high failure rate isn’t surprising, as leaders are trying to create entirely new competencies and wedge them into an organization with strong legacy cultures and operating models.

Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about what digital transformation is and how to carry it out.

On our quest to unearth the mysteries of the roadmap to Digital Transformation, we introduce you to some expert tips which can ease your difficulties.

Always have a strategic plan:

Planning is the first step before embarking upon any transformation. Strategic planning is a long term planning process and if done correctly, it can provide maximum utilization of resources. Debra Ruh, CEO of Ruh Global Communications and CO-Founder of AXSChat shares her thought on this:

“Many firms start a digital transformative initiative without creating a plan. Since a digital transformation is about your brand that is very dangerous. Without a strategic plan that includes a digital transformation roadmap there are many ways to create a bad impression with your audience.  Once problems have been created on social media it is hard to fix it. A best practice is to create a strategic plan that includes a road map, engagement, content, and marketing strategy. The plan should also include ways to capture, measure, manage and analyze metrics.”   

Know your processes and implement changes:

Change does not come overnight. It is a gradual process. When you are embarking upon digital transformation, you cannot expect an entire overhauling of the organization in one night. It takes time. But you cannot scrap your old processes at one go. It’s a collaborative effort. Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, shares his expertise on it. Here’s his take,

“Know your old processes and define future proven to be processes, don’t just lift and shift your existing processes, as technology upgrade alone are not really (digitally) transforming your company.”                                                    

Prepare the mindset of your workforce:

It is a daunting task to convince your workforce and implement changes. Frederique Murphy, Mountain Moving Mindset Strategist opines:

“Do not underestimate the fear of change of your workforce. And, instead make sure that mindset is one of your change drivers: having mindset as part of your digital transformation plan will ensure that you consciously focus on it, thus helping your people accept, embrace and push through your digital transformation. Change is an opportunity. Make sure your digital path includes mindset. Remember, your organization’s best moments are on the other side of your employees’ fears. Work WITH them, help them push through WITH you on your digital transformation.”                                                    

Digital transformation is a disruption:

Digital transformation disrupts existing business models with the new wave of technologies it brings along. Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & Founder Constellation Research, Inc. says,

“Digital Transformation is not about a set of technologies. This is about a business model disruption that happens to use some kick butt digital technologies.  Form must follow function. This requires you to rethink your brand and mission; and how you want to provide a business model to support that mission and then you want to think about the products, services, insights, experiences, and outcomes that support the brand.”        

Digital Transformation is a journey:

Digital transformation is a journey. So before embarking upon the journey, you must set attainable goals. You have to flexible and dynamic to be able to incorporate the desired changes. Shelly DeMotte Kramer, Marketing veteran and co-founder of V3*Broadsuite has her take on this:

“Don’t expect for change to happen overnight. Digital transformation is a journey and requires commitment by senior leadership, patience, tenacity, a willingness to take a leap of faith, a willingness to fail along the way, and a commitment to learning every step of the way and improving as you go. None of those things happen overnight. Set reasonable expectations, adapt and adjust, be agile, and change will happen.”                  

Transforming an organization is difficult. But it is still worth doing. Forrester’s assessment is that by 2020 every business will become either predator or prey. As a leader, you likely already know the basics of managing change, but a digital transformation goes deeper, and thus makes different demands on you, your team, and your organization. In return, you have the opportunity to invest in the most profitable and valuable business models the market has seen.

Blog, Digital Strategy, Media

How Digital Entertainment is Ushering in a New Era in The Field of Media & Entertainment

Digital Transformation in Entertainment Industry

Case Study

Entertainment is not only limited to a single medium now. It spans across various mediums and often works in a collaborative platform. When the movie Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted was set to release, D3 Publisher wanted to launch a game alongside the movie. D3 approached [x]cube to build ‘Madagascar: Join the Circus‘, based on its movie story and iconic characters.

The movie revolves around the Madagascar troupe performing center ring as they travel through different countries on their journey back home, and they also make sure that the circus runs in profits. Based on this concept, [x]cube created a simulation circus social game where players can build and decorate their wild Big Top attractions and clown around with Madagascar-style mini games featuring Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe, Gloria the Hippo, and all their new and old friends.The mini games are also part of the circus where Marty will be jumping and collecting balloons.

The game and movie are related as both were released almost simultaneously for effective cross-promotion. The result was that the game got 2+ million downloads in it’s very first month of launching.

Thus, movie alone is not a medium of entertainment. People now-a-days consume the best of both digital and non-digital. They go for a balanced digital diet.  So movie alone is not the only source of entertainment. Movie makers are resorting to the digital platform for their promotion.

Introduction

It is evident from the case study that, Entertainment has seen a gradual evolution through the past few decades. In earlier times people were restricted to limited choices. With the gradual evolvement of the digital media, the modes ofentertainment are also changing. Digital technology has already made its foray into the entertainment world and has totally disrupted the marketspace

But What Is Digital Entertainment?

To put it simply, digital entertainment is a type of entertainment, providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment, displayed digitally on our electronic devices, computers, laptops, tablets or smart phones. The type s of content we demand, including social networking, 3D TV as well as live TV, are becoming more varied now a days as the world experiences a revolution in digital entertainment.

Applications Of Digital Entertainment

1. Gaming: Gaming today is a widely recognized part of our cultural landscape. Since the early 2000 s, internet capabilities have exploded and computer processor technology has improved at such a fast rate that every new batch of games, graphics and consoles seems to blow the previous generation out of the water. According to the ESA Computer and video games industry report for 2015, at least 1.5 billion people with Internet access play video games.

Online storefronts such as Xbox Live Marketplace and the Wii Shop Channel have totally changed the way people buy games, update software and communicate and interact with other gamers, and networking services like Sony’s PSN have helped online multiplayer gaming reach unbelievable heights. Technology now allows millions around the world to enjoy gaming as a shared activity. Nowadays, many games have an online component that vastly improves the gameplay experience and interactivity often superseding the importance of the player’s offline game objectives.

Since smartphones and app stores hit the market in 2007, gaming has undergone yet another rapid evolution that has changed not only the way people play games but, brought gaming into the mainstream culture in a way never before seen. The huge shift in the gaming industry towards mobile has not only widened gaming demographics, but also pushed gaming to the forefront of media attention.

The move to mobile technology has defined the recent chapter of gaming. While, on-the-move gaming is well-suited to the busy lives of millennials, it has its limitations. Although mobile gaming has caused the death of hand-held gaming devices, consoles are still booming, and each new generation of console welcomes a new era of technology and capabilities.

2. Smart Tv: Smart TVs are the wave of the future. They come with a vast range of advantages over your average TV, and keep you updated with easy access to the internet, movies, TV programs, games, and even applications.  Smart TVs are equipped with the same web functions as your computer or laptop. Some of the Smart TVs have been built with Wi-Fi access that will connect to almost any website from the set.

One of the most popular features is the ability to access social media functions as most Smart TVs come with a Facebook or Twitter functionality. This hybrid form of television allows you to watch video on demand, which you previously had to log onto your computer to watch. Subscription services like Netflix have also been made available through the Smart TV.

Taking inspiration from the likes of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, some TV manufacturers are following in the footsteps of modern smartphones and developing their own online stores, allowing users to download extra apps on to their TVs.

Research from Gartner indicates that by 2018, 76% of connected home apps will be accessible from smart TVs. The popularity of Smart TVs coincides with the emergence of the connected home, a revolution that offers the potential to change the way we all live for the better. The connected home is fundamentally about enabling devices to communicate with one another, something that may sound scary to the uninitiated, but actually possesses huge positive potential. It is almost inevitable that in your future (connected) home the smart TV will be a focal point within the home and therefore it would make sense for information to be directed to it.

3. Video on Demand (VOD): Over the last decade consumers everywhere have settled into a Video on Demand mindset towards entertainment consumption. Earlier they used to wait for specific times to catch their favorite TV shows. Viewers can now access those shows in mere seconds from their smart phones, tablets or PCs via services such as Hulu Plus and Netflix. Movies are also easier to queue up than ever before. Instead of physical rentals, thousands of films are now available on the Web and in cable operators’ VOD packages.

It’s no surprise, in this context, that subscription VOD services have been picking up steam. It is estimated that video streaming is responsible for 30% of overall Internet traffic. The 2015 edition of Ericsson’s “ConsumerLab TV and Media Report” revealed that consumers spent an average of six hours per week using VOD platforms. That number more than doubled from 2011 levels.

4. Virtual Gaming:  Virtual reality is a whole new medium. As a result, there is a whole new wave of creators, storytellers, writers, directors, game designers that are really intrigued by the new medium and are developing content for it. Virtual Reality gaming is fast evolving as a medium of digital entertainment. It immerse us in glorious digital worlds, enabling us to interact with technology in new ways and experience gaming at its most intense and absorbing.  The year 2016 will see the launch of three new VR systems.

According to research data from Statista, by 2018, expected sales of virtual reality products will reach $5.2 billion. Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Valve’s Steam VR, HTC’s Vive, and Sony’s PlayStation VR are able to take advantage of all the progress made in graphics technology. One small firm has seen early success in virtual reality gaming. Crowd-funded VR game Star Citizen, developed by Roberts Space Industries, has raised well over $100 million in funds.

If marketed and priced right, virtual reality gaming and accessories could introduce a brave, creative new direction for gaming. It would certainly move beyond the gimmick factor.

The Change In Consumption Pattern

Media consumption habits are changing as consumers find new ways to access TV content. The evolution of computing devices, networks and more highly evolved user interfaces has created a tsunami of home-based and portable devices and has become the catalyst for remarkably fast changes in media consumption behaviors. New forms of consumption are becoming easier to access, and easier to use – especially in an increasingly mobile world.

There has been a push amongst major media companies for a new type of entertainment delivery: TV Everywhere. TV Everywhere is the idea that people should be able to bring the living room with them, watching shows and movies on their time and their dime.

The key themes that emerge around media consumption behaviours are

  • Consumers are maintaining a balanced digital diet, while they are embracing digital content consumers have not entirely forgone non-digital media
  • The broadening of the social ecosystem that we interact with in our day-to-day lives and use to discover and consume content and engage with businesses
  • Consumers’ increasing familiarity with and preference for new monthly, pay/cancel as you go, low-cost subscriptions across multiple forms of entertainment

The Future

The future of digital entertainment therefore lies in its delivery. The Internet allows consumers to access just about any content at any time. Hardware manufacturers and software designers will continue to come up with novel ways for consumers to get the content they want. Marketers will follow these developments closely in order to remain at the cutting edge of new technology because that’s where the consumers will go. Novelty is where buzz lives.

Blog, Financial Services, Internet of Things

5 Benefits of IOT in financial Services

IOT in Financial Services - [x]cube LABS

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a way where billions of devices are connected to communicate, share information, anticipate needs, solve problems and improve efficiency. As per Gartner forecast, there will be 25 billion IoT devices in operation by 2020.

IoT has changed the way banking services were done by connecting infrastructure and influence the way they interact with the service world. Since these industries deal with huge data transfer, gathering and analyzing of data, IoT has a huge impact, that is benefiting both the customer and the financial services as a whole. Here are five benefits of Internet of Things in Financial Services world.

1. IoT benefiting Insurance industry

Connecting almost all types of devices IoT has made its huge impact on the insurance industry and will have its involvement over the next five years, through telematics data for vehicle insurance, health insurance and so on. This helps the insurers to capture the customer data effortlessly, improve business practices, cost cuts, which will add significant value and increase revenue opportunity by better evaluating client’s risk.

For example: automobile insurance, some company offers their clients UBI (usage-based insurance) that tracks the driving habits of the clients by using sensor devices, connected to their car to monitor driving, of course with their permission and with that data insurance company offers discounts or other facilities for healthy and safe behavior.

2. IoT benefiting banking industry

Banks have to deal with big data and analytics everyday and they have to monitor all the transactions to avoid any fraudulent practices. IoT helps in making the information readily available and also consumable by other system and networks. A customer using their bank mobile app has an option to take a picture of  any required documents and upload it using their smartphone, which will increase the productivity, boost efficiency and drive fundamental improvements in customer experiences.

Bank gives home loan to all qualified people. Banks using IoT technology give the option to their borrower to install a sensor in their new house with their permission, wherein they agree to automatically issue a home improvement loan when there is any damage and requires repairs. The sensors in the wall prevent large scale damage and benefits loan borrowers with discounted rates, with no additional paperwork and later at any point of time they can drop out from this agreement.

3. IoT benefiting Credit card company

Reliable in-store connectivity provides valuable customer information to financial services and using beacons – Bluetooth low energy technology, credit card company can send a notification to the targeted customer regarding their credit qualification, by tracking their location, a new way to target market that includes specific advertisements and notifications. Due to the rise of IoT in financial services, it offers personalized and reliable services to their customers with the information, which are being captured and shared within the context. IoT soon going to accelerate in how financial services interact with the customers and allows them to meet customer’s needs with relevant content.

4. Customer Relationship Management

Financial services are investing more in reliable connectivity solutions to grow their business and to give their customer best experience by providing excellent services and products. All this can be managed by the cloud-based applications, where financial services store their customers data, using customer relationship management (CRM) software. IT is a powerful tool to utilize content management systems (CMS) and organize documents in the cloud, with the reliable connectivity and solid security. Which will improve business operations and strengthen client relationships, which will be benefited and judged by the end users.

5. Maintain data Privacy & Security

Where there are so many devices transferring huge data, privacy becomes the priority and information shared needs to be secured all the time. This is no new thing, when devices are connected to a network, there is chance of data manipulation, which may lead to undesirable consequences like financial risk. Internet of Things helps to protect customer’s data from the inevitable breaches, including secure payment process and information management.

For example: When a customer connects their refrigerator to the internet, refrigerator automatically senses that the household is running out of eggs and orders a fresh eggs from the local grocery store.  IoT app in financial services is for payments which takes place seamlessly in the background. Here we are dealing with the customer’s bank account, so while making payment for the groceries using a refrigerator, customer must have the credentials to avoid any fraudulent transactions. Also gives customers a good experience and loyalty, that could help in collecting data and use it for marketing and services.

IoT will soon overtake the financial services, where the end users will be able to do almost everything at their convenience, from anywhere and anytime through the internet. It offers new opportunities  to solve problems, add value to financial services and to its customers – there is no area in life that would remain untouched.

Blog, Insurance, Mobility

5 Ways Mobile Is Transforming The Insurance Industry

Digital Transformation in Insurance Industry - [x]cube LABS

Mobile technology is the most dominating entity among other technologies, because it can reduce risks by controlling cost, increase productivity and enhance customer experience. Mobile technology has a huge impact on the insurance industry by attracting new customers and retaining former policyholders.

Mobile technology has become a game changer, gone are the days when you have to sit with the sales executive for hours to get policy information, now you can buy and purchase insurance products, compare other company offers, and even file a claim right on the spot via our mobile devices.

Mobile can play a vital role in transforming the insurance industry. Let’s explore more.

1. Acquiring Customer

Competition in the insurance industry has increased. Most of the industries are adopting mobile technology because it is more convenient and cost effective. Using mobile app technology, the insurance industry can now easily reach out to their tech-savvy customers. The path to insurance purchase is complex, usually customers won’t interact with insurance providers as frequently as they connect with their banks but, if the insurance provider is able to deliver claims-related documentation to the client’s smartphone, the opportunity of earning customer loyalty is high.

Mobile App technology keeps customers connected, as it provides quick access to the information, and less time is spent waiting for information to be delivered and processed. A fast and efficient service to the clients can be provided with the help of mobile technology. For example: Automatic email notifications is set up for clients, about the insurance process with real-time reports, clients will be getting notification on the progress of their applications and claims. These notifications improve transparency with clients, and definitely a better service which they will enjoy rather waiting for updates and receiving delayed reports.

2. Customer Service And Retention

Customers will look for services which take less time to process with efficiency and insurance providers who will meet the customer expectation will be getting the positive returns. Resulting in acquiring more ROI from the targeted market, with the help of mobile technology.

For example: In case of any emergency, insurance provider quickly providing access and contextual customer data following an accident claim filed via smartphone will give more tailored service to support the customer.

Once you have acquired new customers, now one of the most daunting tasks for insurance providers is to retain the customers. Mobile technology provides a solution to this, as mobile users spend close to 40 hours a month on mobile apps, they are now able to report theft or accidents quickly, make claims, or seek any information they require anytime from anywhere. Mobile app helps users to have multiple options in one app, like they can buy new policies, renew or upgrade their existing ones. This will increase the chances of generating more revenue for insurance industries and customer retention.

3. Simplifying And Expediting The Claims Process

Smartphone app is extremely useful and viewed as invaluable assets, when it comes to claims. They are capable of capturing and transferring data quickly, making the process  hassle free and expediting the complete insurance related claims process. By using mobile technology, customers can make claims, which eliminate all the time-consuming fuss associated with manual form filling. This processing has made the client’s life easier, by reducing the clutter, helping them collect data, communicate and collaborate in real-time and also freeing their time. Mobile technology has brought efficiencies into the most complex and costly element of the insurance business by automating previously time-consuming tasks, for both insurance industry and their customers. Customers can now use their mobile devices to take pictures of a vehicle accident and share it with the provider using a mobile app for processing their claim. This will help in enhancing the customer’s digital experience, and ensures satisfactory engagement and customer retention.

For example: US Pet Insurance company Healthy Paws facilitate their claims process by giving customers the option to submit claims through their mobile app, simply by submitting photos of their invoices received from their vet. The user can create a profile of their pet so that they can quickly assign a claim to a specific pet and forward their claim quickly for handling by Healthy Paws.

4. Productivity And Revenue

Mobile technology has become a game changer, by offering faster and more efficient processes which transformed the way insurance industries operate.It has reduced the paperwork, like domestic and commercial claims, appraisals, sales documents, and application forms which was used both in the office and in the field. Insurance providers are now using mobile forms, that has standardized drop-down menus, where data can be entered and reduce the need for typing free form. With less time spent double checking data and transferring data from paper to computer, insurance provider can focus more on their clients and other high-value responsibilities.

Mobile technology is certainly cost-effective and is easier to earn more in less time,  therefore, insurance industries are inclined to adopt the mobile space. Ensuring customer satisfaction, by providing multiple options to compare the different available options, browse through different policies before settling on one and pay bills using a smartphone, has helped insurance providers to gain customer’s trust. This customer-centric mobile technology improves the chances of revenue increase for insurance industries.

5. Big Data And Analytics

The insurance industry is a data-driven industry. It is very important to recognize the immense value and impact of analytics for any business. More than one-third of insurance industries are investing in big data and analytics like, financial data, actuarial data, claims data and risk data to take important decisions. Big data analytics deliver a significant ROI and cost savings for insurance industries to ensure their future successes and has become non-negotiable. Big Data helps in risk management, enabling to analyze the risk characteristics, improve customer segmentation, fraud identification and other areas. With the help of one mobile device where all the rules are configured, providers will be able to identify all the mistakes immediately, prompt the person to fix the error or omit before the form is submitted. And once the forms are submitted it can be reviewed instantly using the mobile technology whether remotely or at the office.

Mobile is bringing a revolution to the insurance industry, by allowing them to maximize their capacity with proficient and fast services. Using mobile technology customers is able to get in-depth knowledge of a product and insurance providers can utilize it to deliver remote presentations to their clients from anywhere.

Blog, Mobility

Why Mobile App Design Should Be Essential To Your Mobile App Strategy?

Enterprise Mobile Strategy - [x]cube LABS

Mobile is the best way to reach people globally, to fulfill business requirements while focusing on meeting users’ needs and their expectations. So, it is an immediate need for enterprises to have a great mobile app design, which is the first and the most important step in mobile app strategy.

Mobile app design if not executed properly will cost you by driving away your brand reputation and loyal customers. A solid mobile app strategy has countless number of elements that apply to a mobile app design which brings all verticals and horizontals of the business together to meet a common goal. So, it’s necessary to have a thoughtful design that resonates with the business vision and user requirements.

Prioritizing And Opportunities

It’s not possible to implement every feature because to every feature there are backlogs that can’t be avoided. So, you need to prioritize things based on a number of criteria like risk, cost, time, resources, business value and customer need to provide a requirement for mobile applications and the mobile features to incorporate into the design.

Once you are done with the prioritizing things, the next important thing is to document the opportunities in order to determine which app initiatives has brought the highest value to your business and opportunities for future release and improvement. It will also give your enterprise a visibility into mobile applications and keeps you on a track while keeping a watch in what other competitors enterprises are doing.

Prerogatives And Simple Design

Now that you have your objectives, what you need is a simple design considering why and how a user can interact with your app? Designs which are simple, easy to navigate, gives the developer a clear understanding of potential users considering how customers use mobile devices. Every enterprise has a level of custom and standardize development toolbox to meet their objectives and a specific development tool for particular type of applications. There are four types of applications: Mobile Web, Hybrid, Native and Cross-platform having their own set of available tools, so you need to decide on a standard group for each type of application. For the e-commerce companies it is important to design their app which is simple and easy to navigate for their customers to have the best experience. Mobile app needs to have a prerogatives design to communicate the core brand offerings and opportunity to align elements in a broad spectrum, that helps you to introduce your app with an exceptional mobile experience to the users.

For example: Domino’s app has a built-in pizza tracker to track the preparation and delivery process, that allows their customers to keep an eye on what stage their pizza is at and reduce the problem of customers calling up for their order status.

Consistency And Security Standards

The appearance of an app, such as colors, fonts and pixels is important, however mobile design is much more than just visual aspects. While designing a mobile app, you should be more focused on mobile app consistency and ensure a secure way to manage your app support and maintain expectations. By ensuring and evaluating mobile app securely and consistently, you will be able to understand and create tools that satisfies the end user.

For example, reusable components can be used in maintaining consistency, doesn’t matter who is developing and deploying the mobile apps. This will help the mobile app strategy to remain consistent and well organized and maintain a balance between the time, scope and your budget through the organization. A human-centric design will lead to a better outcome and opportunities for business success.

Perfect Platform For Branding

Customers use their smartphones to compare prices and shop on the go, so it’s essential for an enterprise to design the mobile app keeping branding in mind for a great customer engagement. Mobile app design has a major contribution towards mobile app strategy and a perfect design holds the good branding image for your organization, by providing an immediate platform for the global users under one roof.

Customers like to share their experiences in social and by adding social sharing features in your mobile app, where users can share their experiences with their friends, you are tapping into the inherent appeal of sharing via mobile device, which lets brand interaction. Also, by adding a feature like push notifications, help you to keep your user updated and also creates an opportunity to interact with your app. The most important source of information to all the app users is the App-based content. A quality content in the app will help you get a great branding.
The ultimate goal of any organization is to provide excellent mobile app experience to their end users and a great mobile app design is very essential to manage various mobile apps strategies to stand out among your competitors.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility, Mobility

How To Measure The Success Of Enterprise Mobile Apps?

Measure The Success Of Enterprise Mobile Apps

Enterprise mobility is not a child’s play. Implementing and measuring a mobile app’s success is nothing different. Measuring an app’s success will enable your enterprise to get a true insight into the development and deployment of your mobile app.

Here are a few critical mobile attributes that should be captured and measured successfully to develop usage metrics:

Revenue vs. Costs

Managing costs and revenue to maximize profit is key for any enterprise. A business can have high revenue, but the costs should be low, it will show profit and is bound to go out of business when the handy capital runs out. Once you know all the important parts of your enterprise mobility strategy, you’ll be able to calculate the qualitative costs against the monetary benefits of the solution, including increased sales and profitability.

App Latency

Latency refers to the total time taken in a request for a response. The basic rule is to optimize to a one-second response time. Along with tracking API latencies, you should keep an eye on the complete response time for apps that are powering the APIs. “Data show that moderately 60 percent of users abandon the transaction or may even delete the app if the total response time is over three to four seconds.” The app load limit refers to the transaction number and calls during a particular time interval. You need not just look at how to grow the app faster, but also how to handle a large number of users at one time. You need to know how to handle drastic changes in load during app usage hinders without compromising on speed.

App Crash Ratio

The basic requirement of any app is its stability. If your app is programmed perfectly, the chances are it won’t crash often. However, app stability also depends on the entire mobile experience including the mobile platform, usage, app type, maturity and more. The average crash rate of an app is two to three percent. Presently, the crash rates of Android 6.0 and iOS 9 are 2.52 percent and 2.70 percent, respectively. Technical metrics help you know if users face problems while using your app. Basing on the the platforms and the devices, make sure you collect the data. Examine crash rates and error by device OS and carrier to sharpen in on issues and finally, make sure to collect performance metrics such as how slow the app is to load.

Device Type

Capturing the user’s preferred device type for an enterprise application will help you measure mobile app usage. It will help you to see how many devices are jailbroken and are a potential security risk. These stats will help you gain an understanding of the average device’s life and software. It shows you users’ device choice for specific apps and also exposes security risks that can be addressed quickly and efficiently.

App Usage

Do you know 50 million apps are downloaded daily and 95 percent of apps are discarded in a month? This is disturbing. It is important to measure how often users are accessing the app, again similar to downloads, whether it’s daily/weekly/monthly. Find out how much time users are spending using the app and by doing so, you will get an idea of the users who are using it frequently and who aren’t. This will reveal which specific group of employees are using your app to improve their productivity. This data will not just help determine how in-app offers would sway mobile app usage rate but also will conclude the functioning of new features and marketing campaigns.

Enterprise mobile apps offer huge benefits such as simpler collaboration, productivity gains and improved sales enablement. But to truly bring in these benefits, you will need to keep your business goals in mind and on course. So, start tracking data to improve your app performance and most importantly take action to resolve the issues and shortcomings of your mobile app to make it a big hit in the market.

Blog, Digital Strategy, Digital Transformation & Innovation, Weekly Insights

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Blog, Enterprise Mobility

6 Things Every Enterprise Mobile App Must Have

The amount of effort being placed into mobile app development is staggering. When an app is designed properly, mobile apps become competitive weapons which will provide a business the superiority within the battle for market share. However there is an obvious drawback with major apps: they are not excellent, they may do the task, but they are missing key features that distinguish a really effective and addictive app with a good user experience from a simply “okay” app. If your app is missing any of those features, you would like to rethink however and why you are designing for mobile.

Following are the 6 things that you need to look into before developing an enterprise app

1. Apps Must Work Offline

The reality of being mobile is that, so much too usually, wireless data services are not accessible. Mobile apps that cannot work in offline mode waste the worth of mobility. Apps must work offline to gain or to retain users. Not all the phones are connected to data services. In such cases, an app that works offline is an add on. An offline app’s performance can be snappy, consistent. Almost immediate searches of cached recordsets. And the best part of an offline app is that, it has the potential to add a couple of more hours to the battery life on your phone.

2. Provide User Feedback

Enterprise mobile apps ought to be able to ask the user to rate or comment on app features and functions and also as track user behavior to produce insight into ways in which the app is used and may be improved. In this way, businesses can constantly improve their apps to deliver the greatest value. When users are using two competing apps then they are always comparing between the apps as well. But if your app can cope up with a good feedback, you have got a high chance that you would feel rewarded. Giving importance to the user’s feedback and acting upon it is an essential need for you.

3. Support Customization

App customization could be as easy as permitting the user to pick a “skin” or as advanced as permitting the app’s menu to be organized. This matters as a result of what works within the field is typically not precisely what was planned for. Successful businesses got to be nimble and adapt, which needs their apps got to be even as nimble. Apps must conjointly support customization to support the distinctive options of every device kind, whether Android or iOS. Customizing an app makes an use feel something new, different and the user will be happy to use your app over and over again.

4. Need For A Strong ROI

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of an enterprise app development process concerns our app directly and depends on which OS it has been developed. ROI in mobile app development isn’t invariably a similar and should not even be proportional to the investment created. the foremost vital issue is to own the goals we would like to attain with our app project outlined from the start. Is it an application for your company? Or is it rather a game to get money? It’s not similar to develop mobile games to earn money than to form a company app to boost your complete and be ready to connect additional directly along with your customers. So it depends on the outset of your app when you are thinking about ROI.

5. App Security

An unsafe app is always a major drawback while developing an enterprise mobile app. The security is the main concern for the users when they use the app. An app with high security is always recommended to build a successful enterprise app. There were numerous reports related to hacking and information leaks. “As per Gartner’s prediction, 75% of mobile applications will fail basic security tests.” The hackers will continue to exploit security gaps in enterprise mobile apps to crack sensitive information. Key point, mobile app security is something developers need to seriously act upon.

6. Allow Updating

Enterprise Mobile apps must be simply updatable not only to fix issues however, additionally incorporate user feedback and supply improved features. These updates must be straightforward to implement across all platforms and devices. Updating an app keeps your customers happy. For a mass driven market, users emerge because the most vital app testers and their discontent should be taken care as early as possible by a mobile app development team. In the modern-day mobile world, keeping up with the competition helps you to improve, innovate your app in a better way. Your competitors and you’re in an exceedingly constant tussle to extend and retain various user base. And to stay at the top it’s essential to serve what others don’t seem to be able to offer to your users. If your contender adds an extra feature within the app and rolls it out for free of charge, you’d would want to do a similar thing, by adding or changing an existing feature in your app.

For many enterprises, developing mobile apps is a great way to spend time and money because these apps help boost employees’ productivity. Through a mobile app, users can accomplish a difficult and time-consuming business process in just a few minutes or even seconds. Still, each and every app comes with challenges. Businesses may have to dig deep into their pockets to come with the money for native apps or sacrifice some practicality to create apps. In conclusion, an app must be easy, perform consistently and the user must feel secure while using an app.