All posts by [x]cube LABS

[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.

Blog, Digital Strategy

7 Considerations To Your Digital Transformation Journey

May 18, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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).

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

May 16, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

May 15, 2017 [x]cube LABS

“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

May 11, 2017 [x]cube LABS

“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

May 8, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

May 2, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

April 28, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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,
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,
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:

“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,
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,
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,
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,
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,

“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:

“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

April 25, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

April 5, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

March 23, 2017 [x]cube LABS

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

November 11, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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

October 25, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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

October 5, 2016 [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

September 16, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Image 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?

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

August 25, 2016 [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

July 29, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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

July 20, 2016 [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

July 14, 2016 [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?

July 7, 2016 [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?

July 7, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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

Digital Transformation Insights Weekly June 28- July 4

July 5, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Digital Transformation: Key to success of the organization Share on X
Want to try something innovative and worried about failure? Digital Transformation is the answer for disruption. It can help your organization to overcome the fear of failure. Here are few takeaways on how you can achieve success with Digital Transformation. Read more

The Enterprise world is moving from Business model canvas to Digital Transformation Share on X
Digital wave is changing the business. You have to offer a fresh experience to succeed in this disruptive era. Start a new Business model and bring in new ways of thinking. Go along the journey from business model canvas to Digital Transformation. Read more

Three steps to a successful digital transformation Share on X
Finding it difficult to attain Digital Transformation? Pace up and face the competition by strengthening your digital strategy. Embrace digital transformation with confidence and focus on what makes it possible. Here are the Three steps to a successful Digital Transformation. Read more

Digital Innovation: The Bridge between ideas and values Share on X
Innovation: A right medium to drive growth and testing new ideas. It uses your digital channel as a receiver rather than a transmitter where new ideas can be presented with less efforts. Good Growth founder James Hammersley details how innovation can fill the gap between ideas and value. Read more

Digital Banking Transformation: The story of BBVA and Banco Santander Share on X
Transform from traditional banking into digital banking. Change the approach towards the customers. The future of traditional banking seems obsolete. Let’s checkout the banking story of BBVA and Banco Santander. How they indulged Digitization in Banking. Read more

Blog, Enterprise Mobility

6 Things Every Enterprise Mobile App Must Have

June 16, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility

Top 3 Security Concerns For Enterprises

June 10, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Mobile technology continues to move forward in all aspects of business, however security issues threaten to slow down the progress. The modern enterprise is waking up to the needs which can be addressed by mobility solutions. Yet the barrier that stands in their way to embrace enterprise mobility is a massive one-security.

For most organizations today, cyber security concern is of top priority on their radar. The most valuable assets that companies own is the information about their business-client records, payroll information, sales data, etc., and the list of the companies who have learnt this the hard way is a long one.

Most security breaches are caused by human error and poor security discipline. For instance, in April 2011, it was discovered that the personal and confidential data of 3.5 million teachers, state workers and retirees in the state of Texas was lying unprotected on the Internet closely for a year. As far as the history of executive management goes, chief executives and IT security professionals do not seem to have a close working history. However, the mammoth security attacks on corporate giants like Google, Amazon, Citibank and JPMorgan have made the CIOs of today to sit up and take notice. Infact it would not be untrue to say that security threats are giving sleepless nights to the leaders of today. As enterprise technology has become more significantly complex and mobile, when compared to what it was five years ago, effective security requires more than a set of guidelines and tactics.

Infact recent research indicates that a single data breach can cost companies up to $7.2 million at an average of $214 per compromised record. This is a warning bell for CIOs to set the agenda as to how IT security should be addressed across businesses. A security breach can lead to serious financial loss, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. It is therefore of utmost importance that CIOs have a clear understanding of security loopholes and be deeply involved in developing and implementing a strategy to combat these threats.

1. Human Error

Though it might not come out as expected but, it is human error and not malicious intent that is the primary cause of critical corporate data breaches. According to Gartner, Inc., more than 99 percent of firewall breaches are caused by misconfigurations rather than firewall flaws. With big money being invested for the protection of data in large organizations, CIOs must wake up to the fact that making fundamental changes in the way security is managed and configured, especially at the network level can actually go a long way in reducing the number of security breaches occurring through human error. It is critical for CIOs to identify ways to reduce network complexity and minimize the risk of human error across the security process thus improving the effectiveness of IT security.

Cloud Security: Cloud computing is not a new term for CIOs interested in executing cyber security programs. In simple words, cloud computing allows companies to outsource their IT infrastructure to a virtual environment which is either on a public or private cloud. Therefore cloud computing serves as an effective strategy to reduce technology costs and redundancies.

2. So What Is It That Blocks The Way?

According to Gartner’s research report, security is the top concern for companies looking at migrating to the cloud. The “lack of confidence” in the security capabilities of the cloud service provider is the top reason why organisations hesitate to take the leap to cloud. Visibility, monitoring, access control etc are among a few security challenges faced by cloud providers. For instance, the disastrous web server failure of Amazon in April 2011 was a breach of service that temporarily brought down the online presence of thousands of its clients.

How will your business be affected if you are not able to access certain data on the cloud? What impact will it have on your customers? How do you make sure your data is not being incorrectly accessed? These are a few questions that CIOs must ask themselves before expanding their dependency on cloud.

3. Mobile Security

As the number of mobile and smart devices accessing critical business information is rapidly on the rise, mobile device security becomes increasingly complicated to implement. The biggest threat here is the device itself. If left in wrong hands, it could be nothing short of a debacle. It is upon the CIOs to prioritize the execution of a policy that strictly lays down guidelines relating to usage and liability of both personal and company owned devices and that foresees the ways and means to combat incoming threats from mobile device usage. BYOD risks, is a high concern of any security manager today as it allows less control than ever on unauthorized access to enterprise data. As enterprise BYOD adoption rates continue to rise, organizations are on the lookout for a tradeoff between BYOD risks and rewards.

There is no getting around the fact that it is infact a formidable task to ensure end to end IT security. It is hard to build a connected risk-aware-culture and it is even harder to change the existing culture. But as the stakes are high, it is highly recommended to have security essentials in place. Measures such as building security into design, controlling network access through monitored access points, centralized device settings and building an automated and unified system to manage and respond to incidents should be implemented to meet the growing cyber security challenges of the day.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility

5 Benefits Of Gamification For Enterprises

June 9, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Gamification is fast emerging game based techniques to boost employees. Enterprises are adding this techniques in the training process to increase the learning engagement and focusing more on satisfying their employee by creating positive competition among co-workers which helps in reducing attrition. Adding interest or fun at work is a good way to create happy and more engaged employees and help enhance workplace productivity.

What Is Gamification?

“A game is a form of play with goals and structure.”– Kevin J. Maroney

Gamification is the process of applying game principles and mechanics into non-game environments. It isn’t about designing games, it’s about adding elements of gaming into a business activity to increase engagement, motivation and participation for better performance management.
How gamification is benefiting enterprises? And the reasons why you shouldn’t delay deploying an enterprise gamification program are-

1. Boost Employee Engagement

Good enterprise gamification is focused more on personalized leaderboards and benchmarks for the employee, which helps employer to use unbiased and accurate information in order to assess the performance of their employees. This will motivate the employee, letting employee know how they are doing. Employees who feel their hard work is valued and engaged in something entertaining are always happier than those who interact a little or not at all, throughout the day. Creating a workplace that promotes fun activities will help maintain a high-caliber workforce. In addition to that, recognition is another element of employee satisfaction and well-being. Gamification allows to monitor which employee has made substantial improvements from last few weeks. Gamification allows you to take notice and recognize those employees who make real progress. Recognition is the key ingredient to be satisfied.

2. To Know The Customers

Enterprise gamification helps organizations to collect accurate customer data. For example; whenever a user visits a website, the platform asks the user to login with a valid email id or social credentials. Each user interaction is associated with clicks, badges, points and achievements which generate valuable customer information and insights for the companies. Once we have generated a large amount of data, it needs to be analyzed correctly which will help the company to figure out how to build a better business and engage in that. Some gamification vendors offer analytics as a part of their product. For example, Badgeville offers the Behavior Analytics software to measure customer engagement, growth, behavior, and user activities. Bunchball has Nitro Connectors, a product that connects their gamification platform to enterprise software such as SharePoint or Yammer to collect activity and behavior from employees.

By implementing gamification, employer will also be able to collect objective performance data, employee’s productivity and gather valuable data for the company. Employees will be rated based on the real, hard data instead of what is being said about them or a post-facto manual leaderboard. Appreciating employee can motivate them to work hard, and this automatically will be shown in numbers.

3. A Vehicle For New Product Launches

Gamification can also be used as a tool to introduce new product in a creative way, like giving a free trial of a new product can let the customer test out the product. Company on the launch of a new product gives a 30-day free trial for the customers to know the benefits of having that product. Also, do an onboarding program like LevelUp by tasking them with assignments where they can earn points and badges upon completion of certain level.

For example: Jillian Michaels encourages users to stay on track with her fitness programs using gamification techniques for a number of fitness challenge. With a multitude of challenges to choose from, users can select a program that’s most closely aligned with personal goals and lifestyle. Each challenge uses its own set of gamification techniques, such as contests and prizes, badges, partner and group challenges. Many companies also give discounts on products in exchange for a person’s email address, for example, if the company’s goal is customer engagement, than offer rewards like 10% off on some items on subscription. However, we also need to make sure it’s for the right audience. Otherwise users might get the 10% off and unsubscribe.

4. Feedback To Solve Business Problems

Companies use customer feedback as a sounding board to make required changes and decisions for future growth. Gamification can be an avenue to crowdsourcing if the company uses the customer feedback and tries to solve the issues. For example: companies like Allstate and GE have turned to crowdsourcing to help them come up with answers to complex business questions.Similar way internal feedback also plays an important role too. When the feedback to employees are given timely and regularly, it gives an opportunity to correct the issues and enhance a sense of control and mastery. For example: If the employee is struggling on a certain measure, can be notified so that it helps in solving the issue immediately. Feedback will help business to understand how they did yesterday and how are they doing today and how those measurements fit with the goals they want to reach.

5. Performance Management

Gamification helps employees to get a sense of progress on their own by creating a sense of mastery, because gamification allows employees to keep a track and record of their work. Also gives work-related satisfaction by giving opportunity for an employee to feel that they are mastering on what they do. Using gamification analytics, the employer can optimize the area of difficulty that an employee in facing at work. When done right, gamification allows employees to track down their performance at work through personal benchmarks and giving rewards for specific tasks which will motivate them and increase the participation.

Gamification in the enterprise has the potential to produce remarkable benefits. It is a tool that has to be managed with great care and needs to be focused on intrinsic motivations of users to leverage more from it and optimize its effectiveness.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility, Mobility

How Beacons Are Helping Retailers

June 6, 2016 [x]cube LABS

As the world of business advances, the competition amongst the retailers is reaching a saturation point. Retailers are finding new ways to reach out to their customers, to keep them engaged in the stores and regulate their buying decisions. Picture this: Whenever a customer walks into your store, they get a notification on their mobile phone – a welcome message, offers/coupons, promotion or a reminder of their shopping list. Isn’t that a delight to your customer and, help you take your business to the next level? All thanks to beacons! Let’s see how this technology helps your business transform.

What is a beacon?

Beacons are small, battery operated devices that enable more accurate location within a limited range. They are attached to a wall or countertop inside a store and transmit small amounts of data via Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) up to 50 meters. Due to it’s low cost, even small businesses may want to try this new beacon technology.

Reasons to use Beacons

Track movements: Beacon makes it easy to track customer movements around the store and, provide coupons, discounts and information for that department where the customer is. Also, by using beacon technology, retailers can attract customer attention, by sending messages like new arrivals, discounts, rewards, etc.Let’s see how Macy’s used Beacon: Last year on Thanksgiving Day, Macy’s installed beacons in nearly 800 stores, in partnership with Shopkick, a location-based coupon provider, to better utilize on an offline data-driven retail experience. This technology tracks customer movements with their store, push product recommendations and discounts and to inform shoppers about relevant sale items.
Best experience: Meeting up with the customer’s expectation became a priority for all retailers, because there are so many retailers in the market competing with each other. Now this gives a customer the power to informed decisions and creates a need for a business to deliver the best experiences to their customers. For example: iBeacon technology for Apple devices, which are used by the retailers to get an alert on their apps or websites, which detect when someone approaches or leaves a location. So at any given moment they can send messages to the customer promoting their products.
Personal Touch: Beacon collects data based on the shopping behavior and product references of the customer, creating a more personalized experience. Let’s say a customer comes to the store and buys a blue shirt and now, a week later the retailer can send out an offer to the same customer on a black trouser that’ll go along with blue shirt. Retailers have an option to send their message notification automatically on their customer’s smartphones whenever they triggered customer passes by the store. This will increase the chances of getting the customer visit the store. Lord & Taylor used their beacon program for a more personalized approach. They targeted their users based on their shopping history, with specific sections of the store sales, targeting right customers with the right product. Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which owns Lord & Taylor, has rolled out beacons at 50 stores in the United States and 90 Hudson’s Bay locations. Using beacon technology, retailers can create an individualized campaigns for each department, focusing more on customer satisfaction which makes the shoppers experience interesting. For example: customers will receive messages in their smartphones with the offer up to 70% off on certain items, in certain departments with some specific code to use.

Engaging Customer: Rule To Follow

Beacons and their related apps can do multiple things, in an automated way, which makes it easier to engage customers for a longer time. The ultimate goal is to build a strong relationship with your current customers, because it is important to let them know, that the effort they made to come to your store is appreciated and valued. More engaging in-store experience can engage current customers using beacons, helping them to navigate through the store and help them decide what to buy and notify them if there is any offers running in the store. This allows a retailer to understand the customer’s behavior and serve them with the information needed. Information that is provided to the customer are accurate and specific to where they are in the store, here contextual information, gives customers access to rich product information such as videos at the right time. For example; GameStop an electronics retailer company is experimenting where, customers can voluntarily wave with their smartphone in front of them to receive some type of offers or information with prominently displaying beacons in stores.

Challenges

When the retailer has multiple stores with beacon technology installed, maintenance becomes one of the most daunting task.
Limited range to target customer. It can only send push notifications to the customers within a location perimeter. For example, if a retailer wants the beacons to broadcast over a large space, they have to increase the range. The challenge here, each time the broadcasting power is increased beacons become less energy efficient, resulting in a faster battery drain.
Use of beacon technology in retail has transformed in-store retail experience and is no longer an experimental technology. Beacon devices brought much interest to retailers as well as customers to take the shopping experience to next level and by the end of year 2016 beacon will soar to new heights.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility, Mobility

5 Tips To Sharpen Your Mobile App Retargeting Strategy

June 3, 2016 [x]cube LABS

“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” ― Kevin Stirtz

We just can’t stay away from our mobile devices. Can we? There are millions of apps in the store, which people download every day and you don’t just want your app to be installed, you also want them to use it. So, you got a new user and now what? What can you do to retain that user? How we you make this ongoing process?

Mobile app retargeting is same, like what you do on the desktop, reconnecting with your users in a more personalized way. Retargeting can be a major challenge because users are already familiar with your product, they have already downloaded your app and know what you serve. Here are the five tips for you to run a successful mobile app retargeting strategy.

1. Follow The Simple Re-Marketing Rule

Acquire users ⇨ Get your users to use your app again and again ⇨ Get your users to make transactions.

2. Categorize Your Users

Mobile retargeting should be an ongoing process for any successful business. We all know every user has different motivation based on demographics, reason to install your app, how frequently they use your app, etc. It won’t make any sense if you put all the users in the same campaign, reason being every user has different needs and assumptions. You need to segment your retargeting campaigns to achieve better performance and once it’s done, create unique ads that are relevant to each section and the business objective you’d like them to achieve. Determine the KPIs that can fit into your strategy. Like, what your goal is and what do you want your users to do?

If your goal is user’s engagement, your measuring point should be

Number of app sessions
Retention Rate
Daily Active Users (DAU)
If you want your users to install your app than your measuring point should be
Cost Per Install (CPI)
Retention Rate
Lifetime Value (LTV)

Collect data in all possible ways

Now that you know your users you must know their needs, as well. There are lot many ways where you can get your user’s data to re-reach them. One of the way is to

Keep a track on user actions: Most of the time people have a habit of opening the app and leaves without doing any transaction, like adding the product in the cart and leaving the page or adding it to their wish lists or browse websites. Using a tracking tool, you will be able to track the user’s device id no and use it for retargeting strategy.

For a new customer, ask them to fill in their personal details like, date of birth, anniversaries, phone numbers, email ids, etc. once you get customers email id and other personal details, you can send them greetings for their birthdays, anniversaries or seasonal greeting, also send them notifications keep updating them with your ongoing sales, which you don’t want them to miss.

3. Utilize Media Channels and Re-marketing approach

This kind of approach not only gets you new users but also brings back old users to use your app. Banners are used for an elegant acquisition campaign for the user to visit the app store and install your app. With mobile re-marketing, you’re not only retargeting your user, but also a general mobile-device-user. This way you are able to place your ads in the both platforms: mobile apps and the mobile web. Choose a partner who can adequately segment users, which offers real-time optimization. By this way your retargeting banners will be seen by more of your users in more different mobile app and web.

4. Set Campaign with right message and attractive banners

“Content is King!” — Bill Gates

Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other networks use re marketing as a powerful engine which lets you show your ads either directly in the news feed or in the right-hind sidebar (Facebook). For example; if you’ve ever been on any online shopping site and then you login to your Facebook account, you’ve probably seen so many ads from the same site on the right-hind sidebar. Among all social media, we consider Facebook to be the most powerful engine, because most of the users spend their time browsing Facebook. And we get users in lower CPC (cost per click) rate, which means high competition. In order to do this we need right message and attractive banners.

Facebook only accepts 20% text of the image, that you use for campaign banner.

Your banner size should be 1200 x 628 pixels and twitter it should be 800 x 320 pixels.

Call-to-action here is different, so you can’t use the same UA banners here, because you’re asking your users who already downloaded your app to revisit your app. Use appropriate text which should have all the message that you want to convey.

5. Trace Action

“Tracking marketing is a cultural thing. Either tracking matters or it doesn’t. You’re in one camp or the other. Either you’re analytical and data-driven, or you go by what you think works. People who go by gut are wrong.”— Stuart McDonald

You have to know if the campaigns are effective in generating any output. With the help of potential tracking partner, you must be able track clicks, the amount you have spent and the revenue you’ve made so far with those campaigns in order to analyze the performance. Introducing programmatic methods via RTB, retargeting has become truly unbeatable solution.

Mobile app re-marketing is a powerful tool, you can explore new platforms, methods and strategies. If you find some of your strategies are working, keep creating identical messaging or design and focus on improvements. Mobile app retargeting is still a new thing and there are new ideas and methods that are experimented every day. What methods you want to use to optimize is your call.

Blog, Enterprise Mobility, Mobility

13 Tips To Make Your App Go Viral

June 2, 2016 [x]cube LABS

There are millions of apps available on app stores. The bar for standing out is exceptionally high, which is why it’s necessary for mobile app developers and businesses to have a strong mobile app marketing strategy so that their app gets the desired success.

Here are few strategies to make your app go viral.

1. Create Something Truly Valuable

Unique apps that provide a relevant purpose are more valuable than generic applications with no clear target group. In the world of mobile programming, few developers are able to come up with truly original ideas and execute them well enough to draw a dedicated user base.

Apps should be created keeping the target audience in mind. Apps should add value to the customer’s life, then only chances are there for it to go viral. If an app is valuable to the target audience, then automatically it will generate word of mouth promotion.

In this regard an example can be quoted that of Uber. Uber has made the business of car rental or booking more simpler and safer. Now people need not stand in queue and book cabs. One app does it all. Users just need to download an app and feed their details like location and pick up point. Users can also get an estimate price of the ride. So create an app which will add value to your user’s life.

2. Know Your Audience

Clearly defining your audience makes all the difference when you are creating an app. Creating an app without a clear understanding of your audience is like a chicken without a head.

Envisioning your app also involves preparing your app requirements, which need to include a clear definition of your exact target audience. This usually refers to the special characteristic that your target audience might have, which may include culture, language, age (whether they are kids, adults), the user’s web ability and several other criteria. These characteristics are very important as they help you understand how to convey the app requirements into a set of functionalities that are prioritized within your app as features that are geared towards fulfilling your target audience’s needs.

By getting a clarity on targeted audiences, it becomes easier to capture someone’s attention because their needs and goals are front and centre.

3. Promote Your App Aggressively

Mobile app marketing is a big factor behind the success of any app. Marketing your app is critical, given that there are many mobile apps belonging to the same genre that just differ in name, but are developed for the same purpose and in the same form.

Here are a few ways to promote your app in an aggressive manner

4. Maximize Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are a large area for mobile app ads. Facebook ads have grown by 500%. This is because Facebook is seen to be a good avenue for app advertisements because there are millions of Facebook users all over the world who visit the site. Therefore, there are more chances for your app to be seen by prospective downloaders.

5. Monitor Your App’s Download Activity

Monitoring the download activity will give you an idea on which platform or blog your app gets more downloads from. Identifying the traffic source will give you an idea over which app marketing avenue is the most effective, and where you should be investing more money.

6. App Store Optimization(ASO)

ASO is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store’s search results. The top your app ranks in an app store’s search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. That increased visibility tends to convert into more traffic to your app’s page in the app store.

These are just some of the most suitable and simplest ways to make your app popular and make it known to all downloaders from across the globe.

7. Keep The Customer On-Boarding Simple

A 2015 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that more than one-third (33%) of potential customers are lost due to complex and inefficient customer on-boarding processes. The effort put in by marketing departments and sales in acquiring new customers is mostly lost in the process of on-boarding the customers.

Most of the on-boarding processes requires unnecessary details which can be easily organized on the digital front.

More than 60% of the customers abandon signing up process due to its complexity and time consumption. So keep the on-boarding simple and fast by using social media credentials or email ids instead of making your user fill-up a long form.

8. Make It Easy To Share

Apps should be easy to share. The app should support all devices.

Provide the ability to share to several social platforms in one or two taps. Sharing apps on the social platform gives more visibility to the app. If the app is visible then it will garner interest of the users and ensure maximum downloads. Make it possible to post to multiple social networks at one time.

As a business owner, you would want to have an mobile application which is adaptable on different platforms so people can use it on the go, wherever they go, however they go. It is easier to maintain and deploy changes in apps that run across all platforms. Updates would immediately get synced across all devices and platforms. This will save you money.

Place sharing channels that are relevant to the app’s content. If you share the app on a platform which is relevant to your app content, then it will be advantageous. It helps internal communicators and managers decide on the best way to deliver their message. Practitioners and managers should match their choice of communication channel to the intended outcome, for example, whether they wish to raise awareness or gain commitment.

9. Reward Users For Marketing Your App

If you want to encourage a certain behavior, reward it. Inviting friends and connecting with others should be a part of their daily usage. Inviting friends should be a core process in your app, rather than a second thought. Experiment with ways to encourage the customers to invite friends at different points in the app.

Rewarding customers for their referrals can make them feel a little guilty that they are making money off of their friends. The best way around the problem is to also reward the friends who receive their invitations. Rewards could be: extra storage, a free upgrade, free a character, discounts, free themes.

Sneak in secret rewards and surprise people, then watch as the app goes viral.

10. Monitor User Behavior

User behavior of those who download and use app is highly diverse. There are users who like engaging with the apps. They like tapping, pinching and swiping. There are users who will abandon an app if they don’t get what they want. Tracking user behavior can open wonderful opportunities for marketing an app.

It is post launch of the app that mobile user behavior has the most impact on app marketing since this is where users engage with an app. Studying how users behave and interact with an app can help support an improved user experience through a refinement of app marketing strategy.

Essential as air, this feature allows to track users, and get the full information about their behavior. On the basis of this information you might see, in which way to upgrade the app.

11. Keep Your App Fresh

To get mobile users to download an app is a challenge in itself. Keeping them engaged and coming back to that app is an even higher one. The reason is simple – mobile users tend to have incredibly high expectations. They’re quick to delete or simply ignore the apps they’ve downloaded, if the experience doesn’t meet their standards.

So how do you drive app loyalty with new customers and keep your existing loyal customers coming back?

Keep your app fresh by the following methods

12. Dynamic Updates

In the mobile world, change is consistent. It happens fast and it happens unexpectedly. These changes may come in the form of market trends, or they may be changes in user expectations and behavior. Regardless of the nature, adapting to changes and constantly providing a better feel of the app, means you need the ability to make dynamic updates quickly, on the go. This means no waiting for IT, and no waiting for an approval from the app store. Just like the web world, you need the ability to make changes to your app in minutes so that you can respond quickly to the changes and constantly drive improvements that make users happy.

13. Send Relevant Messages

Push notifications and in-app messages have the ability to increase app awareness and drive more app engagement. However, if implemented wrongly, your users will likely see these messages as annoying spam. Include push notifications and in-app messages into your overall app strategy.

Viral marketing is the way app marketers are resorting to win the tough app race. Thus to be ahead on the race, you need to go viral. Being viral is the new vitality.

Banking, Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation

6 Challenges Banks Face Today And How Digital Tech Can Solve It

June 1, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Digital tech is changing the face of banking at a whopping pace. As per a survey by Celent, 90% of US bankers expect at least a 10% decline in branch numbers over the next 5 years, with 45% expecting the decline to be 25% or more. Branch numbers have declined by 9% in the last 3 years. And banks are gaining new efficiencies and business benefits from embracing digital.

1. Disruption

The biggest threat the banking industry is facing today. What can the banks do when the technology is challenging stereotyped banking models? Payments methods have changed, transferring money has become easy – The idea of Digital wallet or mobile wallet has a major role in changing the traditional methods of banking. According to David Shrier, managing director of MIT Connection Science, “In the last four years, venture capital investment in Fintech has increased more than 600 percent,” They have to compete with the Fintech companies by improving its standards and taking steps towards digitization.

2. Customer experience matters

It’s high time for the customer to walk into a branch to perform banking. Digital banking makes it easy. Two-third’s of the decisions made by the customers are informed by the quality of their experiences all along their journey. It is a tough task to satisfy the changing demands of a consumer. Digital consumer wants the banking experience to be simple and fast. Consumer protection continues to be a major hurdle for regulators in the Digital world. Understanding customers is the foundation to a sustainable advantage in banking. As a result, industries can no longer hold on to the power of advanced analytics to gain feedbacks and rate opportunities that will improve, increase up-selling, cross-selling and develop customer value.

3. Avoiding Compliance risk

Banks have the great opportunity to completely redesign and optimize their bloated compliance processes, building “smart compliance” in the journey of digitized customer. The Financial regulators around the globe are trying to ensure banks perform with a greater level of professionalism and do not allow any illegal activities through their services. And, the fast increase in digital banking services makes it difficult for these banking institutions to be absolutely certain with complying the rules. The biggest advantage of digital banking is the ease with which it can be accessed to engage with clients.

4. Constricting the cost

Modifying the operations and structure of banks for the digital age, consistently changing its cost base, and initiating better cost management procedures can help in decreasing the costs. Banks will have to change the way they are operating, making the model more customer friendly. Banks can see the cost reductions somewhere around 40 to 90 percent by digitizing internal processes with self-servicing capabilities and workflow tools for customers and staff. Self-serve ATMs is one area where we can see a quick cost-cutting gain. Going digital can help the banks do the same duties with less expenditure and less manpower.

5. Bringing Data centricity

Gathering data and using consumer insights can be a key differentiator for organizations hoping to build new relationships. Banks of all sizes will leverage data and technology to help their customers in taking better financial decisions developing the ability in saving money, achieve particular financial goals, increase financial knowledge and better budget management. The cost of collecting data and putting the same to use is highly restricted. The precision of data generation becomes the fatal in this process. With Big data coming into the picture, data gathering and data handling has become a walk in the park. Not only all the data is collected and stored but it is also secured.

6. Pressurizing the time

In this tireless daily life, a minute saved is a penny earned. The enhancement of internet banking services has given some kind of rejoice to the customers in saving time and efforts. Those days are gone where the customers had to wait for a really long duration make a transaction at the bank. Be it opening an account, loan approval, money transfer, the time to apply, time to process, verification etc., all this chaos has been cut down on time. Depositing cheques, money all of it has become so convenient with digitization. It’s really amazing how Internet banking services have grown. Great levels of security and response time have been developed. Finally, Internet banking is no longer an interest, but a necessity.

Banks can reduce costs by up to 50% on a per-transaction basis in the next few years by going digital, according to a study titled ‘Logging into digital banking: Creating access, transforming lives’ said.

When the flaws of banking were considered, it was concluded that banks were limited by legacy systems than financial technology firms, innovation and the ability to be strong. Banking has also struggled by the inability to reach the level of technological expertise needed to develop the products compared to Fintech firms. In other words, it’s about securing the future and not being pulled into a false sense of security based on the back book. Digitizing banks can be a one stop solution for a better banking and for the future.

Blog, Mobility, Retail

5 Ways Retailers Are Using Mobile Apps To Win Customers

May 31, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Retail Strategies That Drive In-Store Traffic

Mobile apps have become essential part of shoppers’ life. We now use mobile to locate a store, get info on products and compare. Before entering a store, shoppers already have the product information and expect the same with store attendants. Therefore, the relationship between mobile and in-store shopping is very much interconnected. Mobile apps present an opportunity for the retailers to enhance the in-store shopping experience, create personalized experiences for them and boost profitability.

Here are 5 ways mobile apps will help you reach your consumers, increase your revenue, loyalty and productivity. And all this while controlling the cost!

1. Shoppers Engagement

Having your store app will help you increase customer engagement more effectively. Sprint, a telecommunication company discovered that one in four people who click on mobile search ads rush to the retail store. Shoppers generally look for promos and coupons. According to a survey carried out by RetailMeNot, in partnership with Omnibus Company, more than 33% of shoppers admitted to being bargain hunters. They often search for online coupons on their mobile devices. Giving away offers will keep your customer updated on your latest deals and discounts. In-store navigation will help shoppers find your products, which make things easier for them. While shopping 90% of customers use smart phones to check product information, product prices etc., For Example, Walmart’s app serves offers on their homepage. One of the app store reviewers puts it, “Easier than (sic) using my computer!!!” Walmart ramps up mobile in-store strategy to save customers time.

2. Upgrade Efficiency And Profit Level

Walmart has a feature on their mobile app called Scan & go, which allows shoppers to scan their products in destined stores and pay at a self-checkout counter. Also, with the help of a mobile app, the retail staffs are able to process a payment from anywhere in the store. Most of the retailers are leveraging mobile apps to boost efficiency and productivity, reducing the chances of a customer to change their mind before checking out, thanks to long queues at the market. With less effort you gain customer satisfaction, generate sales and grow your business. Motorola research determined that by 2017 nearly the in-store transactions can be done using an app or a self-checkout feature on the mobile device of the customer. Customers are always looking for local information like, google search for “near me” and it has grown 2.4X every year. As per research, 50% of customer who look out for local search, visit a store within a day and 18% of those leads to a purchase. As per the survey, 82% of customer consult their phones while doing in-store purchase. Retailers who adopted the digital in-store, took advantage of the mobile technology to enhance customer experience, drive sales, improve customer loyalty and achieve operational efficiencies. Neiman Marcus service app provides customers to personalize in-store shopping experience by bookmarking certain items, and connecting with sales staff. For the sales staff, this allows them to look at the customer’s desires and shopping history, thus giving them a valuable insight to customer queries.

3. Product Availability

It is disappointing for a shopper when they reach your store and find the product out of stock. You lose your potential customer and also their loyalty, a reason why most of them avoid a store visit. Having your app on a smartphone provides product information and will have a quick access to up-to-date inventory in the store, as many of your customers are depending on their phones to purchase products. If you provide a quality app, you are providing a consolidated cross-channel experience. According to MasterCard, customers who shop both online and offline with a specific retailer buy 250% more on average. Mobile apps not only provide information to shoppers, it also helps your store manager to keep a track of the inventory and make effective inventory decisions. Resulting in reducing stock-out situations, manager will know the amount of stock that should be in the store. For instance, Mobile apps will give real-time alerts to your store manager, of any pending stock, overstock situation, immediately. Keeping this information in-hand, managers plan and take decisions like, to request a back-stock pull, overstocked inventory can be moved to another store, or request for additional merchandise. With the help of Local Inventory Ads, Sears Hometown and outlet stores saw an increase of 122% in store visit by showing actual store inventory App users. “Mobile computing/mobile BI is not only becoming more pervasive in and across organizations, it’s becoming much more mature and advanced,” said Howard Dresner, Founder and Chief Research Officer, Dresner Advisory Services, and author of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Mobile Computing/Mobile BI Market Study.

4. Customer Feedback

Today retail industry has become highly aggressive acquiring new customers, retaining them, gaining customers trust and growing their business while generating revenue. It is important for retailers to deliver the right products, keep interacting with customers to know their needs, keep them engaged and deliver personalized content. Start giving options like, live chat with an associate to know more about the product, you’re likely engaging your customer. In the end ask for their feedback.Nowadays, people rely more on product reviews and rating, before buying any product. This will improve the conversion rate by providing your customers with other customer reviews and ratings. Based on Cisco’s research, that the 63% of online shoppers consumers purchase depending on the ratings and reviews displayed on websites, so that it will have a sizable impact on their purchase decisions.

Sephora, the beauty and body-care retailer, consider in-store mobile behavior as a major opportunity. Their app allows in-store customers to scan the products to view the product reviews and other key information.

“In retail, you can’t think about the mobile phone as a threat. You have to think of it as a magnet to draw that client to your store”—Bridget Dolan, VP Interactive Media, Sephora

5. Add A Layer Of Excitement

Parkway Parade is a shopping mall partnered with Sprooki. Their mobile app has an option for customers to pre-purchase using smartphones and also motivate retailers. When customers receive any alerts of the shopping mall, they will open the app and make a purchase and services on the spot, using their phone and they can pick the product immediately from the store. While CVS Caremark and Walgreen’s app allows users to get refills and make orders to collect, at the same time they also look at deals in the store. This feature will add more confidence about shopping and help customers keep a track of the products they want. To make shopping more entertaining British shoe retailer Clarks rolled out an interactive, iPad-based system which help measuring children’s shoe sizes. The app creates a pleasing heat sensor image of the child’s foot, trying on new shoes is now more appealing to children and easier for parents.

Mobile apps are transforming the retail market. For a retailer, a mobile app is no longer a choice but necessity

Blog, Enterprise Mobility, Mobility

5 Ways To Optimize The ROI Of Your Mobile App

May 30, 2016 [x]cube LABS

A recent report published by Gartner predicts that mobile apps will generate a revenue of $77 billion by 2017. The mobile app ecosystem is fast expanding beyond the smartphone generation. The future shall see mobile apps becoming more and more pervasive into our daily lives. With breakneck competition, apps which fail to gain users or retain them are missing out on mobile revenue. The key to make your app profitable is to boost app usage.

We outline 5 best practices for driving user engagement and increasing the RoI of your mobile app

1. An Improved UI: For any app developer, user satisfaction is the hallmark of success. To create an ingenious app experience, one should focus on a human centric design approach. Often there appear bottlenecks in the UI which impede a smooth app experience for the users. The trick is to use app analytics to identify where your users get stuck in the flow – That is where your hold-ups lie! Diagnosing these bottlenecks and eliminating them will help you create a fluid and engaging experience for your users.

2. Audience Segmentation: To receive positive returns on your app, you must make sure that your Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), the average revenue that app users generate over their lifetime is greater than your Cost per Acquisition (CPA), the average direct cost to acquire a user that generates the ARPU.

So, How Do You Get There?

This requires audience segmentation that can identify specific attributes and generate targeted, personalized campaigns to interest those audience groups.

One way is to run push-messaging campaigns to reach out to users who haven’t opened your app in a while and re-engage them. Running in-app messaging campaigns can be effective towards directing users to desired events and providing them personalized offers.

Test your marketing campaigns for frequency, timing, offer, content, and audience to identify scope for improvement before actually submitting your app to the App Store.

3. Enable Social Sharing: Social media sharing is that part of the user engagement process which no mobile app developer can do without. Make sure you push social sharing enough for your engaged users to talk about and share their experiences about your app and spread the digital word of mouth. The more your app is shared, the more will it catch the attention of potential users. Build your social media presence by integrating sharing buttons in your app and using in-app messages to prompt users.

4. Reward Your Customers: The best course to drive engagement is to make your users feel special by offering them mobile rewards. These offers can be run either in-app or through push notifications and can include a wide array of options such as rewards programs, customized offers, and mobile coupons. Rewarding customers is a way to show them that their loyalty is recognized and appreciated.Targeted incentives such as rewarding a user who has reached a certain level in your gaming app with bonus credits, coins etc.

5. Leverage The Benefits Of Mobile Analytics: Firms aiming to harness the vast business opportunities should understand that traditional marketing rules do not apply to mobile app promotion. You should be able to pick and choose the right metrics depending upon the custom needs of your business and monitor them on a regular basis. Metrics such as those listed below can be used to full advantage to get insights into your mobile app performance, to identify and eliminate unproductive channels. Consequently they can be improved to ensure positive returns

User Acquisition Cost- The exact amount spent to acquire a single user
User Retention Rate- The number of people coming back to re-use the app after first use
Screenflow- This metric records the order of the screens followed by the users while navigating through the app.
Average Session Length- The average session duration per user indicates the level of engagement driven by the mobile app.
User Lifetime Value (LTV)- It depicts the revenue that a user generates over its lifetime.

Therefore, with the right mix of app analytics,an outstanding UI design and carefully targeted marketing campaigns, mobile developers can hit the bull’s eye and eventually maximize their app RoI.

App Marketing, Blog, Mobility, User Acquisition

5 Tips To Boost Your Mobile App User Acquisition Strategy

May 27, 2016 [x]cube LABS

User Acquisition is the art of building a brand

In today’s competitive world, millions of apps are published on app stores, each jostling for some space on your mobile screen. In fiercely competitive app stores, it is challenging to get your app visible and get users. So, you need a matchless user acquisition strategy to make your app a success. Here are 5 ways you can refine your mobile app user acquisition strategy and get the desired RoI from your app

1. Know your user

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”–John Russell

It is important to know that there are millions of mobile users with varied needs & wants. Plan what type of users you want to target or who can be your users to bring revenue for your business. You have a final product ready – test your app, do a soft launch in order to run bug free app. Soft launch is very important to fit with your product in the market. This data will help you improve your ad’s text and graphic creative to acquire new users. Do a survey to know why they downloaded your app, you will find the reasons. Don’t stop at the first survey, keep this going for more insights. In order to run any business we need to acquire users. By users we mean quality users which will help you in increasing revenues. For that you need to know the right audience.

2. App Store Optimization (ASO)

Recently, at Google I/O, Ankit Jain reported that “For the average app, search actually makes up the vast majority of installs.” App Stores, be it the iOS or Google Play Store have become the current shopping windows. It’s a the first thing all users will look into and your app needs to look good to get the conversions. Your keyword pick should be effective, so that users are able to find your app. Keywords plays an important role here, however, it needs to be changed over time. Every day similar apps are out on the app store to compete with. At the same time you also will have to set a campaign to get app installs, which would influence app ranking from the amount of traffic that the app gets on a daily basis.

3. Shape up your channel and behavior

We use different channels to bring the traffic like Facebook, Twitter and ad networks. An effective app acquisition strategy is a combination of organic and paid campaigns which brings users for your app. It is also important to keep monitoring which network is bringing more traffic, based on which you can plan your future investment. These segments allow you to track details like action taken, campaign, and other attributes that will give you a deeper understanding of how your organic and paid tools are performing.

4. Track Every Action

“Sometimes the best discoveries are the result of simple observations”
–Dr. Seyed Reza Agha Seyed Hosseini

Analytics tools allow us to track more than just downloads, when a user downloads your app the story doesn’t end there. Tracking the user’s actions can be more efficient for your long term business plan. For example; a user can download your app and never open your app (not all downloads turns into users). In this case you are getting users, but no quality users which doesn’t end up serving your purpose. Once you get the user, you should focus on retaining them for a longer period of time. You also need to track how many users are checking your app, session length and other behavior.

Analytics tools will provide you with granular data and help you track user behavior minutely. You will know how the users are engaging with various features of your app, the time spent on it and the frequency of app usage, along with other key details.

5. Measure Lifetime value (LTV) of Users

Like I said, we just can’t acquire users for our app but we also need to look for quality users. LTV will let you measure ROI, as it tracks down how much a user is worth to your business. Do a soft launch, once you have strong data, your focal point should be on getting high LTV users. For example; you are running two campaigns from two different channels. From campaign 1 you are getting the number of installs, on the other hand from campaign 2 very few. You may think campaign 1 is only performing, however now it’s time to check the LTV. It may turn out campaign 2 users are more active and making more in-app purchases. This clearly means campaign 2 is giving high ROI. To measure LTV you need to consider-

Average Revenue Per User – How much a user is worth to you?

Retention – Level of engagement with your app?

Virality – How likely are they to bring in new users for your business?

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
–Theodore Roosevelt

Focus more on quality over quantity, because they are the one who will bring in revenue and be the voice of your app. Always experiment with new ideas or ways to reach new users. And keep the funnel flowing!

Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation

5 Winning Tips For Successful Digital Transformation

May 26, 2016 [x]cube LABS

Businesses today are under an aura of transformation, driven by emerging technologies. With companies like Uber, Airbnb, SalesForce and many others in the picture, the moment of truth is here. These digitally revolutionized companies call for a change. Marketers and entrepreneurs now need to understand how to engage their customers and meet up with their demands of staying connected round the clock.

In this world where information is available on a single tap devices, digital transformation encompasses every idea that has a minor digital aspect. Starting from an early phase being digitally reactive involves being tactical on every transaction that forms the backbone of online business. Following this and moving to being digitally strategic is the next big step. This involves being digital in processes like selling your products and services to thrive against competitors. After attaining this stage with your USPs in place comes the ultimate stage of transformation, where the innovation of your business drives trends and fashion in the industry.

To complete your journey through these crucial phases, few winning tips to keep in check are described below. If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur, these tips are your spot on methods to follow.

1. Know your customer

Before you plan out your strategy or hire a resource team, knowing and analyzing your customer will lead to building a strong foundation. It is critical that you know what your target segment thinks, what are they looking for, what attracts them the most and what is your go to strategy to keep them engaged. Building buyer personas will help you with representations of your ideal customers. Framing a story of these customer journeys can easily help you identify the how’s and why’s behind a particular action. As a strategist, you need to map out the customer journey and identify his needs step by step to form a rock solid plan for your business goals.

2. Develop your team

For the smooth sailing of any strategy in process of going digital, building your team is the first step. A team that comprises the knowledge of both aspects – marketing and technology is what you are looking for. Serving just one aspect of your plan will lead to an incomplete fulfillment of your goals. A resource who knows marketing with a sound knowledge of technology will prove to be your best pick amongst the lot. Digital transformation is a path full of surprises, to deal with the newness, having stability in your high-performance team is essential. Your organization goals, objectives and fashion will change, therefore find people who are comfortable with uncertainty and have a variety of paths to cater too. In short, hire omnivores.

3. Keep the ‘learn as you go’ attitude

Being open to changes and having the learning attitude is a plus. Having the shared vision of an outcome helps to get to your objective efficiently with a variety of ideas in place. Let’s be honest here, you will never be able to enter a consumer’s mind and understand his pain point until you hear him out. Aren’t open to learning. Keeping your solution in focus and trying to develop content on it is not the right way to go about digital transformation. Rather, keep a clear mind, ears open and adapt the change.

4. Experimenting

Innovating new ideas and experimenting, has always been a key factor in digital transformation. Taking risks — which is the core of experimenting — can make you feel uncomfortable, which is why you tend to avoid it. Taking risks puts you in a position to possibly fail, it also creates the opportunity to do something great, something that’s far better than what you are doing now. Digital always has the benefit to trial and error and you can always learn something new. Experimentation integrates learning opportunities into the full scale execution of your plan.

5. Integrate your culture

More than forming a dedicated team for transformation, it is important that your employees accept and adapt to the metamorphosis. Going digital comes with changes in every department and process the foundation of your business. If the culture of your organisation is not digitally sound, you probably will have things the hard way. Train your staff for the right digital experience and let them have the roller coaster ride for fun.

Testing and learning is your step to digital strategy. Analysing all your steps to form a strong thesis should be inherent in your culture and you will have it all the easy way.

It’s time for digital!

Blog, Digital Strategy

5 Tips To Create Successful Digital Customer Experiences

May 25, 2016 [x]cube LABS

With a myriad of digital services available today, customer experience acts as a potential asset. This can be the KPI to differentiate and evaluate certain factors in an organization for a better marketplace. We’re looking at a tech-savvy generation who have the power to choose. Studies show that 80% of consumers today are ready to pay more for a better experience., Here’s where you gotta do something about it.

A key point to keep in mind is that enhancing consumer experience opens door to loyalty, user satisfaction, consistency in buying, referral increase – reducing your customer churn and increasing sales! Therefore, keeping a focus on this parameter has now become way too important.

With all the pressure from the industry, it is essential to differentiate yourself and stand out. Here are five key tips to create successful digital consumer experiences for you

1. Be A Good Listener

You might not be that person to follow the traditional methods of marketing believe in the power of digitisation – listening and interacting with your users makes it more personal and attains goodwill from your audience. We’ve come a long way to know making assumptions and trying to solve a problem will not lead to right answers. Understanding and keeping an open-mind will help you understand your user journey better. It is important that you touch all the pain points of your user to analyse where the actual problem lies. So, be a good listener to learn as much as you can from your user. He is your best teacher.

2. Analytics Is The key To User Behavior

Technology has blessed us with an extremely powerful tool of analytics wherein you can track your user journey at every single step! Tracking your user from the sources he visits your app/website, the pages he clicks on, the duration he stays on a particular page, the bounce rate of a goal, etc. will develop a strong analytical framework of what your user does. Today the need of consumer experience is such, that you need to understand what they are looking for. In this manner, you will be able to make your digital tool contextually intelligent and personalized.

3. It’s All About Learning

You need to build your strategy by mapping your learnings from the consumer. Start off by knowing your target audience and what they are looking for. It is important that you decide on your objective targets before you set a plan. Remember, a strong and crisp plan comes with a well built strategy – knowing where you are headed will prove to keep your audience in focus. This could bring in increasing profitability, gaining more market share, increasing ratings – all by the process of boosting consumer experience. With a clear direction, you have your game-plan set.

4. Experimental

After having your game plan set and steadily moving, constantly experimenting and testing will give you different perspectives to work with. Regular content maintenance, matching needs, testing different vertices, speaking to consumers, etc provides a great base for your strategy to be in check. There are a number of innovative ways to enhance consumer experience out there, perhaps, you might just come up with something completely new!

5. Monitor Touchpoint And Centralize Knowledge

The benefit of unifying all of your customer service information into one single knowledge-based system is a huge weapon for your business. Many organizations implement a centralized knowledge-base of information to benefit from being instantly updated with information. This ensures regular feedback from all experiments across all channels. For instance, mobile, social media and email channels implies that your users are getting consistent answers to their questions. This will also reduce them to escalate further information, proving to be user friendly.

We have entered the customer’s era – an age where the focus is more on users. The perception of a customer has intense impacts on businesses today and the importance of better user-experience is changing dynamics of the current marketplace.

Announcements, Blog

PurpleTalk’s Venture Nukkad Shops Bags 22nd Annual Communicator Awards

May 20, 2016 [x]cube LABS

PurpleTalk’s home grown retail technology venture Nukkad Shops has bagged the prestigious “Silver Award of Distinction” in the 22nd Annual Communicator Awards 2016. The Communicator Awards is a leading international awards program that recognizes outstanding ideas in marketing and communications. Winning entries for the awards are selected by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts (AIVA) based on merit of achievement and quality of craft. An exhaustive evaluation by the AIVA later, Nukkad Shops was adjudged the winner in the Integrated Campaign 2016 – Business to Consumer category.

Earlier this year, Nukkad Shops was declared the best product in the Consumer – Early stage segment 2016 , at the 25th anniversary of the HYSEA Hyderabad Summit and was also adjudged the winner of the NASSCOM 10K’s Get in The Ring Challenge for innovative startups.

Founded in April 2015 , Nukkad Shops aims to be the largest (virtual) retail chain in India by offering comprehensive technological, strategic and leadership solutions for small to medium sized retail businesses. These solutions empower retail businesses with efficiency, competitiveness and increased profit.

Nukkad Shops was created with the objective of helping typically low tech, neighborhood retail stores a platform to digitise their inventory, leverage mobile as a platform as well as leverage technology across their operations to make their business more efficient and profitable.

With an initial funding from PurpleTalk and close involvement from the leadership team, Nukkad Shops is poised to achieve significant growth with their retail tech solutions for the SMB segment in India.

Announcements, Blog

[x]cube LABS Becomes One of the First Certified Google Developer Agencies

May 19, 2016 [x]cube LABS

[x]cube LABS is one of the the first 13 companies globally to be certified as a Google Developer Agency. This recent recognition from Google further testifies [x]cube’s leadership in the mobile & digital technology space and provides great motivation for the team to continue delivering further innovation on Android and Mobile platforms for our clients.

On achieving this distinction, [x]cube LABS’ CEO Bharath Lingam said, “We’re very excited that Google chose to recognize us with this certification. [x]cube LABS is very motivated in its mission to bring today’s employees and consumers the digital experiences they love. This recognition will act as a shot in the arm for us and further propel us to raise the digital engagement level of today’s enterprises by introducing new workshops, playbooks, and platforms so that the digital enterprise becomes an immediate reality rather than a grainy vision for the future.”

The certification from Google came after an exhaustive evaluation process. As a developer agency [x]cube had to qualify on a number of factors including proven expertise in the use of Google technologies and a successful track record of developing high quality apps.

As a Certified Google Developer Agency, [x]cube will now receive dedicated support and access to Google’s latest products and APIs.

Blog, Digital Transformation & Innovation, Weekly Insights

Digital Transformation Insights Weekly May 11-17

May 19, 2016 [x]cube LABS

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