CX Insights

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Real-Time Data Drives Better Customer Experience

According to a new study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of DataStax – “The Evolution to Real-Time Customer Experience” highlights the key role data platforms play in driving customer experiences. To meet consumer’s needs in real-time, organizations need a data platform that allows them to capture, assess, and use individual customer behavior in real time.

The survey revealed some eye-opening findings related to CX initiatives:

1. CX decisions are not driven by real-time data: To engage customers in the moment, companies require data systems that provide insights in real time. However, 95 percent are unable to make sense of customer data and struggle to gain real-time insights from it. Companies are hindered from serving customers in their immediate context, ultimately hurting their business results.

2. Customer experience is not truly personalized: Today’s personalization efforts are haphazard. Companies rely on segmentation, use single data points, or provide no value when personalizing experiences, thus not doing so effectively. Companies need to make investments not in systems of engagement but in systems of insight because a 360-degree view of the customer is a requirement to provide truly personalized experiences.

3. CX data platforms are an imperative in the age of the customer: Most companies are investing in technology to improve their CX. Almost 90 percent of CX decision-makers believe they would see notable improvements in their CX as a result of implementing an integrated CX data platform. Those who have already implemented a CX data platform are more likely to have a successful CX strategy and effective personalization efforts. To provide truly personalized experiences, companies need a 360-degree view of the customer; 89 percent are investing in tools and technology to improve their CX initiatives.

In order to meet consumer’s needs in real-time, organizations need a data platform that allows them to capture, assess and utilize individual customer behavior in real time.

Real-Time Insights Enables Better Customer Experience

Getting the data is foundational for data-driven marketing. That starts with getting all of that insight-laden data from across channels and touchpoints, then using it to build a complete picture of your customers and their unique needs so you can work out how best to meet those needs. Meeting your customers’ needs is, in turn, the foundation of providing good customer experience, or CX.

Customer data is key to understanding your customers and in turn delivering CX strategically

Data-driven Marketing Process

Gathering customer data is the first step. Then, marketers must curate, organize and manage that data, with robust data governance, to be able to trust and use it for customer insights. Ensuring data quality includes considering:

Source: Which customer channels or touchpoints generated the data?

Process: How is the data collected and governed? Where is it stored?

Reliability: Is the data accurate, or could it be corrupted or false?

Freshness: How recently was the data collected?

Conclusion

Not just insights but making those insights “actionable in real time” is the key to increasing marketing effectiveness. Having access to real-time insights means getting a richer understanding of what influences the attitudes of waiting customers. Organizations can deliver more satisfying service experiences across channels and platforms.

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New Fulfilment Centres To Bolster E-commerce Delivery & Sales

E-commerce giant Amazon continues to aggressively expand its operations in the country with the addition of seven new warehouses, a move that will provide employment to about 4,000 people.

#DigitalErra Thought Corner

The US-based company, which has committed an investment of $5 billion in the Indian market, will have 41 warehouses or Fulfilment Centres (FCs) by the end of June this year. Last month, Amazon had said it would open seven new warehouses to boost sales of high-priced products such as televisions, refrigerators and furniture.

“This (new FCs) will double our storage capacity this year as compared to last year. We continue to invest in strengthening our infrastructure to match our pace of business expansion in India,” said Amazon India Customer Fulfilment Vice President Akhil Saxena.

Saxena said the new centres will create about 4,000 new jobs, both temporary and permanent.

About Fulfilment Centres (FCs)

FCs are warehouses where sellers can stock their inventory. They can save money by replacing their upfront capital expense with low variable cost and pay only for the storage space they use and the orders Amazon fulfils.

Saxena adds, “We are seeing really strong growth here. We want to ensure that Indian customers can buy anything, anytime from anywhere in the country. With the additional capacity, we will serve more sellers better.”

Amazon.in has seen shipment of units grow almost 85 per cent in the first quarter of 2017 and continues to rapidly expand to tier II and III cities. Apart from the greenfield FCs, Amazon.in is also expanding capacity of its FCs in Ahmedabad and Delhi to support increased customer and seller demand.

“These FCs will help us deliver faster and enable thousands of small and medium businesses to fulfil their orders in a cost-efficient manner,” Saxena said.

FCs Boost Delivery in Furniture, Grocery and Consumer Electronics Segment

The biggest problem in furniture category is efficiency and a quick supply chain. Unlike other categories, it is not a single-piece category where it is highly unorganized. Also, grocery is a tough segment to crack due to its perishable nature of items. Building and managing the entire supply chain is a challenge for any etailer. While in electronics category, a volatile supply and demand plus a shorter product lifecycle requires a supply chain capability that is lean and agile.

Flipkart is betting on a better browsing and delivery experience to shift offline furniture purchases to online. It is looking into multi-part shipments where a FC or inventory transfer is used to ship items from one warehouse to another.

Besides, both Flipkart and Amazon India have announced significant investments into building supply chain, delivery and installation capabilities for selling large appliances online. While Flipkart has announced a network of 10 delivery centres spread over 6 lakh square feet, Amazon India has invested in setting up nine fulfilment centres of matching capacity across nine states to ship large appliances and furniture.

Conclusion

With the rise of e-commerce, consumer preferences have grown increasingly important where last-mile services act as a key differentiator. In fact, the variety of delivery options and the perceived quality of the delivery service are major decision-making criteria for online customers and hence directly affect e-commerce players’ success in the marketplace. With this in mind, vendors are working hard to offer the best customer experience possible, especially by improving delivery times.

Amazon, is locked in an intense battle with local rival, Flipkart and the competition is set to intensify in the near future with Flipkart recently raising funds to the tune of $1.4 billion from Tencent, Microsoft and ebay.

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Embrace The Power Of Cognitive Commerce In Retail

For marketers, the ability to create personalized, meaningful customer experiences, infused by analytics plays a critical role in building brand value. Retailers are increasingly creating tailored offers to capture shoppers’ attention and market share. One of the major enablers of this change has been the explosion of structured and unstructured data. 80% of data in the world—like videos, photos, audio files, or customer reviews—cannot be analyzed by traditional computing systems. Advances in social media and other platforms mean consumers are generating new unstructured data every second that indicates their likes, dislikes, and preferences, insights that retailers could not previously leverage until now.

What is cognitive computing?

Cognitive computing begins with machine learning systems that use data mining to detect patterns that mimic the way our brains work.

Why are so many online retailers adopting this?

Speed and personalization are becoming the watch word for marketers and retailers across the globe.

Here’s a small example of it:

You want to update your website by adding newly arrived products. Earlier it was a strenuous task to look at each image and tag it so search engines knew accurately what it was and how to find it. Now with applications like Watson content hub, you simply import all the images into the Hub. Using all its machine learning, it is able to tag photos at something like 95% accuracy. That saves the marketing person time to actually be creative in what they will communicate to their customers.

Then, if two people come the site and click on ‘Shirts,’ the person would see a different list of items than the second person. Different colours, sizes, and types of shirts can be prioritized differently as well- all based on what has been explicitly shared by customers and what has been observed about each user. The system learns on its own and is enabled to act on upon it. Retailers can unlock the potential of this data to improve and personalise their customer experience.

A recent IBM survey finds that 91 percent of retail industry executives familiar with cognitive computing believe it will play a disruptive role in the industry, and 94 percent are likely to invest in the technology in the near future.

A New Era in Retail

Cognitive computing represents a new era in retail, where systems understand the world and reason in the same way that humans do: through senses, learning, and experience. The systems generate knowledge about the customer over time, bringing intimate knowledge from prior interactions to personalize the shopping experience.

Cognitive computing capabilities can also power open marketing automation and analytics that help companies provide personalised digital marketing strategies.

For example, Alibris, an ecommerce bookseller, is working with cognitive computing systems so online shoppers can explore the writing style and specific traits of their top authors in order to discover new books and interests.

Another instance is of VineSleuth’s wine app that has an in-store advisor, personalising the in-store wine shopping experience by matching the retailer’s wine inventory data with shoppers’ personal flavor preferences to craft curated suggestions for shoppers. In this case, cognitive computing empowers shoppers all while delivering relevant data that retailers can use to better serve their customers.

Areas of Application

Some areas of commerce that “cognition” is being applied include:

Discovery Tools

Ones that help customers find products that are right for them with minimal effort. The most effort here is spent on being able to understand a customer’s natural language whether that be via voice or text.

Additional channels

Novel voice interfaces like that of Amazon’s Echo and chat interfaces for ordering products through natural language.

Analytics

Tools that are able to make better use of the masses of data, ideally without the need for expert configuration.

Cognitive computing can also be used to improve the performance of brick and mortar locations by analyzing and understanding factors such as why certain locations perform better than others.

Conclusion

Retail experiences are becoming more user-friendly and intuitive for mobile users, and consumers are getting more comfortable purchasing on portable devices. Cognitive can be overlaid onto any phase of customer engagement strategy to improve customer satisfaction and drive higher business results.

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India’s Online Fashion Retailers See Profitability In Sight

Myntra said that its parent company, Flipkart, had hiked its annual budget by a quarter in a bid to bolster Myntra’s position as the country’s largest online fashion retailer.

#DigitalErra Thought Corner

“This year we got 25% extra money from the Flipkart board,” said Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan.

Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart in 2014 for $300 million, will also use the budget to invest in at least three small to medium ethnic brands.

Flipkart has funds to rake in Myntra as it had raised $1.4 billion funding from global giants Microsoft, eBay and WeChat-investor Tencent.

Hybrid Model of Working

Myntra currently operates a so-called hybrid model where it buys products from vendors to sell on the platforms as well as it runs a marketplace where vendors sell directly on the site without routing it through Vector E-commerce, the largest vendor on Myntra. Now, a host of brands that sell on Myntra said the online retailer is asking them to shift from the earlier model of selling their products to Vector E-commerce to listing directly on its marketplace.

In April, Myntra acquired Bengaluru-based logistic solutions company InLogg in an effort to expand its reach and improve customer experience. The move is an obvious push in the direction of profitability, as faster and more accurate delivery can cut down on expenses.

Fashion Retailers Push for Profitability

Narayanan said that the additional budget will boost Myntra’s chance of reaching its milestone of becoming profitable by March 2018 along with Jabong. com, the rival online fashion portal that Myntra acquired last year for $70 million. Jabong has been showing positive economics, it is yet to show results in terms of profit.

“We will just invest in those brands and that will eventually be run by the entrepreneurs. In addition to our operating budget, our board has asked us to thoughtfully invest more in areas such as technology and brands which will help us continue on our growth trajectory and achieve profitability by March 2018,” Narayanan told ET.

On the heels of profitability, online marketplace ShopClues is banking big on fashion which it expects to start making money in the next couple of months, even as the e-commerce firm moves closer towards posting a profit.

The US-registered company is also preparing for an initial public offering and is open for a listing in India.

(Source: ET)

“Fashion is the first category that will start making money very soon,” Radhika Aggarwal, chief business officer of ShopClues said. “We are on course for achieving profitability for the company as a whole in the first or second quarter of the next financial year. “

In the fashion category, it faces stiff competition from leading fashion e-tailers – Myntra, Jabong, Flipkart and Amazon – and also niche companies such as Limeroad and Voonik.

Fashion and lifestyle is one of the biggest verticals and highest margin segments for e-tailers. And, for obvious reasons, the road to profitability in India’s e-commerce ecosystem could start here.

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Supply Chain Logistics Fueling Furniture Retail Business

Online furniture marketplace Pepperfry could likely be hitting the road for a pre-IPO fundraise by year end to raise $25-30 million as it plans to expand its offline studios, the founder of the company said.

#DigitalErra Thought Corner

“We don’t need capital for working capital needs. So we will use it (funds)for investments for expansion in the areas of more studios being opened,” said Ambareesh Murty, founder of Pepperfry in an interaction with Moneycontrol.com.

While Murty did not give any definitive timeline for a possible initial public offering (IPO), following the pre-IPO fundraise, he said the company would consider it only towards the end of 2018.

Pepperfry has overall raised $167 million.The company currently has 17 offline studios and would be having 23 by the end of May. These are experience stores where people can come and see the products before they place their orders.

Logistics Fueling The Business

Pepperfry runs a marketplace model and claims to be working with around 10,000 merchants. The company takes care of its own last mile delivery and has set up 17 fulfilment centres. These fulfilment centres are typically located within a 50-kilometre radius of the merchant.

“The entire last mile delivery infrastructure for Pepperfry is owned by Pepperfry and outside of this, we work with an extensive network of transporters who ship goods from one city to another,” said Murty.

Pepperfry claims to have reduced the logistics costs of the goods delivered from 25% to 7% in 3 years of time.

“Logistics business is a very lucrative business if you get your costs under control and you have a strong value proposition,” said Murty.

Nearest competitor, Urban Ladder too seeks to open 8 offline stores over a span of 2 years. Presently, the products are being delivered using Urban Ladder’s in-house logistics services.

Hassles in Furniture Logistics

Few hassles that furniture logistics brings at every stage:

Storage: High cost in per cent of market retail price as most of the Indian made furniture cannot be dismantled.

Packaging: A non-standard size introduces a need to customize the packaging for each and every Stock Keeping Unit (SKU).

Damages: Furniture is prone to damages while loading/ unloading in line haul, first and last mile.

Shipping Costs: Due to high volumetric weight, furniture shipping cost constitutes to almost 15 per cent of MRP.

Kaustab Chakraborty, Sr. VP Operations, Urban Ladder, says, “A category like furniture needs special care during transit and assembly and installation are critical post delivery services. We decided to take the tough call of rolling back from all other cities and re-launching only with our trained delivery and logistics teams due to unavailability of a reliable 3PL provider.”

Similarly, Ashish Shah, CEO, Pepperfry, shares, “To resolve logistical issues as well as to save money we rely on a hub-and-spoke model. Our furniture moves from the points of origin to the fulfillment centres to our mother hubs via long distance hauling contracts. We move full truckloads of 32feet containers, carrying at least 80 items at a time. It is then delivered to our customers through our own last mile delivery network of more than 400 trucks covering 500+ cities with the capability of delivering more than 1,00,000 pieces per month. This has also helped us bring down the delivery cost.”

These furniture marketplaces are opting for an in-house supply chain service. To cut costs and improve customer experience, they are striving to build a seamless integration of technology with procurement, delivering end-to-end services from order placement to post sales.

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Progressive Web Apps Will Drive India’s Tech Firms

Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd) has launched a lightweight mobile website, or a progressive web app (PWA), to help the ride-hailing service penetrate deeper into smaller towns and cities and target consumers with low-end smartphones, the company said on Thursday.

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Announced at the Google I/O developer conference, Ola is strategically leveraging cutting edge technology that has the reach of the web and offers a native-app-like immersive customer experience.

Ankit Bhati, Co-Founder and CTO of Ola, said, “The launch of PWA technology represents another milestone in Ola’s commitment to building innovative technology that is made for India. As the first ride-sharing app in the APAC region that is using PWA technology, this represents an important development that will enable us to reach an ever greater number of customers and driver partners in rural India. We have always said that addressing market needs is a key priority and this launch takes us one step further in our commitment to providing mobility for a billion Indians.”

PWA will operate in ways that address the local consumer needs and provide light and agile functionality, enabling Ola to magnify its reach to tier two, three, and four cities across India. Additionally, PWA presents itself as a convenient option for Outstation and Rental customers who can now access Ola through this light application on their mobile phones and desktops/laptops alike.

Key features of Ola’s PWA include:

Simple design, lightweight and fast usage in areas of low connectivity, consuming only 50KB on first download and 10KB on subsequent downloads

Operates at speed on 2G networks and also supports offline bookings; initial load time on 2G is 3.4 seconds and repeat load time is < 1 second

Behaves and looks like an app, providing the reach of the internet while offering an immersive customer experience similar to native apps

Ola is the first ride-sharing app in APAC to use PWA technology as well as the Polymer framework

Seamless integration of extended offerings, including Ola Money and Ola Care

Users can book an Ola cab through PWA across all categories and can also pay for their ride through Ola Money, making the mobility experience seamless and convenient. Other options such as OTP verification for rides, use of maps for pick-up and drop locations, ride later options and the use of Share Pass will also be available on Ola’s mobile web browser.

Ola Vs. Uber

The development comes at a time when Ola seems to be losing ground to Uber Technologies Inc, at least in the top seven cities.Uber inched ahead of Ola in March on the basis of app downloads in the seven biggest cities, according to a report by research firm KalaGatoPte Ltd. Uber accounted for 47.3% of all cab- hailing apps installed, higher than the 43.7% for Ola, at the end of March, according to data from KalaGato.

To be sure, Ola operates in 110 Indian cities as against Uber’s 29. Both companies generate more than 80% of their business from the top 10 cities.

More on PWAs

PWAs offer consumers an experience similar to native apps, but consume a fraction of the data used by native apps. It overcomestechnological barriers to entry in key markets where there is limited connectivity and a prevailing use of low-end smartphones.

Flipkart Ltd and MakeMyTrip are among the few other homegrown consumer Internet start-ups to have launched similar web apps.

Although smartphone usage in India has increased in the last couple of years, it still lags behind most other emerging economies. With the majority of the Indian population using low-end smartphones, PWA will act as an enabler of business for many online startups.

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