How Social Media helps Digital Age

Digital transformation for business is no longer optional but is on the top of the minds of most of the CEOs.  From global companies to local Mom & Pop stores, everyone is gearing up to enter on this digital bandwagon. As digital is bringing all the latest technologies into the game, keeping the human relationship is equally important to interact with customers.

In the end, Digital Transformation is for people. Social media is such an integral part of our everyday lives today, that we share our thoughts, pictures, videos with our family and friends.

Today most of the businesses are using Social Media to their advantage for this human relationship. They know the significance of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google+  in reaching prospects, customers, and partners.

More than 3 billion people are now online, and they are spending more time there than watching TV. They are making and watching videos about products they like and tweeting enthusiastically about customer service they do not like.

Social media can help build a vibrant brand, allow global reach & create and maintain better relationships with customers. Research says that Twitter is the most powerful communication tool, which shows real-time updates about what world is saying.

Here are top benefits of Social Media:

Search Engine Optimization: When someone searches for your business on Google, the social profiles are likely to be amongst the top results. For instance, when you search for Ferrari, their Twitter profile appears as the 2nd listing. In addition, the Ferrari’s other social media profiles are displayed on the right-hand side of the page.

Customer Service: Today, we see many people turn to social media to vent their frustrations with organizations. Consumers ask questions, provide feedback on a brand’s customer support team or seek assistance. Many big companies have recognized this, and have dedicated social media customer service agents employed to actively engage on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Brand Recognition: Using social media also helps to boost the business visibility with both current and potential customers. It gives you the perfect platform to share your brand's voice with your audience and spread the word about your products, services, offers and more. Burberry used social media to directly stream their fashion shows, which generated millions of dollars for them in new customers.

Marketing: Advertising on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube goes viral today and helps great global marketing. Engaging with your brand’s loyal consumers bring more business and spread word of mouth publicity.

Business Insights: The best way to listen to your brand mentions in social media. It shows what your customers are saying about your competitors and discovering your competitive advantages in the process.  With Big Data, businesses learn about customers, their demographics, interests, preferences, etc. Using further helps marketing to improve the relevancy of messaging and build targeted campaigns.

One positive impact of social media is in the distribution of information in today’s world. If you don’t have a dedicated social media team, create one. If you do have one already, then make it even more efficient. If people are the soul of digital transformation, then social media is the heart.

Role of Mobile in Digital Transformation

Our world has become increasingly digital. 

The mobile-first strategy is no longer valid as we live in the mobile-only world.

Today a number of people having mobile phones on the planet is much bigger than bank account holders or credit cardholders globally.

People use mobile devices as Swiss pocket knives: they serve a range of needs, activities, and purposes.

We shop and buy more of our products online or via mobile, we decide where to eat, buy a car, and hire a plumber by looking at the app digitally. Any critical decision that is made, a credit decision, admissions into a top university, accessing your social security benefits statement, etc. are all made electronically.

With the proliferation of new digital platforms, businesses are forced to rethink their physical presence. Gone are the days where you just have an app and a website: it’s vital now that mobile’s role is understood within the larger digital ecosystem.

Mobile is now present along every step of the end-to-end customer journey, from research and inspiration to return. Mobile is one of the most important touchpoints in the customer lifecycle.

Mobile has already stormed the Banking, Travel, Retail industries. Mobile has become an integral part of the shopping experience as consumers spend more time with mobile devices than with desktop and laptops combined.

Users leave billions of data points, which brands use, by applying analytics to personalize & keep them actively engaged to generate revenue. Integrating social media networking channels with mobile apps would further allow the consumers to interact freely with the enterprise, paying the way for increased brand loyalty.

With so many advances in mobiles, the mCommerce has also changed the face. Since the launch of the iPhone, mobile commerce has moved from sheer text messages to apps. There are so many uses for ticketing, money transfers, information services like news, stocks, traffic alerts, etc.

Mobile payments have gained momentum and as more options become available, usage is set to surge. Consumers are adopting mobile wallet apps, Google wallets, smartwatches and devices with Apple Pay, Samsung Pay t capabilities.

Mobile brings various advantages like portability, instant connectivity, personalization & localization of services. Further, it allows businesses to be visible to the customer at all times, build brand and recognition.

Even at work and out of office employees can benefit from mobile access to information, work from anywhere, reduce traveling and increase overall efficiency. While an organization can benefit from easy collaboration with team members, helping sales folks with quick information at their fingertips.

Businesses are focused on delivering growth and profitability with faster; better decision-making, & mobile technologies appear to be in the driver’s seat in this Digital Age.

Digital Transformation in Restaurants and Food industry

Digital disruption is omnipresent, get on board or get thrown off the track.

Digital is no longer a purview of only Banking, Insurance, Healthcare or Retail. The Restaurant industry is having pressure from multiple directions. 

Today’s consumer expects fresh food, whether it is in season or not, with an exotic dining experience.

Successful restaurants recognize that the easy path to their customers' stomachs begins in their minds. They need to grab customer's attention and entice them with a memorable experience in order to trigger repeat visits.

Here are some of the applications of Digital disruption in the restaurants & foodservice industry:

·       Digital Signage to deliver eye-catching graphics to engage customers the moment they walk through the door

·       Online reservations using mobile app & flexibility of customization of the menu as per customer taste

·       Chatbots: Restaurants are using virtual assistants to respond to customer inquiries and to process and customize customer orders. Taco Bell, Pizza hut have adopted chatbots to automate ordering process from a social media platform.

·       Robots – Restaurants are using AI-driven robots to increase the capacity and speed of food preparation and delivery.

·       Recommendation engines – Developers are designing applications which use AI to help consumers choose meals & suggest foods based on their eating preferences.

·       Wi-Fi enabled dining spaces for truly engaging customer experience

·       Kiosks – Restaurants are integrating AI-driven self-service Kiosks to reduce customer waiting time and enhance the customer ordering experience.

·       Pay by phone and flexible paying options

·       Loyalty programs based on a frequent visit

·       Digital supply chains to accurate demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and cost reduction.

Restaurants generate vast quantities of data through software that controls everything from scheduling food delivery and shift staffing to taking reservations to manage vendors and inventory to paying bills

Today almost every consumer is making dining decision on their smartphone.  They have tried new menu item based on the mobile ad.  Mobile payments have become the norm now in this industry. Customers would like to order quick meals via mobile and want to use mobile payments.

McDonald’s was the first store to accept Apple Pay.

Starbucks is a leader in digital transformation. Using more than 50mm Facebook fans & over 15mm Instagram followers at their disposal they mastered the social media engagement. First, they created an app to pay for coffee and food in their restaurants. Then they added the loyalty program, starting to craft hyper-personalized offers and experiences for their 24-hour connected customers. The company also developed new digital services to be enjoyed in its physical stores, achieving a highly praised omnichannel approach.

Pizza Hut has started an order and payment-enabled pepper robot. Customers can now have a personalized ordering, reduce wait time for carryout, and have fun with the frictionless user experience.

TGI Fridays, Wendy’s and other big names have all adopted digital technology to lure their customers.

OpenTable, GrubHub, and Zomato are some of the latest apps showcasing nearby restaurants with high-quality pics, presenting a menu with exotic pictures, price, ratings, etc. you can also get offers, deals instantly.

The digital technology available to restaurants has streamlined the lives of restaurant owners much like smartphones have bettered our daily lives.

Digital has entered the restaurants and food industry through the front door and brings many exciting trends.

As consumers expect Apple to come up with a new iPhone every year that makes the earlier model obsolete, similarly they want fresh ways of serving food with fantastic dining experience which is made possible by Digital disruption.

Why Data Scientist is top job in Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation has become a burning question for all the businesses and the foundation to ride on the wave is being data driven.

DJ Patil & Thomas Davenport mentioned in 2012 HBR article, that Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the century, and how true!  Even the latest Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist at 1^st in top 25 best jobs in America.

Over the last decade there’s been a massive explosion in both the data generated and retained by companies. Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Wallmart, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter all process tons of data every minute and use that for revenue growth, cost reductions and increase in customer satisfaction.

Most industries such as Retail, Banking, Travel, Financial Sector, Healthcare, and Manufacturing want to be able to make better decisions. With speed of change and profitability pressures on the businesses, the ability to take decisions had gone down to real time. Data has become an asset for every company, hence they need someone who can comb through these data sets and apply their logic and use tools to find some patterns and provide insights for future.

Think about Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, smartphone apps, in-store purchase behavior data, online website analytics, and now all connected devices with internet of things are generating tsunami of new data streams.

All this data is useless if not analyzed for actions or new insights.

The importance of Data Scientists has rose to top due to two key issues:

• Increased need & desire among businesses to gain greater value from their data
• Over 80% of data/information that businesses generate and collect is unstructured or semi-structured data that need special treatment 

Data Scientists:

• Typically requires mix of skills - mathematics, statistics, computer science, machine learning and most importantly business knowledge
• They need to employ the R or Python programming language to clean and remove irrelevant data
• Create algorithms to solve the business problems
• Finally effectively communicate the findings to management

Any company, in any industry, that crunches large volumes of numbers, possesses lots of operational and customer data, or can benefit from social media streams, credit data, consumer research or third-party data sets can benefit from having a data scientist or a data science team.

Top data scientists in the world today are:

• Kirk D Borne of BoozAllen
• D J Patil Chief Data Scientist at White House
• Gregory Piatetsky of kdnuggets
• Vincent Granville of Analyticsbridge
• Jonathan Goldman of LinkedIn
• Ronald Van Loon

Data science will involve all the aspects of statistics, machine leaning, and artificial intelligence, deep learning & cognitive computing with addition of storage from big data.

9 steps to Successful Digital Transformation

Today nobody is bothered about if you need to go for Digital Transformation but when and how you are doing it.

All new programs or initiatives should now take a ‘Digital First’ approach, with the rapid evolution in social media, mobile, big data analytics and cloud. 

Consumers of all ages are using wide range of digital channels and are increasingly expecting high standards of digitization.

If an organization fails in attempt to digitally transform its business, then there will be multiple predators to eat them out.

Digital Transformation will involve various leading edge technologies like:

• Social media
• Mobile 
• Big Data Analytics
• Cloud computing
• Internet of things
• API management
• User Experience - Responsive web design
• Microservices
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Virtual Reality - Augmented reality
• Wearables
• 3D printing
• Robotics
• Drones
• Beacons
• Blockchain

Here are the steps to be successful in digital transformation:

1. Boardroom/Senior management buy in, decision to go Digital and drive it across organization
2. Cultural alignment & commitment to Digital from board of directors to entry level employees
3. Identify and assess the current state of the organization on Digital
4. Put Customer first - Prepare customer journey maps to identify all the touch points with organization
5. Find out pain areas at each touch point and respective stakeholders involved who can correct them
6. Prioritize and break them in small projects to adopt fail fast approach. If anything did not work, just accept the failure, publish the learnings and move on.
7. Seek partners to help you in your journey, who take shared risk and shared rewards
8. Deploy agile implementation approach for quick results
9. Market your successes to whole world

Some of the successful Digitally Transformed organizations are:

• Apple – do you need introduction?
• Uber – disrupted taxi industry
• Airbnb – disrupted hotel industry
• Disney – most loved brand in the world
• Tesla – disrupted auto industry
• CVS Health – leader in pharmacy
• Burberry - retail
•  John Deere – manufacturing

Digital Transformation can be achieved only with change of mindset and commitment across the organization. 

There is very little time now for businesses to capitalize on Digital Transformation opportunity to win and serve their customers, to create new products and services that customers want.

Sentiment analysis in the age of Digital Transformation

Sentiment Analysis is the process of determining whether a piece of information or service provided leads to positive, negative or neutral human feelings or opinions.

It is essentially, the process of extracting, identifying and characterizing the sentiments with the help of natural language processing, statistics, or machine learning methods and can be derived from various online mediums such as social media, review forums and blogs or as part of call center operations

Some of the sentiment prediction tools work just by looking at words in isolation, giving positive points for positive words and negative points for negative words and then summing up these points.

Sentiment analysis would help you to better plan your next course of marketing actions keeping in mind the existing tone.

Some of the questions that Sentiment analysis can help are:

• Why don’t people like this new product?
• Does this customer feedback look satisfied or dissatisfied?
• What do consumers talk about my brand in online space?
• Are they happy with the services?
• What do our customers like about our competitors?

A typical process for sentiment analysis is as below:

• Extract text or streaming data from various sources
• Removing stop words, punctuation, slang words, special characters, numbers, extra white spaces
• Stemming meaning putting word variations like "great", "greatly", "greatest", and "greater" all into one bucket
• Converting text to lower case
• Categorization using dictionaries (taxonomies) according to the line of business
• Identifying one word, two words or three-words combinations for more accuracy
• Classify the words into positive, negative or neutral categories
• Generate the word clouds
• Provide further reports on most negative sentiments to be actioned by business

Today there are several products available to do sentiment analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Machine Learning.

They go across all the social media conversations like blogs, news, forums, videos, tweets, reviews, images, Facebook etc and collect the data streams for further analysis.

Several machine learning algorithms like decision trees, naive Bayes classification are used for classification.

NLP provides the ability to read and understand, as well as derive meaning from the languages that humans speak, and it is part of Artificial Intelligence.

Nestle, via their Digital Acceleration Team, tracks the sentiments of their 2000+ brands to know what their customers think and to deliver products that they want and to prevent crisis from happening.

Coca-Cola, the brand that built its marketing message around happiness and sharing, has built vending machines which set the price of a can based on how positive your tweets are. 

Consumers are always on their smartphones leaving the trails of their feelings in the digital world.

In the age of Digital Transformation, Sentiment analysis is all about helping companies gain better insights into their customers, and helping them to bridge the gap between insight and action.

What is Digital Marketing and how to succeed ?

Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of digital technologies to attract, engage and convert customers online.

For a business to succeed in today’s Digital world, it is really important to have a strong digital footprint on the internet. With today’s sophisticated digital lifestyle, consumers are probably on Facebook, checking out Twitter, browsing their email inboxes and searching for products and services on a search engine.

Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing as it leverages all the electronic devices like PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, digital signage or billboards, smart TVs to provide an experience in real time, that influences a desired audience to buy your product / read your articles / engage with your content.

Marketers shall use these Omni-channels, which can track the customer’s journey and give them the ability to engage with the consumer online.

Various components of Digital Marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – make your brand appear at the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – with pay per click & Google AdWords allow your website to emerge on paid listing of different search engines.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – advertising on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube. Get maximum number of Likes and Tweets on twitter. 
• Mobile Optimization and Responsive Websites - When you take a look around a room, nearly everyone is on their Smartphone. The numbers of people browsing on mobile passed desktop users a long time ago.
• Video Marketing - best way to engage with millennials. Facebook live streaming, Periscope, Snapchat, and YouTube are on the rise now, more than ever.
• Web analytics – collection and analyze web usage data
• Content Marketing - eBooks, White Papers and Infographics
• Email Marketing – sending emails to customers directly

Here are some challenges for Digital Marketers:

• Explosion of digital channels - Consumers use variety digital channels and devices to interact with brands in different ways and for different purposes.
• Exploding data volumes - Consumers leave behind a huge digital footprint in these channels. It’s extremely difficult to get a handle on all that data, and find the right data that can help you make the right decisions.
• Increasing competition - Digital channels are relatively cheap, compared with traditional media, making them within reach of practically every business of every size. As a result, everyone is trying to capture consumers’ attention.

How do you succeed in Digital Marketing:

• Avoid overwhelming “in your face” marketing
• Respond to dynamic customer interactions.
• Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster
• Close loop the feedback into future digital campaigns for Cross/Up-Sell

People want brands they can trust, companies that know them as people, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Digital is now the first touch point for the consumer and a channel where the consumer has greater control over what they see and when they see it.

Customer churn and Retention

In any business, competitors are always looking to grab your customers, and many customers are on the lookout for a better deal. 

Customer attrition rates range from 7% to 40% annually in various industries. Slowing this customer "churn" rate by as little as 1% can add millions of dollars to any sizable company's bottom line. 

As it is already known customer acquisition is 4 to 5 times more expensive than to retain them, an effective customer retention strategy is crucial to a company's success. 

Marketing departments are traditionally focused on acquiring new customers than retaining existing ones. But after the economic recession, when finding the new customer is especially challenging, customer retention has become a major corporate priority.

While it is the fact that churn will always exist, ensuring that it is managed effectively is a key, to assure profit margins & sustainable business growth.

By predicting which customers are likely to leave, companies can reduce the rate of churn by offering customers new incentives or packages to stay. Apart from that, it gives the best strategy for them in terms of cost and effort by decreasing the total cost of retention and increasing the effectiveness of campaigns.

There are multiple data mining techniques which can be used for churn prediction.

Just to step back, Data mining is a process of extraction and analysis of patterns, relationships and useful information from massive databases. It usually involves four classes of tasks which revolves around classification, clustering, regression and association rules.

Here are the typical steps that are taken to address customer churn & retention:

• Define “Customer churn” as it varies from industry to industry
• Create a single 360-degree customer view
• Collect every Customer touch point data – billing data, transaction records, demographic details, Call center records, Credit history
• Understand the customer behavior
• Map the entire customer journey
• Profiling & segmenting them on various attributes
• Customer value analysis or Life Time Value
• Identify the customers with the highest chances to churn
• Predictive Churn model
• Typical techniques used are Regression, decision trees, survival analysis
• Discover what are major reasons for churn
• Product or Service-related issues
• Demographic constraints
• Better deals from competitors
• Setup targeted retention campaigns for high-value Customers who are likely to leave
• Customized promotions
• Next best offer strategy
• Location-based real-time offers
• Measure the campaign's effectiveness for continuous improvement
• What is the retention rate or how much Churn % has come down

Today social media analytics including Speech analytics is becoming a key aspect to analyze Customer sentiments which helps in finding out the reasons for customer churn. This involves capturing & analyzing unstructured data from customer touch points like customer support call notes, chats, email exchanges & scraping customer comments from Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc.

It is very important to go beyond just predicting customers who are likely to leave & identify the reasons for churn & effectively drive the targeted campaigns to retain those customers.

Social Media Analytics

The Internet has taken the world by storm in the last few decades. Some of the surveys show that it has grown over 2000% in the last 10 years. Imagine how many people globally are online at any point in time. Being social animals, we like to talk about our feelings, good or bad, with our family & friends.   

Today people are using internet for communication more, than any other medium, This has given birth to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, myspace, digg & the list will go on. Imagine how much data is collected on these sites in one day.

So companies have started using this huge unstructured text data in these comments, sentiments of people for their product improvements, for Customer service improvements, for understanding what customers are talking about competitors. This is called Social Media Analytics.

In the recent example of Toyota recalls, they are closely watching these social sites to gauge what Customers are talking about their brand, quality & take necessary measures to correct their actions.

But social media analytics isn’t just about damage control, it can provide precise data to help you better understand your customers and discover new business opportunities.

Here are typical steps in implementing social media analytics.

• Collect the huge amount of unstructured data – comments, blogs, call center notes, twits from social sites
• Using statistical analysis & Natural Language processing (NLP) on texts & words to break up the information into good or bad
• Use categorization, classification & association methods for text processing
• Further, identify the categories on which these good or bad sentiments are applicable from the data
• Brand awareness, trust, loyalty
• Customer service
• Product improvements
• Competitor analysis
• Geographic locations
• Produce the results using visualization tools

Here is how various businesses are using Social Media Analytics:

• Manufacturing – using the warranty data combined with Customer complaints to improve products & reduce warranty costs
• Healthcare – find connections amongst the claims received to flag further frauds
• Banking & Finance – use the social network profiles data to improve credit calculations, identify reasons for Customer churn
• Insurance – claims cost prediction& fraud detection
• Telecom – improve the customer experience for new products introductions
• Hospitality & Travel – listen to guests comments to improve repeat customer rates

Social Media Analytics will continue to gain importance in near future !!