How HR Analytics play in Digital Age

Today every company is acting on the digital transformation or at least talking about digital transformation. While it is important to drive it by analyzing customer behavior, it is extremely important to understand who from your organization is acting upon it – your employees.

Hence knowing your employees first and then go to explore the outer world of customers, is the best strategy for digital transformation.

HR plays an important role in knowing the employees. As the volume of data available to HR has increased exponentially over the few years. The data on recruitment, onboarding, employee personal data, their training, performance and attrition data can give tremendous insights to an organization.

HR analytics is focused on making the most of the vast amounts of HR data, organizations have gathered as mentioned above.

Collecting employee sentiments, while they are in office is a good way of improving their life. Happy employees go an extra mile to make your customers happy.

Sentiment analytics can be done for all the touch points:

·      How do employees commute to the workplace – office transport or their own

·      How do they find the parking – nearby or hectic to reach to office

·      How are they welcomed in the office – good fresh smell or closed stuffed environment

·      How is hygiene maintained in the office premises

·      How is the canteen facility, food options, quality of food

·      How the official communication flows through employees, what transparency is maintained

·      How is performance measured and rewarded

·      What is the feedback on the onboarding process

·      Emotions due to promotions or rewards

·      What are the main reasons for attrition

These data points can help HR a lot in improving the 8-12 hours employees spend in the office.

Descriptive analytics help analyze the current scenario for HR:

·      Who is performing well and who may need some additional training or support in order to raise their game

·      Where your best employees come from

·      What recruitment channels are most effective

·      Which projects are delivering on time and what are their project pyramids

·      Which band employees are leaving frequently

Further predictive analytics can be used in several ways:

·      Which candidates are likely to join your organization

·      Which new hires will become your highest performers in two years

·      Which employees are likely to churn and join other organizations

·      Which band or grade employees will leave early

·      Which skills will be in most demand next quarter and later

·      How many billable employees needed to achieve the revenue targets

HR analytics open new ways to recruit, train, and engage employees. Benefits include a streamlined hiring process, better-prepared & unbiased recruitment managers, reduced attrition and higher customer satisfaction.

How Consumer Packaged Goods companies are adopting Digital?

Consumers are at the heart of the digital transformation, in every industry starting Retail, Financial services, insurance & Health Care. 

Consumers are most concerned with getting quick, easy and effective results from any interaction in their professional or personal life.

Consumer Packaged Goods companies are typically relied heavily on traditional media like TV and display advertising to drive brand awareness among consumers. You will see multiple advertisements for toothpaste, detergents, and dairy products and so on.

They have so far relied on mass marketing; focused on physical brick & mortar sales. They still have to catch up on online ordering like electronics, books etc.

The physical store still enjoys a major share of the market: customers like to feel a product before they buy it.

CPG companies are quickly adopting digital to connect with millennial consumers.

They are using Big Data Analytics:

·         To identify consumers who will convert with less spend on marketing.

·         Trying to identify the best and most profitable channels to sell select products and pack sizes.

·         To gain deeper insights into price-sensitive consumers

·         To be able to send unique offers to every consumer with extreme personalization

·         360 degrees customer views to build loyalty

Here are some innovative ways CPG industry is using digital for excellent customer experience:

·         Social media to understand the needs, gaps, brand performance, and purchase behavior leading to significant input for targeting, positioning as well as new product development.

·         Using geo-fencing to provide real-time deals when a consumer approaches the store.

·         Stores like Amazon Go has come up with cashless checkouts. When the customers have the Amazon app installed on their mobile device, any product added to the cart gets billed to the customer’s account automatically.

·         Mobile payments: most of the physical or online stores are accepting mobile payments like Apple Pay, Samsung pay, PayTm etc.

·         Beacons: to ease finding products in a store, a customer can download the retail store app, and be able to connect to the store’s “beacons” and get details of the best deals available

·         Smart Shelves: these indicate inventory levels, and instantly update product prices on display.

The future is digital and CPG companies are adopting it with an open heart.

Check this 10 tips for successful Mobile apps in this Digital age

Today, the number of mobile users globally exceeds the number of desktop users, and apps are far more popular than websites.

With the advent of smartphones and internet, people are spending maximum time on mobile apps to explore events nearby, gather news and get everyday alerts.

Hence having a mobile app is nowadays necessary for any kind of business. There is no dearth of tools to aid in the design and development of a mobile app but there are few key steps that businesses need to keep in mind before building the first app.

Consumers have little patience for bad mobile experiences. Over 30% of downloaded apps are uninstalled within the first 2 or 3 weeks of use.

Mobile app development should be based on the idea that user experience is everything and not how many features it has. UX is particularly important in mobile applications, you have so much less screen real estate and slower connectivity, so great design and execution make incredible differences in terms of user experience.

Here are 10 tips to make your app successful:

·      Research your app’s idea, & audience - Start by searching the app stores, not just Apple but also Google Play, and look for competing products. Don't waste money on app development and mobile resources that will not be appreciated by users. Reach out to customers via social media and similar platforms, to truly listen to what your customers want

·      Focus on the user experience – unless you have laser sharp focus on user experience, providing 100+ senseless features will not make it successful. Responsive design is an efficient way to optimize user experience.

·      Keep it very simple for use – do you see any user manual with iPhone? Same goes here, keep your app extremely simple to use. A common mistake is thinking your app has to be packed with features and have every bell & whistle you can think of. However, the reality is half of them won’t even be used. Simplicity deliver the great user experience

·      Use agile for frequent releases – by collecting frequent feedbacks, keep your app updated with agile deployments to make users happy

·      Market your app - Once you have the right app, get the word out about it. Both Google & Apple stores have millions of apps today, it can be challenging to get noticed.

·      Test the app thoroughly before and even after release - Test, test, and test with the target users until you get it right. Once launched, continue to use analytics, customer feedback, and A/B testing to optimize and improve the application.

·      Have an extra ordinary customer support – after sales support is where word of mouth publicity comes in. any problems reported by users have to be handled efficiently and effectively to make them happy so they become your marketers.

·      Keep Innovating - No app is ever complete. Listen to your users and find out what they’re asking for. Keep a running wish list of features you can build when you have time. As they say Rome wasn't built in a day, your app won't be, either.

·      Build analytics – incorporate analytics which gives you detail picture of your users, their behavior, usage

·      Choose right business model – free, freemium, charged or pay-per-use as per your business needs

Most mobile apps fail to engage the users in this highly competitive digital age. The bottom line is have a sharp focus on the customer. Sure, technical skill matters—but you can only succeed if you use that skill to meet the customer's needs. 

How is your marketing gearing up and making use of Digital?

For many businesses, digital has simply been the domain of marketing: web marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, etc. It was lightly wrapped around existing products and services.

As digital is more about customer experience, Marketing is the closest department to handle this. They have to use Machines, Humans, and things to interact with customers in real time.

As we have seen, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, etc. have grown their businesses almost entirely through digital marketing. 

Digital technologies have introduced new kinds of marketing tools that take the guesswork out of marketing. With analytics, marketers have a much more accurate picture of their customers.

The main goal is to use data to reduce the expenditure on marketing, increase the customer retention by using the digital channels.

With these omni-channels marketing, businesses can guide the customers through various stages of their journey such as increasing the awareness of the products, build their desire to buy via sending personalized messages so they finally take a decision to buy the product.

Earlier methods of marketing spend attribution, which decides what worked well, instead of just clicks, are now augmented with artificial intelligence to give information that is more accurate.

The marketing department is the closest to the customer in the digital age. Businesses have changed the sales-driven approach to consumer-driven approach of the purchasing process.

This customer-first approach has brought the brands closer.  Further, today’s consumer uses their smartphones for everything. Analysis of this mobile data can help organizations understand the affinity of different groups to brands, changes in digital and physical footfall after campaigns, and so on.

Today marketers use several digital techniques such as SEO, SEM, Web Analytics to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Global brands have changed their marketing strategies over the years now.

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

Burberry was earlier just telecasting the live shows of their fashion catwalks, which now are online on social media, which means they are going to masses.

How is your marketing is gearing up and making use of Digital?

Digital in the Age of Customer !!

Today’s customers are like a King. They are in the driver’s seat, with the power of the internet and social media tools creating tons of information. With the strong influence of smartphones, all the information is at their fingertips.

We are living in interesting times of Industry 4.0. Consumers are now on the cusp of a hyper-personalized era with fundamental changes in terms of choice, consumption, ownership and overall experience of products and services.

This is called “Age of the Customer”.

Digital technologies and customer focus are going hand-in-hand.  New channels, new devices, new service providers have changed our lives.

Look around and you’ll see that digital transformation is so omnipresent that it has touched nearly every industry.

Gone are the days of the 90s, when we used to rewind tapes before returning them to Blockbuster, as they have been replaced by Netflix, iPod, Spotify and their online streaming platform.

As Steve Jobs once said – You have got to start with Customer experience and work backward to the technology. He created a product like iPhone that evoked the needs & wants of the target market. Blackberry was the leader then with QWERTY keyboard. Nobody knew we will need a touchscreen phone until he made us realize what we are deprived of.

Every business began before the Internet, now faces the same challenge, how to transform to compete in a digital economy?

Creating customer value and building long-term relationships are even more challenging in a digital world as customers are well-informed, expect more, trust their friends, have millions of choices and more important have a voice which can be heard by mass.

Your understanding of your customers' context will make, or break, your ability to succeed at a customer's moment of need. Thankfully, your customers now create and leave behind digital footprints through their activity across all their touchpoints, such as websites, mobile apps, store visits, and phone calls.

All the successful digital firms like Nestle, Starbucks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Walgreens use this data to respond, based on context and develop deeper insights about their customers by applying analytics.

Here are top 4 ways to businesses are improving the customer experience:

1.  Hyper-personalization – make them feel unique, focus on each individual journey

2.  Seize the moment of truth – act in real time to impact each and every interaction with customer

3.  Empower employees – get your employees in the game so they can go extra mile to drive customer behavior

4.  Continuous improvement – get all the departments to pass the customer information while interacting with customer

Amazon, Nike, Zappos, Apple, Starbucks and Walt Disney are the top brands, based on the customer experience they are providing in this age of the customer.

Why Data Visualization matter now?

Data Visualization is not new, it has been around in various forms for more than thousands of years. 

Ancient Egyptians used symbolic paintings, drawn on walls & pottery, to tell timeless stories of their culture for generations to come.

Human brain understands the information via pictures more easily than writing sentences, essays, spreadsheets etc. You must have seen traffic symbols while driving…why do they have only 1 picture instead of writing a whole sentence like school ahead, deer crossing or narrow bridge? Because you as driver can grasp the image faster while keeping your eyes on the road.

Over last 25 years technology has given us popular methods like line, bar, and pie charts showing company progress in different forms, which still dominate the boardrooms.

Data visualization has become a fundamental discipline as it enables more and more businesses and decision makers to see big data and analytics presented visually. It helps identify the exact area that needs attention or improvement than leaving it to the leaders to interpret as they want.

Until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most, but recent computing developments have created new tools like Tableau, Qlik with striking visual techniques, especially for use online, including the use of animations.

There is a wealth of information hiding in the data in your database that is just waiting to be discovered. Even historical complicated data collected from disparate sources start to make sense when shown pictorially. Data Scientists do a fantastic job of analyzing this data using machine learning, finding relationship but communicating the story to others is the last milestone.

In today's Digital age, we as consumers generate tons of data every day and businesses want to use that for hyper-personalization, sending right offers to us by collecting, storing & analyzing this data. Data Visualization is the necessary ingredient to bring power of this big data to mainstream.

It is hard to tell how the data behaves in the data table. Only when we apply visualization via graphs or charts, we get a clear picture how the data behaves. 

Data visualization allows us to quickly interpret the data and adjust different variables to see their effect and technology is increasingly making it easier for us to do so. 

The best data visualizations are ones that expose something new about the underlying patterns and relationships contained within the data. Data Visualization brings multiple advantages such as showing the big picture quickly with simplicity for further action.

Finally as they say “A picture is worth a thousand words” and it is much important when you are trying to show the relationships within the data.

Data is the new oil, but it is crude, and cannot really be used unless it is refined with visualization to bring the new gold nuggets.

Do you want to hire a Data Scientist?

As mentioned by Tom Davenport few years back, Data Scientist is still a hottest job of century.

Data scientists are those elite people who solve business problems by analyzing tons of data and communicate the results in a very compelling way to senior leadership and persuade them to take action.

They have the critical responsibility to understand the data and help business get more knowledgeable about their customers.

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 to be competitive

·     Over 80% of data/information that businesses generate and collect is unstructured or semi-structured data that need special treatment

So it is extremely important to hire a right person for the job. Requirements for being a data scientist are pretty rigorous, and truly qualified candidates are few and far between.

Data Scientists are very high in demand, hard to attract, come at a very high cost so if there is a wrong hire then it’s really more frustrating. 

Here are some guidelines for checking them:

·     Check the logical reasoning ability

·     Problem solving skills

·     Ability to collaborate & communicate with business folks

·     Practical experience on collaborating Big Data tools

·     Statistical and machine learning experience

·     Should be able to describe their projects very clearly where they have solved business problems

·     Should be able to tell story from the data

·     Should know the latest of cognitive computing, deep learning

I have seen smartest data scientists in my career, who do the best job at analytics, but cannot communicate the results to senior leaders effectively. Ideally they should know the data in depth and can explain its significance properly. Data visualizations comes very handy at this stage.

Today with digital disrupting every field it has an impact on data science also.

Gartner has called this new breed as citizen data scientists. Their primary job function is outside analytics, they don’t know much about statistics but can work on ready to use algorithms available in APIs like Watson, Tensor flow, Azure and other well-known tools.

The good data scientist can make use of them to spread the awareness and expand their influence.

It has become more important to hire a right data scientist as they will show you the results which may make or break the company.

How Augmented Reality is improving Digital Age!!

Augmented reality (AR) means amplified reality with graphics, sounds, haptic feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists. Virtual objects and information are displayed on top of the physical world, will make its way to our phones.

Just like the Internet ofThings & Big data, Analytics, augmented reality is going mainstream. Search engines are already expanding on image search, allowing you to point your camera at something and search for information based on what the lens takes in.

Both video games and cell phones are driving & exploiting the development of augmented reality. Everyone from tourists to someone looking for the closest McDonalds can now benefit from the ability to place computer-generated graphics in their field of vision.

Unlike Virtual Reality, which creates a totally artificial environment like you are on the top of Eiffel tower or looking at Taj Mahal right now from your living room couch, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it.

Pokemon Go released in 2016 was the most successful game to use AR to superimpose Pokemon on physical background and all children and adults were mad chasing them in real world.

Recent innovation, Heads-Up Display (HUDs) glass with AR superimpose crystal-clear driving directions on top of the real world so you can easily navigate without taking your eyes off the road. It’s like Pokemon Go but all the adorable monsters have been replaced by driving directions.

Digital Marketing will get a boost with AR.  A new augmented reality campaign from Pepsi Max have stunned people in London, giving experiences like a prowling tiger, a meteor crashing, an alien tentacle grabbing people on the street, the bus stop window serves as a scarily realistic screen to bring these scenarios to life.

With AR, you can view your living room on a smartphone and see how virtual furniture would fit into the real world and decide what is good to buy.

Artificial Intelligence has brought virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google to life but AR can put a face to it and beef up the experience. Microsoft Hololens is currently leading the AR headset race. 

There are several industries that will benefit from AR applications, including healthcare, tourism and entertainment. However, it is retailers who are the ones to use it more. With AR, your retail website is brought to life with a 360° online presentation of your store. In-store, augmented reality can easily display information and other visuals on packaged items with a simple image scan.

Lego’s “Digital Box” Provides Customers with an Interactive 3D Digital Experience. Aside from kiosks in stores, soon they will have mobile devices to be equipped with the capability to instantly bring up relevant information about any product in real-time.

Fashion retailer Forever 21 had put up a giant billboard which features a model walking in front of an image of the crowd below. The model occasionally leans over, and pluck someone out of the crowd. Sometimes, she drops them in her bag and happily walks off.

French cosmetic super chain Sephora is one of the leaders in AR marketing area. Their mobile apps & AR mirrors allow people to see how clothing, jewelry, and accessories look on them.

Augmented Reality cleverly blurs the line between the digital and the real by way of specially designed apps and unique visual ‘markers’ to intuitively visualise 3D virtual forms in physical realms.

We are still in the very early days of AR, and all of the future possibilities are difficult to imagine at this point. As this technology advances and gets more affordable, it will be easier for businesses to take advantage of it. AR helps to bridge the divide between the digital and offline world.