Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution has Touched Everyone

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution has delivered on its promise.  While our expectations on what it can do are still very high, I believe we have achieved a lot already. Communication revolution has given IT a platform to make life easier for almost every Indian who can be reached via road, rail, on foot or by the mobile network.  I share some of the use cases and associated stories with you, as in my opinion, they provide a vivid picture of how IT and Communication has changed our lives for the better.

1.       Travel and Ticketing - Most visible benefit of computerization that common man saw in late eighties was “Computerized Railway Ticket”.  With charts displayed prior to boarding the train and real time status of railway reservation, in one stroke, it took away the opportunity of rent seeking behavior. Millions of Indians, who travel daily on Railways, not only saw the benefits, but also became the champions of IT in India. That, to my mind, is the single most driver of IT adoption in India. 

2.       Travel and Ticketing - Internet ticket by Railways is also nothing short of a revolution. A local Internet Café accepts payment in cash and delivers me a ticket without the need to approach the local railway station. Savings in cost of travel to the station and back, no time taken to travel and easy access to railway information, all benefits have been delivered with the convergence of IT and communication.

3.       Real time Communication - 20 years ago, an Aunt of mine was coming to visit us. She lost her way and we learned that she had left her residence a long time ago and by all means, should have reached us by that time. Yet, there was no sign of her.  We imagined that she had probably lost her way.  We went in several directions to look for her. An hour long search and we could locate her, safe yet tired.  Just imagine the scenario today, she carries a mobile phone. We can reach her anytime and she will probably never get lost.

4.       Location Services - A similar incident like the one before. A few years ago, while traveling by train, I woke up with a start. My train was expected to reach by destination at 4am in the morning. It was already 3.40 am and I did not know how much time we had. I switched on my Blackberry and checked my location on Google Maps. We were just 2 Km away from the destination.  The train was running ahead of time. I knew we had to rush and get ready before the station arrived. Google map and easy access to mobile network on a train route helped me find the exact location and prepare me.

5.       New Customers for Small Businesses - Until a few years, for any problem with electric fittings or plumbing requirement, I will visit an Electrical or Sanitary/Hardware shop. I will wait for an electrician or the plumber and leave a message for him to visit us.  A number of follow up visits later he will arrive and do the necessary job. Today, every electrician, plumber or even a domestic maid, carries a mobile phone. They are reachable immediately and confirm their availability.  Everyone has benefited in the process. Of course, except the Electrical or Sanitary/Hardware shop owner, who has lost the cut he used to get.

6.       Mobile Payments - A construction worker was due to receive his wages from the contractor. However, he asked the contractor to keep the wages in his safe custody as he was afraid of losing the money since he had no regular place to stay and risk of thefts. A month later, when he wanted to go back to his native place, contractor made him run around for getting the accumulated wages. With no place for safe keeping, he was at the contractor’s mercy. That has suddenly changed with Money Transfer on the mobile phone. He can now transfer money back home without waiting for his next visit.

I am sure all of us have experienced something similar in our lives. ICT has touched everyone. With new innovations, our expectations are also soaring high.

·         Touch and speech are two new interaction elements which are making IT more accessible to every individual.  Touch phone is more intuitive and so, is speech. Siri is a great beginning in this direction. Speech recognition as a technology holds great promise and with a commercial value attached to quality, I am confident it will soon improve to serve the masses.

·         Another promising initiative is Aadhar. That shall help the common man in opening Bank accounts by providing an identity proof required to access services.  Will banking correspondents make up for absence of banking branches? That remains to be seen.

·         Will remote healthcare delivery graduate from being pilots/experiments and scale up to District or State level delivery models? Healthcare workers cannot replace the expertise of a doctor, yet they can at least provide timely help for the patients.

ICT is a force multiplier, yet it is not sufficient to improve the living standards of the common man.  Without roads, it is hard to make services accessible in the hinterlands. Without drinking water and access to healthcare, progress will remain limited. Physical infrastructure is a must for progress.

iPhone5 does not Wow

iPhone5 is thinner, bigger, faster and has more battery life. There are more apps, Facebook is more deeply integrated and Siri has been enhanced further.  The wave of innovation that started with new magical touch interface and apps that led to phenomenal usage on iPhone, is now abating.  Siri which promised another round of innovation with its voice interface and deep integration with existing apps on the device, has not yet made the same impact as Touch interface did. iPhone5 is almost guaranteed to be the best selling iPhone ever and most selling smartphone. The question is “is that enough”. As a customer, it does not matter - I still get the best product albiet at a high price.  As an investor, I care about long term growth and profitability, while share price moves to near term sales potential.

Apple needs to keep the innovation engine rolling, for margins to stay at current levels. The big challenge facing Apple is the open source, Android and copy cat apps on Android. To protect and preserve long term growth and margins, we may see more instances of legal suits between Apple and Android vendors. That said; it is very hard to control the onslaught of free and open source.  

·         Governments and large companies don’t prefer getting locked in to a proprietary and closed system like iOS. We saw a brief upsurge in Linux as Governments and Government owned institutions backed Linux.

·         However, unlike Linux, Android has the support of application developers and device manufacturers.  

·         Android is already dominating traffic across the emerging countries.  World is more web centric than it was a decade ago.

Can Apple innovate fast enough to maintain a strong lead over competition? iPhone5 disappoints on this metric. If Apple fails again, price competition will soon destroy Apple’s margins or worse, Apple may lose market share.

Is it Hard to Customize Mailer Content?

A bank sent a promotional mailer on “Get a term cover of Rs. 1 cr for Rs 8600/- PA”. It was a well crafted mailer with photograph of a young, dynamic gentleman holding a Play Card with “My Family” written on it and a smile with an exclamation mark.  All designed to catch attention and appeal to the feelings for family members – the right emotion to drive purchase of an insurance policy. 

Only catch was that the insurance premium of Rs. 8600/- PA was applicable to a 25 year, non smoker male with 30 year premium paying term.  And the mail was sent to a 35yrs+ old, female.  The recipient was an active customer of the bank and bank had all the demographic details in their records. 

It could have easily customized the mailer content, by replacing the Gentleman holding the play card with a lady, providing the real premium applicable to the recipient, instead of doing a mass broadcast of the mail.  For an interested customer, it could have been a single click purchase, landing on the login page of the bank, to make the payment of the insurance policy and so on.  The task required was to create two creatives and use dynamic variables from a look up table that can populate the premium values basis the age and the gender with all the caveats.  I bet this would have led to more conversions. 

Do share your thoughts on this topic.

Maximizing Value from New Customer Acquisition

One of the easiest ways of acquiring customers is through a campaign on Google, Facebook or any other platform. We all know the importance of ensuring that targeting is right, ad copy appeals to the target audience, landing page must engage with the visitor and enable conversions to registered members. Clearly, all three variables, targeting criteria, ad copy and landing page, are of utmost importance when acquiring customers through Google / Facebook.


However, all acquired customers are not equal. For a local business, a customer from another city has less than "10% value" as compared to the customer from a nearby locality. A customer who is interested in only deals for smaller value products is less "valuable" as compared to a high margin high value product in an ecommerce setting. Since marketing campaigns require tweaking on an ongoing basis, it is important to use the feedback on “value of the customer” as soon as possible.

Campaigns can be optimized for

1. Maximum response (goal is to maximize number of customers acquired),

2. Minimize cost per acquisition provided a minimum number is acquired, OR

3. Minimize cost per unit value of customer acquisition provided a minimum number of customers are acquired.

Today, there are reliable techniques to predict the “value of the customer” as long as rich profile information is getting captured as part of the customer acquisition process. If the value of the customer can be expressed as a function of these variables, customer value can be fed back for campaign optimization. For example, if we know that B.Tech Computer Science Graduates from Bangalore are more in demand as compared to BSc Physics from Bhopal, that data can be used to run Geography focused campaign on Google/Facebook. Keywords can be characterized in terms of demographic profiles of customers they help acquire.

How are you maximizing value from your customer acquisitions? Do share in your thoughts.

Analytics -Making the Transition From “I Feel” to “I Know”

A young, bright, energetic MBA graduate from a top college joined the “Most Innovative Company Pvt Ltd”. He was full of ideas and keen to change the world with his overflowing cup of knowledge. Within one month of joining his company, he presented an interesting idea to his manager. His manager asked him to learn more details about the company, the business context and prepare a proposal. However, by next week, manager was running after quarterly targets and he asked the new joinee to focus on the targets, rather than the new idea he was pondering over.

Three months in the company, manager asked the trainee to focus on another idea, manager’s pet idea, which he has been pushing for a few years and was not able to move forward for lack of time. The trainee was assigned the task of preparing a presentation, putting the stuff together and do the background work. He got to spend a lot of time of his manager and three months down the line, the proposal was ready.

Since Business Head was visiting for annual review, his manager presented the idea to the Business Head. Business Head liked the presentation but did not feel that idea was significant. He asked the manager (and in turn, the trainee) to work on another project which was Business Head’s pet project. Another six months down the line and much effort spent, even that idea was rejected because CEO did not feel that the idea will succeed.

Does the story sound familiar? A lot of ideas get rejected because the idea champions fail to convince the decision maker. If a decision maker FEELS that idea will not work, that is the final outcome. If you look at the whole story, it was all about different people making decisions on what they FELT will work or not. In the end, idea champions failed to present data and customer insight to support their idea. Projects were conceived because managers FELT that they will work, they did not KNOW that they will work.

That’s where analytics is important, in removing the guesswork from decision making. It is important to use customer insights from data and if data is missing, collect it before making the pitch. Make the decision maker believe that you KNOW that the project will work.

Email Marketing – Keeping Customer's Profile Current

Email marketing has multiple objectives like every other business initiative. For example, email campaign may focus on encouraging customers to make transactions that are profitable and also, ensuring that the same set of customers come back again for their next shopping trip. However, today’s profit cannot be the only objective, ensuring customers return in the future is probably equally important.


What is the trade-off between the two? In my last post, I emphasized on how customer segmentation improves RoI of an email marketing campaign or engagement strategy. If a particular email is only focused on current set of deals on offer without ensuring that customer keeps the profile information current (email address, mobile number, location, preferences, like or dislikes), targeting of offers will sooner or later, start missing the direction.

As a marketer, you will miss the current likes and the current interests that have changed since the customer first shared them with you. With limited and probably incorrect information, message will lose relevance. Customer may start marking your emails as spam or simply delete them or unsubscribe.

What percentage of your customers come back through email? Is it less than 2%, or as high as 50%? Do customers lose interest over time and if yes, what is the rate of decay in the level of interest? It depends entirely on your product category.  Travel gets maximum response in and around holiday season or long weekends. Ecommerce is driven by seasons and in category like jobs, interest level dips over time with annual revival during appraisal time.  If a significant percentage of customers come back, can you slowdown the process of customers losing interest? Or by making them update their profiles, bring them back to the active pool.

Should an email marketing campaign necessarily contain information that urges the customer to update the preferences and the interests that you have. Probably yes…

Or can you do one better? Include this only for customers who have not updated their profile information for some time. For customers who have recently updated the profile information, they continue to get mailers focused on maximizing transactions.

Big Data and Analytics

Data Analytics is as old as the data itself. Extracting information from data is as ancient as one can think of. However, there is a major hype around Big Data, Web Analytics in the recent past. What has changed–

(a)   Most businesses across the globe have implemented some form of ERP and transaction automation solutions. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have been in existence for more than a decade and a large number of organizations have crossed the bridge in terms of integrating different systems across the organization. It is now practically feasible to understand a customer in terms of her journey across the organization from a lead, to sales pitch, to customer, service/product delivery and fulfillment.

(b)   Transactional data is large in volume, often captures the demographic information and behavioral information in terms of likes (products purchased represent a Like behavior). Large volume of data naturally can be used to identify patterns and patterns can be used to characterize customers. For example, a customer purchasing lot of sugar free items is possibly health conscious or may be diabetic. Customer buying lot of sports goods is obviously interested in sports.

(c)    Analyzing Retail transaction data and interpreting basis the purchase history was subject of intense analysis in Research in the Nineties. Since then Ecommerce has provided additional input from data analysis perspective. Ecommerce companies can track the browsing behavior of customers on their site. Which products they looked at, compared and what did they finally purchase.  Now this is enough to characterize customers as price conscious, style conscious etc. While transactional data can be used to derive similar inferences, click data is more definitive as it captures the customer’s exploration of products prior to making a decision. In the end, objective of all analysis to drive business decisions which can help the customer as well as the business.

(d)   It’s been more than a decade of big data and analytics in the Western world and Indian companies are now catching up. ERP which was big in early part of the last decade is now commonplace. Consultants are now keen on selling Analytical Tools and making a pitch of analytics. In the end, transactional automation solutions were also sold with the promise of data analytics. Customers are also demanding results from the same vendors.

The hype around big data and analytics is probably here to stay, unlikely to go away in a hurry. If a business analyzes several projects it undertakes, it does not take too long to realize than RoI from analytics projects is probably the highest.  As one of my friends once said “If you did not find the patterns in data that you were looking for, you did not look hard enough”. Data always throws patterns, patterns drive understanding of customer behavior, and hence, better decision making.

Customer Segmentation in Email Marketing

Email marketing is as old as the internet. It is probably the lowest cost customer acquisition and engagement tool.  Variables of interest for an email marketing campaign

1.       #emails opened – No tool today provides that with certainty. Most vendors provide a pixel open method of identifying how many emails were opened and how many were not. #Emails opened is equivalent of #Impressions in marketing parlance.

2.       #clicks – This is most obvious and probably the most important data that measures the success of any campaign.

3.       Actions on the landing page – Every email marketing campaign needs to have a landing page which will trigger a further sequence of actions to deliver the business benefits to the marketer. If you are running a Facebook Like campaign, the #likes you get is the goal. For an ecommerce company or a deals site sending out deals, Add to Shopping Cart is the goal of the landing page.

While the above metrics are most commonly used to track performance of a campaign, a smart marketer only begins with these. She can go to the next level …..

1.       Identify the customer segments you sending mails to.

2.       Repurpose the content before the mail is sent to meet the aspirations of the segment audience.  For example, subject lines for new buyers can be customized basis what they have recently bought and offers can include related products. That is, a customer who recently bought a Tablet from your electronics store is more likely to open an email with subject “Buy a matching leather case for your tablet”.

3.       As you repurpose the content of the mail, you can also provide custom landing pages for each customer segment. An existing customer will land on a page which is customized with previous profile information. If we know that she also owns a phone of the same brand, cross selling another product that goes along with that, might be a good idea.

4.       Tracking the response by customer segment, number of actions items in the email and landing page gives immense insight in customer behavior. Learn and improve the email content, landing page further…. It’s a virtuous cycle.

RoI from customer segmentation in email marketing can easily exceed 100% depending on richness of data you have on the customer. Better targeting is not only good for the marketer, but also for the consumer. It is a win-win situation.

iPad 3 and Decline of TV

As expected, iPad new version is faster with a new quad core graphics process, resolution of screen is better than just HD, battery life is same at 10 hours despite high resolution and faster processor, supports 4G connections, better camera and comes with the new version of iOS, same as iPhone 4S. Moore's law of compute power is getting played again with better power efficiency of processors and innovations in battery life.

Tablets are the new devices for gaming, browsing and home entertainment. PC continues loses mindshare, and  entertainment PC segment loses ground almost permanantly. No points for guessing the losers in this game - Microsoft, Intel and among the smaller players Adobe.

Mobile phones have almost eaten away the digital camera category, with sony, canon struggling. The next category to hit is obviously the TV industry. When screens turn touch friendly, it is hard to imagine how TV industry can remain unaffected. Power of touch and high resolution screens are likely to rock this industry. Fighting over which channel to play is common across households. TV is no longer a family entertainment device and in personal entertainment, there is no better element of interactivity than touch.  What can happen? A few guesses.....
1. Online voting on current affairs programs, chat shows is very likely.
2. Movie makers will start experimenting with multiple storylines and tracks which audience can chose at run time.
3. In fact, fight sequences can merge with games to decide the outcome and next sequence in the movie can be based the outcome of the game. Audience can be an active participant in deciding the movie outcome. There comes the convergence between games and movies.
4. Online singing/dancing competition with automatic selection and winners from shortlisted candidates through votes within hours is possible.

And this is probably only a few years away.
What do you think? Do share your opinion.

Native App vs Wrapper on HTML5 site

Games need great interactivity, rich images, speed and performance, which only a client app can provide. Flash based games over the web also work, for non serious gamers. In general, serious gaming needs app on the client device.

On the other hand, for a content site which serves content basis the search context, personalized recommendations and user profile, client app provides little advantage. News requires retrieval in real time,and freshness and relevance of content is important.  Yet a client app has several benefits, it can be customized to device specific user interface, has access to local storage or caching of content items, and can access mobile device hardware/apps for alerts and notifications, that can help in engaging with users on more regular basis.

Local storage and caching with browser based cookies may not help if the data size for caching is large or users regularly clear out browser cache for privacy and security considerations. However, if a powerful browser exists and has access to some of the unique interaction elements on the device, a browser based HTML site may match the native app in user experience.

A combination of app and HTML5 site is also possible where the app reserves the content area for server based content that is pulled in runtime and rendered using the installed browser on the device. It saves costly maintenance across platforms and yet benefits from the rights available to the client app.

What are the risks with this approach? I welcome your comments.

Protecting Your Privacy

Google has changed its privacy policies, which should enable it to access information more freely across 60 services that are part of the Google network. That means, list of contacts on gmail and connections in Google+, will they become available to Youtube and Google search? That is, location co-ordinates on Google maps and Latitude, apps downloaded on the Android phone, search queries, profile on Google+ all can be correlated to gather a 360degree view of the user. This information when collected over time will provide immense source of information about any individual. When a website uses Google network to serve ads and user is logged in to Google+, Google may use the profile information to personalize. That will mean better targeting and more revenue for both Google and the publisher site. Already, retargeting of ads is considered vaulable by the advertisers in attracting customers.

Google is not alone in seeking access to personal profile, behavior and interests information, Facebook is also collecting enormous amount of information through specific widgets like login with facebook, social media plugin used by several blogs and websites to allow Facebook authentication for two way communication. Facebook now knows which site i visited and when, besides everything i do on facebook.

While the ability to gathering information shows great promise for personalization, privacy concerns are natural. That said, users are still in partial control of their information. That may or may not be enough.

How can i protect myself?

1. Remember to logout from Facebook/gmail/youtube/google+, the moment you logout, no information can be correlated. Dynamic ip addresses provide sufficient level of anonymity even though all acts can be traced uniquely to a device.
2. Creating multiple identities for different services of Google network is probably the easiest possible solution. Don't use gmail for the account which is used for youtube or google+. While google may create correlation between devices, browsers and applications used in association with time of use, it will still create sufficient doubt to protect your privacy.  Several users share devices, two or more identities used from the same device may actually correspond to multiple users.
3. Change your service provider to another supplier, even though it appears feasible, it reduces your choice to possibly sub optimal offerings. Therefore, i prefer chosing a different browser and a new account to access these services.

Privacy is and will remain important, frauds are common, in both real and virtual world. Protecting personal information is a must and creating slices of information that cannot be correlated is probably the only possible solution.

What do you think? Will this work?

Reviving this blog

I have not posted on this blog for a while, having moved to Twitter, I have liked the short format.
That said, it is probably time for me to revive this blog.
Thanks for those visited the blog in the meantime.

regards
Vivek Jain