Work need not lead to stress. It should lead to a sense of self-fulfillment and achievement. At 91����, our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) aims to create a compelling work environment that maintains the physical and financial health of employees along with their mental well-being, allowing us to enhance our people strength. This strength allows us to win in our weight category.

The moments of truth

The Sixth Moment of Truth creates mental well-being by driving a culture of social and psychological security through empathy with a sense of inclusivity driven by openness and trust. A focus on mental well-being is important because it impacts individuals, their working ecosystem, and their relationship with different people in the employee network

The widespread impact that an employee’s mental well-being can have is understood and appreciated by enterprises across the world. But a National Employee Mental Wellbeing Survey showed that 35 percent of employees approached no one for support on the most recent occasion they experienced poor mental health. In addition, another 86% employees said they would think twice before offering to help a colleague whose mental health they were concerned about. This implies the need for enterprises to be pro-active in managing mental health. Unless they do so, a pandemic like COVID-19 can quickly lead to panic and deterioration in employee performance. 91���� considers it a duty to make its employees mentally resilient, especially when life and livelihood are under threat. Our goal is to ensure there is no corrosion in the decision-making capabilities of employees, their sense of responsibility and their relationships with colleagues and customers.

Understanding Our Ecosystem

An analysis of 91���� provides insights for an action plan to ensure that mental wellbeing does not become a matter of concern. This involves:

• Understanding motivational drivers of employees that can strengthen the impact on peers and others
• Managerial sensitization that enables better management of a multi-generational workforce
• Creating self-awareness that helps employees manage their relationships better
• Optimum managerial spans that promote psychological and social safety by building a culture of inclusivity, trust and openness through regular connects

The unique nature of COVID-19 demands extraordinary support for employees. To deal with this, we have identified four situations that call for urgent attention:

• Emotional issues emerging out of the probable spread of Corona virus
• Emotional issues because of social distancing/ distributed working
• Challenges because of quarantine restrictions
• Impact of identified COVID-19 positive employee

To address the anxiety and panic that the above situations can lead to, we have instituted a formal system:

• Availability of self-help online resources that includes a portal with assessment and tools along with online resources on COVID-19 related coping resources.
• Manager support available to employees.
• COVID-19 specific communication such as mailers and resources circulated to all employees.
• Live chats and webinars by experts on self-care during the pandemic, dealing with social Isolation, enhancing productivity while working from home and building emotional resilience

Measuring Effectiveness

To measure the effectiveness of our approach and to constantly improve it we track metrics, using survey questionnaires, related to:

• Employee Experience or what employees encounter, changing work dynamics, employees’ happiness quotient
• Employee Effectiveness or how well employees build self-awareness, develop empathy towards self and others
• Psychological/Social Safety that includes feelings, attitudes and behaviours that express employees’ commitment, motivation and connection to their work (enthusiasm, satisfaction, indifference, anger)

The mental well-being of our employees is a significant responsibility. Making investments in mental health not only improves productivity but also creates a deep sense of positivity and bonding critical to success in these unusually challenging times.

Author:

Nivedita Saxena
Senior Manager, Training

The post Covid 19- Mental Health and its Linkage to Moments of Truth appeared first on 91����.

For payers, RoboticProcess Automation (RPA) provides a way to address all three challenges.

The healthcare industry is not a newcomer to RPA adoption. Payers have used the technology for a handful of tasks such as extracting structured and unstructured data, pre-authorization of services claims processing, and to exchange data with providers.

Now, in the shadow of COVID-19, there has been a rising demand for applying RPA to a wider range of processes. These include speeding up claims processing, enhancing customer care through chatbots, improving new enrollments through data enrichment and validation, renewing contracts, meeting regulatory requirements through data interoperability, and enabling a remote workforce by automating day to day IT tasks (for example, incident response) and administrative processes (related to finance, human resource,etc.). The range of use cases is wide.

The urgency for payers to deploy RPA implies that they need to be cautious as well. RPA can be applied in several areas — all with varying benefits—and evaluating and prioritizing the functions where the technology could deliver the highest and fastest ROI can be tricky. With the right decisions, RPA will deliver on its promise.

According to a report called “Intelligent Automation in Healthcare: Addressing COVID-19 Scenarios” published by global management and strategy consulting firm, Zinnov, the areas where RPA has proven ability include:

• Claims Adjudication
• Customer Support
• Regulatory Reporting
• Claims Data Management
• Interoperability

Once a payer has identified a business function wherein RPA can be applied, the next step is to implement the technology where it will result in cost reductions, productivity increase, risk reduction, and improved patient and employee experience, in the shortest possible time. ROI and time-to-value are important considerations. Both determine the amount and pace of investments the payer can commit to, on RPA. This is where 91���� makes a substantial difference. Our team of healthcare technology experts has studied the impact of COVID-19 on payers and has created a Special Task Force with a single mandate: to identify critical pain points that payers need to address and provide cost-optimal, easy-to-implement, and high ROI yield solutions.

We execute leveraging our catalog of process frameworks that can be applied to IT and business along with a library of ready-to-use bots. These need minimal refinements and customizations (to align them with the goals and the needs of individual payers) to achieve a faster time to value. Our industry and processes mining expertise allow us to quickly identify the automation opportunities in a payer’s environment. We stitch the solution in line with enterprise mandated business outcomes ensuring that the business is ready for automation at scale. The automation can be for practically any process ranging from member enrollment to premium collection and from claims settlement to reporting.

RPA can be deployed by our experts quickly and precisely, to reduce the cost of claims processing that COVID-19 is bound to lead to, provide augmented support to producers/agents to improve and onboard new enrollments, and alleviate the pressure of claims management caused by the imminent spike in elective procedures. For a detailed examination of use cases where RPA can deliver an immediate impact, please download the Zinnov – 91���� joint whitepaper.

Authors:

Manish Jaiswal
Vice President, 91����

Sanjana Bhattacharya
Principal Consultant, 91����

Nikhil Kulkarni
Principal, Zinnov

AV Ruchir
Project Lead, Zinnov

References:

The post Automation: What The Doctor Ordered To Manage The Implications Of COVID-19 For Healthcare Payers appeared first on 91����.

1. The Strategy

With social distancing and limited face-to-face interactions becoming the next normal, organizations will now have to look for all possible opportunities to engage with the customer digitally. Organizations would have to be available on digital platforms, anticipate customer needs proactively and engage every time a customer starts looking for a product, service or information. Providing personalized, omnichannel customer experience will play a significant role in gaining brand salience and early mindshare. As part of the strategy, organizations will have to now understand the new norms adopted by customers and their digital journey touchpoints. To align with the new norms, organizations will have to adjust their goals, examine technical feasibility, ecosystem flexibility, scalability, transformation success criteria, adoption strategy, and several similar aspects. This stage has always been, and will now become even more, crucial for any successful MarTech transformation journey.

2. Data Unification

Unifying customer data lies at the core of delivering relevant and meaningful customer experiences. The success of a MarTech ecosystem depends on the quality of customer data that is available. With the growing number of online channels used by customers, it is cumbersome to understand individual customer behaviors and preferences in order to engage in a personal manner. Organizations, therefore, need to leverage a unified platform that integrates customer profiles from multiple discrete sources into a centralized location, allowing segmentation for relevant customer interactions across customer journey touchpoints.

3. MarTech Stack

Defining an appropriate MarTech ecosystem is one of the toughest tasks for a marketer, especially because of the overwhelming variants of tools and technologies available today. According to analysts, marketers utilize only 58% of their MarTech stack’s potential,i and this comes at a time when marketing leaders are spending 26% of their marketing budgets on MarTech. An underutilized MarTech stack is the result of a distorted MarTech strategy. While defining your MarTech stack it is necessary to first understand the foundational elements of the ecosystem. The core system includes a CRM, CMS, Marketing Automation, and analytics platform. Additional components (for example, Ad-Tech, Social Media Management, etc.) are introduced into the ecosystem to further strengthen the operational efficiency and relevancy, while ensuring alignment with the overall business goals and objectives [the success of a MarTech system would also depend on the knowledge and skill sets of people working on the platforms].

4. Marketing Analytics

With the plethora of customer information available within the digital space, it has become extremely difficult for organizations to identify individual customer needs and behavior and engage accordingly. A survey of senior marketers conducted by the CMO Council and published in the Harvard Business Review showed that “more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI.“ ii The need for Marketing Analytics has never been so relevant. Today leading organizations are willing to spend more on analytics in order to better gauge the effectiveness of their marketing activities as well as improve relationships with existing and new customers. However, organizations need to keep in mind that analytics and marketing attribution models need to be used in tandem to deliver measurable outcomes.

At 91����, we leverage our MarTech Ecosystem Maturity Assessment framework to define the current state of the ecosystem. The framework covers 30+ attributes (see figure) to gauge the maturity levels of the ecosystem before ascertaining the optimum path to attain the next stage of transformation.

For organizations that want to create a comprehensive tech-based ecosystem/process, allowing superior customer engagement, experience, guaranteed conversions and retention mechanisms, it is advisable to collaborate with specialized entities like 91���� Ltd. and tread effortlessly towards realizing the desired MarTech end-state.

Author:
Bijayananda Bardhan
Sr. Project Manager

Reference:

The post MarTech transformation in the age of Covid-19 appeared first on 91����.

Data to save lives

The ask in this pandemic is the sharing of information and best practices at every level from local to global. All stakeholders including governments, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and citizens need to work together to shift from the diagnosis and cure of the disease to the prediction and prevention of disease.

IT teams across care delivery ecosystems are working tirelessly to ensure that clinical applications such as EHR, LIMS, and other supporting IT systems are working, thus ensuring access at every point of care. Analytics can also help in effective population health efforts by identifying patients who are risk-prone to COVID-19 as well as other homeless patients to narrow their efforts and deploy proactive outreach efforts to check COVID-19 spread. Also, data can be facilitated by the work of care teams creating new alerts systems and methods to stratify COVID-19 patients, helping medical support teams and nurses in decision care delivery. Researchers at Stanford University have launched an interactive, data-driven model that evaluates possible outcomes of non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19, including social distancing and quarantine².

Telehealth to be the frontrunner of the new care delivery model

With an ever-increasing number of infected patients, COVID-19 has demanded unparalleled coordination and collaboration between private and public healthcare. Physicians, nurses, and other care supporting teams are leading the fight at ground zero. Telehealth can provide contactless care-in-need and thus minimizes the risk transmission. Also, patients in isolation can communicate with their families and friends with mobile phones, tablets, etc., and doctors can remotely monitor vast numbers of patients that are recovering at home.

In the US, CMS, its nodal agency for healthcare regulations, has eased rules around telehealth, allowing physicians to care for patients at rural hospitals via mobile, radio, or online communication – without having to be physically present. Physicians are changing the patterns of their practice because of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly half of them using telehealth to treat patients, up from just 18% in 2018³.��Most countries in the EU have also embraced telehealth and have deployed telehealth solutions and relaxed regulatory requirements attached to it.

The 91���� Advantage

91���� helped a leading��not-for-profit integrated health delivery system provider in the US and provided a comprehensive analytics-driven engagement platform for patient outreach to address gaps in care. ITC implemented a CRM solution that impacted over 200 Contact Agents and 345K patients. The one-stop customer intelligence platform reduced patient phone call-time by ~14%, improved ROI by 3.5%, and improved productivity of the patient experience team by 22% respectively.

91���� has also recently developed a mobility solution for the COVID 19 surveillance for John Hopkins University. This surveillance applet will help to predict the outburst of Covid-19 in a specific area or county across the US and help healthcare communities & other government authorities to take corrective action as necessary to stop COVID spread.

Improving healthcare is not a singular effort. You need assistance from specialists who can plan a roadmap for you and make the digital transformation seamless. With our healthcare technology experts, you can make the shift from legacy systems to on-cloud cutting-edge technologies.

Moving toward a digitized and connected value care delivery healthcare ecosystem is the need of the hour and we can facilitate the change for you.

Author:
Jeewan Das Mohta
Lead Consultant- Healthcare

Reference:

The post How COVID crisis will change the care delivery model appeared first on 91����.

Loyalty is driven largely by perception shaped by personal attention. However, in the wake of COVID-19 it is time to pause and re-structure the idea of personal attention and loyalty, to sanitize the concept, making it smart and aware of the primary need of customers to be protected from invisible health hazards.

The central percept on which the success of post-COVID-19 loyalty programs depends is trust. Create trust, and the customer will return for more.

Creating a bond with customers by making them feel special has been a business pivot for ages. In the late 1700s, a US-based company gave redeemable coins to customers that could be used for their next purchase. The program recognized the value of creating repeat customers. Modern CRM systems are geared to creating repeat customers—which remains the primary measure of how effective an organization’s loyalty program is.

The early 1980s saw customer loyalty becoming a finely honed science with airlines launching frequent flyer programs. By the 1990s, card-based loyalty programs gained in popularity with retailers, CPG, the beauty and grooming industry, gaming, entertainment, media subscriptions and even credit cards. It became so popular that collecting loyalty cards from different loyalty programs was often a topic of discussion. The proliferation of loyalty programs across industries increased the focus on building overall spends. COVID-19 has changed that, bringing a remarkable shift in the factors that create and build repeat buyers and improved spends.

Redefining value in the times of COVID-19

For the moment the changes in the business environment have placed the concepts of personalization and customization on the back burner. They are vital, and will continue to remain so; but a laser focus needs to be brought to redefining value in the face of COVID-19. Most benefits provided by traditional loyalty programs have become soft criteria in the face of hygiene and safety concerns. Earn-and-burn has become secondary to health and wellness. Necessity has replaced nice-to-have. The art and science of loyalty management is being forced to adapt.

Customers also need to adapt. To enable this, brands have to invest in re-educating customers on the need to adapt. For example, guests at a hotel would want to know how many customers have come from COVID-19 affected red zones, how many from green. To enable this, the onus is on guests to provide accurate details. Organizations must devise a variety of incentives to ensure that customers provide details honesty so they can add a new dimension to their loyalty programs.

Another example is of restaurants intensely promoting kerbside and no-touch home deliveries/ payment processes using videos, mailers, social media, chat sessions/ IM, prominent messaging on food packaging, delivery vehicles and even on bills to ensure that customers are put at ease. This should be followed up by a quiz on “safety and health standards adopted by the restaurant” where participants are rewarded with points on their loyalty cards (or provided coupons) for correct answers. Retailers can use similar tactics by creating Virtual Reality (VR) modules that walk customers through the store (before they step in), showing them the safety processes being followed by the retailer – then rewarding the customer (with the equivalent of coins) for participating in a simple follow up quiz on safety standards.

Creating smart loyalty programs

How deep is the change going to be in the loyalty marketing space? How can loyalty programs be made smarter so they stay sensitive to the anxieties of customers? To respond, the priorities placed on data acquisition need to change:

1. Declared data,��which comprises the data that a customer shares��(like name, contact details, DOB, etc.) needs to be supplemented by self-declaration about their wellbeing, recent travel, potential syndromes, health test certificates, etc. How can your brand entice customers to honestly provide this data?

2. Behavioral data,��or observed data from customer interactions with the program (buying patterns, reward level, response to offers, reward redemption), partner programs, online data exhaust, provide insights into creating relevant personalization.

3. Calculated data, that comes in two flavors: Aggregations and machine learning calculations. Aggregations are counts and pre-defined calculations. Machine learning allows for prediction based on historical user interactions.��Examples include: Customer lifetime value, probability of churn, product/offer affinity scores and recommendations.

While the last two data types are important—they help our restaurant, mentioned earlier, add��extra hot sauce to the kerbside delivery because the data shows the personal attention and connect will build loyalty—it is the declared data that must be improved and leveraged to make loyalty meaningful in the time of COVID-19. On the face of it, acquiring health and travel data may seem difficult but if the communication is clear and suggests that the brand is keeping the interests of customers foremost, customers will respond with trust. Remember, the operating environment for the customer has also changed drastically, changing the rules of the game for everyone.

The next step is to integrate all the data. This presents a real challenge for loyalty marketers as the data they need resides in siloes (or even in partner systems). Bringing it together to create real-time intelligence is a herculean task.

The inability to bring data together for prompt analysis results in loyalty execution that is ineffective and often clumsy. For example, there is little point in sending an offer, say a complimentary bottle of wine for dining at a restaurant, to a hotel guest after the guest has checked out!

Our Smart Loyalty solution

To leverage new data, integrate it with existing data and improve loyalty programs, 91���� has created a Smart Loyalty solution. It is designed for the difficult times that customers and businesses are going though. The solution combines platforms and services, primarily based on a SessionM platform coupled with our deep loyalty experience, accelerators and design-led approach. It allows marketing teams to create newer and faster responses to retain customers, reward them, improve spends and provide a consistent omni-channel experience over Mobile, Web, Portal, Chatbot, Service Desk, etc.

Our overall offering is experience and data led, allowing businesses to innovate, implement and improve their loyalty strategies. Our solution addresses program design, business case identification, program benchmarking, delivery, integration, performance management, predictive analytics and customer value maximization (CVM). It drives value through personalized engagement generated by leveraging declared, observed and calculated data.

Our Smart Loyalty program can integrate with any third party systems and leverage external data, hence, supporting requirements around any industry like Retail, Quick Service Restaurant, Travel, Hospitality, CPG, Finance, Telecom, etc.

A smart program is vital for effective loyalty management today. Take for example the restaurant we discussed earlier. It may be using a delivery partner like DoorDash or Uber Eats that can provide critical data to enhance loyalty campaign targeting and effectiveness. Our solution even allows smaller brands to form a coalition program, placing them in a competitive position vis-à-vis larger brands.

Creating a strategy that counters the impact of COVID-19 is just as important as technology. Your industry, geography and customer type will be major determinants of the new strategy. But technology innovation and implementation expertise will make the difference.

Our expertise of having worked with several brands globally can help your organization turbo-charge its transformation towards Smart Loyalty. To know more, reach out to us at��contact.us@itcinfotech.com.

Author:
Hunaid Haider
Global Capability Leader – Loyalty

The post Time to ‘sanitize’ and re-create customer loyalty appeared first on 91����.

Consumer behavior is seeing a dramatic shift in uncertain times

According to recent consumer surveys conducted by��Numerator��in US, 90% of respondents said that they have experienced a change in their shopping behavior due to the pandemic and 32% of respondents continue to stockpile goods that they usually don’t.��As the stockpiling continues, out-of-stock has emerged as one of the most serious issues, with 65% consumers experiencing a shortage of products. News reports and social media posts showing empty shelves have exacerbated the issue, and CPG manufacturers and retailers are challenged in keeping up with demand, especially as the effects of the coronavirus become more wide-reaching.

Shopper behavior has changed, and they have moved to online shopping to avoid contact.����There is a growth in online grocery shopping, with 11% of online shoppers making their first purchase in last 6 months and an additional 6% making their first purchase ever. However, the sentiments towards continuing online shopping post the pandemic remains mixed with many customers planning to return to stores for grocery shopping. Survey respondents expect a 3 to 8% increase in store visits post Covid-19 for grocery shopping, but a 7 to 9% decrease for non-grocery products.

McKinsey global consumer survey report an expected increase of 15 to 30% in expenditure on groceries and up to 15% on household products during the pandemic. While many welcome the increased demand, however, meeting the consumer demand has its own set of challenges. Manufacturers need to assess how to best mitigate the risks of supply chain disruptions and capacity limitations.

CPG supply chain is stretched thin

The sudden & dramatic shifts in consumer behavior and buying patterns has impacted the CPG supply chain and its stretched thin due to:

• Slowdown in production due to gathering restrictions and slower movement of goods
• Conventional just-in-time inventory & replenishment not able to handle the disruption.
• Shortage of raw material
• Unplanned shutdown of plants for sanitization following infection among workers and
• Increased worker absenteeism

Understand the dynamic consumption patterns using internal and external data

The rapidly changing market has increased difficulty for sales and operational planning. The changing product preferences, new consumption patterns and shift in demand channels, handicap the existing inventory planning and demand and sales forecasting models during the pandemic as well as during the post-pandemic recovery period. Hence, to capture the new trend in consumption during and post forced lockdown state, we need to look at potential sources of data for capturing the dynamic consumption pattern. Following are few potential sources of data which could provide information on dynamic consumption pattern during this situation:

• POS Data:��Point of Sales data for a few of the Key Accounts/Online Vendors with respective market share will help in deducing the new behaviour of these accounts.
• �±𲹳ٳ���:��Consumer-based businesses should be paying greater attention to the weather as about 5% of their total annual revenue directly impacted by the weather, with much higher sales variability in seasonal categories. Based on research by the American Meteorological Society, current U.S. economic output varies by up to $630 billion a year (about 3.4% of 2016 gross domestic product) due to weather variability.
• Consumer Sentiment:��Information like Consumer Confidence, Consumer Credit, Consumer Spending, Disposable personal income, Households debt to GDP and Consumer Savings can contribute a lot to understanding the consumer situation.
• Macro-Economic Data: Information like��Consumer Price Index (CPI), Producer Price Index (PPI),����Economic Activity Index, Unemployment Rate, GDP��from various sectors,��GDP Growth Rate,��GNP,��Labour data�����Ի���Housing Index��will provide information on the economic situation of the region.
• Disease spread / mortality rate: Information on the number of��Coronavirus Cases,��Deaths�����Ի���Recovered��will be a strong influencer on how the customers will react to this outbreak. For example, in case of a sudden large spike of the COVID-19, customers might be motivated to stockpile items.

Develop a short-term demand forecasting model using ML

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the true consumption pattern might have shifted as compared to historical consumption pattern by Categories, Sub-Categories and Region. Even there could be lot of variations across different types of Stores as well – Large, Medium, Short Format stores. So, it makes little sense to observe past historical data for a long duration. Hence using the mentioned data sources, we would develop a short – term��Demand Forecasting��model to generate potential demands of different Category/Sub-Category/SKU level at daily level by��Geo-Spatial dimensions�����Ի���Store Type��using sophisticated��Statistical/Machine Learning algorithms��that would provide significant confidence level of forecast accuracy. This would enable the��Trade distribution, Supply Chain and Manufacturing��functions to take right steps and measures to cater to those future demands with high degree of confidence by reacting to those demand signals.

The core component of the model might be a traditional forecasting models like;

1. Multiple Linear Regression model with ARMA errors,
2. Box-Jenkins ARIMAX (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with suitably estimated parameters from the data)
3. More sophisticated algorithm like��Dynamic Linear/Non-Linear Models – Gaussian State Space Models with Kalman filters which essentially includes models like UCM – Unobserved component Model, Bayesian Structured Time Series Model, Prophet
4. Highly computationally intensive models from the class of��Deep Learning Models like LSTM��using daily historical POS data in the presence of other data sources as mentioned earlier along with the data representing consumer behavior.

All these models are capable enough in producing accurate forecasts with reliably high degree of confidence when applied to short term time series data, provided enough variation in trend and seasonality exits in the data. Final model for production usage would be decided based on the��accuracy metrics��and��model robustness.

Consider a small historical window for forecasting models

The��main difference��between the traditional models used so far in the industry are quite prominent. While standard forecasting models consider a sufficient historical timeframe to capture the long-term trend, we will consider a small historical window, say last 3 months. This is because due to COVID-19, the trend and pattern of total sales would have shifted dramatically. Hence it makes little sense to observe past historical data for a long duration. Also, an in-depth region-specific analysis of the causal relationship between COVID-19 needs to be carried out. It is to be remembered that the overall COVID-19 trend of a country is not enough to capture the local trend. For places which have a high spread of COVID-19, the��average value per transaction (ATV)��will be high due to bulk shopping, but the��visit count��will be low, as customers will be reluctant to leave their homes. Whereas for areas where COVID-19 spread is low, the buying pattern might be more regular. So, the causal relationship analysis must be more granular. For each of these regions, a separate model needs to be created after accommodating the influence of COVID-19.

So, in conclusion the Short-Term Demand Forecasting model should primarily composed of 3 parts:

1. Downstream Data Integration:��Analyzing point-of-sale data from different regions, markets, brands and distribution channels to better understand consumer behavior.
2. Measuring the Impact of��Demand��Shaping Actions (DSA):��Recording and determining the impact of so-called demand shaping events like COVID19 in this case.
3. Latency Reduction (LR): Model demand more frequently — weekly, or even daily

Our short – term��Demand Forecasting��model is more practical in the sense that it is more attuned to the current scenario and changing dynamics incorporating rational downstream data integrations, capturing demand shaping events Through frequent model recalibration including newer data, the model would deliver superior performance in forecasting future demand.

Do get in touch with our Data Science team and CPG SMEs who has decades of experience in building CPG domain-specific analytical models. We have been helping world’s largest CPG companies with their customer insights, supply chain planning, sales/trade and distribution planning and operations. We can help you thrive and revive your business in this new normal.

Author:
Sumit Mukherjee
Sumit is a Principal Data Scientist

Anindya Neogi
Anindya is GM, Chief Data Scientist at 91����

Reference:

The post Predict Consumer Demand in COVID 19 with a Short-Term Demand Forecasting Model Using ML appeared first on 91����.

Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, 86% of CMOs were optimistic about the business climate and 61% were confident that the marketing budget would increase in 2020. However, post the outbreak CMOs all over the globe have hinted that they will make cuts in the marketing budget to stay afloat, namely in TV Advertising (32%), Offline Advertising (32%) and Event Marketing (28%). CMOs are focusing on strategies and tactics to understand the changing consumer behavior and are effectively engaging consumers to drive faster conversions with personalized offers and services. Driving maximum ROI from the marketing spend is crucial for a CMO in this “new normal” as it plays a key role in the revival story of the business.

According to Gartner, Marketers must be proactive and not wait for the external business environment to give the green signal for taking action. With strategic maneuvers guided by the right technology and approach, organizations can not only dodge but successfully outlive this pandemic. The biggest challenge is not only predicting consumer behavior, expectations and needs in these uncertain times but also defining an action plan to enable conversion in a cost-effective manner.

Marketers should follow a well-defined action plan that focuses on the following key aspects:

Use Social Listening to Understand Voice of Customer��– In times like these, it’s important that organizations stay tuned to social media to listen to the concerns that customers have regarding the organization’s brand. It’s imperative to monitor discussions pertaining to health and hygiene that maybe relevant to the brand. The organization must be responsible for providing timely, accurate and realistic information about product availability and delivery keeping in mind customer relationship and trust. 91���� enabled Social Listening for the Foods Division of a leading conglomerate through the��Marketing Command Center. The solution revolved around continually partnering with various online listening tools by providing brand level data (sentiment, reviews, tags, posts) through web crawling. The MCC with 18+ Dashboards provided an integrated view of online and offline brand performance. It helped identify the key drivers that determine the efficacy of campaigns. Furthermore, it led to an improved understanding of the end-consumers, the key personas and their needs.

Personalize Engagement for Higher Conversion��– The pandemic has accelerated the transition to an ‘online’ mode of life. Studies highlight that in the United States there is a 56% increase in online orders from March 22 to April 4 as compared to the previous year. With more than a million consumers scrutinizing organizations’ online presence, it becomes crucial to develop a differentiated and personalized experience. Reports indicate that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes the shopper experience and 71% of shoppers end up feeling frustrated when their shopping experience is impersonal. The key to personalization is��Analyzing Data. With a 360-degree view of each customer, organizations can target the right customer segment, design customer journeys, email relevant content and provide value enhancing offers thereby making the experience very rewarding. For a leading Clothing, Footwear and Textiles Retailing Group, 91���� increased the promotion ROI using consumer insights. The collaboration resulted in a Customer Intelligence Platform that helped derive insights from 3.5 million consumers across 703 retail outlets. ITC helped the organization increase revenue by 1.5%, reduce promotion spend by 5% and increase in-store credit utilization by 15%.

Monetize Loyalty for Growth –��Organizations with a loyal customer base will time and again find that their customers continue to invest in them and spend even in difficult times. Identifying customer concerns and tailoring offerings around those needs will help build lasting relationships. A Cloud based loyalty solution integrating data from all touchpoints ensures that every interaction turns into a personalized engagement.����A good loyalty solution enables real-time analytics to drive movement down the customer funnel. The key is to design specific digital campaigns targeting the right customers through customer segmentation, propelled by the right product recommendations. For a leading retailer of Vitamins, Minerals and Herbal Supplements, 91���� facilitated a pilot program that impacted 10M members leading to 5M activations. The program enabled a ROI of 17%, increased customer retention by 18% and increased sales and margin by 1% and 2% respectively.

Optimize Promotion Effectiveness for Higher ROI –��Retail organizations invest up to 25% of their gross sales on marketing activities. With increased competition, limited budgets and narrow timelines, promotion effectiveness and return are more critical than ever. The key to achieving promotion effectiveness is to integrate analytics, processes and organizational capabilities. 91���� helped a leading CPG client in assessing the effectiveness of the Coupon Program across all its brands. The program helped in reducing the entire marketing budget by 35% and the planning process time by 25%. The scientific approach to planning future coupon programs enabled insights on cost, ROI and spend rationalization resulting in reduced coupon spend in ineffective coupon schemes.

ITC infotech’s expertise covers the entire spectrum of��Customer Engagement, Personalization, Smart Loyalty Management and Campaign management.��The one stop solution on Customer Intelligence enables��Intelligent & Automated Personalized Experiences,��Conversational AI-based Commerce & Customer Care�����Ի���Loyalty Engagement & Optimization. The platform enables CMOs to reduce the marketing costs by 5-10% and improve sales by 2-3%. The Customer Intelligence Platform helps in achieving top-line and bottom-line incremental business value through increased credit utilization, customer lifecycle value, and process efficiencies.

Stay tuned to know more about our Customer Intelligence Platform…

Advisors:

Amit Derkar
Offering Leader, Digital Experience
amit.derkar@itcinfotech.com

Caleb Shireesh Jacobs
Associate Partner, Digital Experience
caleb.jacobs@itcinfotech.com

Author:
Shweta Subbaraman
Lead Consultant, Digital Experience

Reference:

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COVID-19 has sent a new wave of learning through the world across societies, businesses and governments. To use the acute wisdom of Lenin, with COVID-19 a few weeks have passed when decades seem to have happened. There is also a major difference between past disasters and COVID-19: The pandemic is changing business structures and processes, ensuring that when they come out on the other side of COVID-19, they emerge much stronger.

At 91����, we experienced the disruptive change brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic up close – and we were able to respond swiftly. Organizations were forced to create a distributed workforce. Processes that were weakly linked had to be integrated and strengthened. Collaboration tools that everyone had access to but barely used, were brought in to create seamless processes with clients, employees, vendors, partners and entire ecosystem. As a technology provider, we realized that all of us may not be in the same boat, but we all faced the same storm. Working closely and building trust became the single most important objective. We ensured that our customers across the world could have their teams work from the safety of their homes, bring their system back online, and continue to serve their end customers. We know that the dividends of the effort we put in will become visible in the months to come.

At a time when globalization appeared to be broken—people could not travel, the movement of goods and supplies was restricted—it appeared that the only thing that worked within and across borders were digital systems. In fact, without digital, we may have been much worse off than we can imagine. With digital, despite the lockdowns, we could continue to share our knowledge of COVID-19 across the world, order takeaway and groceries, complete zero-touch transactions, and stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues.

The implication of this unforeseen global pandemic is profound for corporates. Many organizations will need to optimize and divert costs as demand shrinks and a long-drawn economic downturn begins to take shape. However, recent events tell us how important it is to continue to invest in digital, in mobile technology, cloud, analytics, machine learning and automation. If anything, investment in digital transformation must be increased and businesses must explore the areas their transformation strategy may have overlooked—from online recruitment to training, transactions and customer service.

In the months to come, technologies driven by our experience with COVID-19 will gain traction such as touchless processes, facial recognition, voice, gesture control and loyalty driven value needs. These will become the new norm, creating new opportunities in industries such as CPG/Manufacturing, Hospitality, Travel, Retail and Logistics. Hard robots will be deployed in increasing numbers in warehouses, in retail, the travel industry and in transportation. Fundamentally, a whole new world of opportunity is brewing for IT organizations and IT consumers. Technology will witness a new level of innovation, where creativity, need, safety and investments will intersect.

It is therefore extremely important for organizations to start putting their short-term plans in place, along with a long term view of the future. How will the short-term plans look? Will it be to ensure that a distributed workforce becomes the default norm? Will the push for digital transformation be on top of the agenda of corporate leaders? Will the ability to collaborate with partners, governments, institutions, analysts and investors become a boardroom priority? Will companies be able to address security and privacy issues with greater resolve? These are questions that will find different answers, depending on the industry and region in which a business operates. But a common thread will run through these decisions: Investments in strengthening IT will increase in the long run. Businesses that don’t do this will remain vulnerable to unpredictable disruptions. IT has established itself as core to business, an enabler which has kept businesses running during difficult times. With use of IT, now enterprises need to come closer to the consumers, built trust and create loyalty programs that are aligned to current needs. The value created now will ensure that organizations begin to grow as soon as the COVID-19 crisis abates.

In these times, compliance will get more closely integrated with the DNA of the organization. Where BCP has been invoked by organizations in the wake of COVID-19, data, application security and related compliance is becoming a pre-requisite for winning contracts and new businesses. Regulatory compliance and compliance to standards like ISO 27000, ISO9000, CMMi, Data protection laws such as GDPR and country specific data protection regulations are becoming a way of life and small and mid-size companies, startups are required to embrace such standards in their business processes in order to get an entry to a given market segment.

We will also see new business coming from within countries and governments utilizing the economic slowdown as an opportunity to encourage budding and innovative startups. With lot of migrant population leaving A class and B class cities (specifically for India), Manufacturing segment has a golden opportunity to build units and establish demand based supply “factories” in small towns and villages, which will then become an integral part of a country’s economic growth.

Industry and corporates will go through a revival much faster by increasing the digital components in operations and processes to transform the core businesses of physical goods / transactions industry.����The core operations will have a high component of digital thread coming together to differentiate in the operating market and environment. The end result will be a growth in the IT industry.

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Source : ICAO estimates ()

Figure1: Estimated impact on international passenger traffic and revenue by region for 2020

There are two broad categories where we see a major impact:

1. Direct and immediate:��The drastic reduction in demand has eliminated incoming revenues. Booking cancellations and running opex have forced most global airlines to ground the entire commercial passenger fleet and some have filed for bankruptcy. Air Mauritius and Virgin Australia are just two such examples.⁵��Typically, even with a grounded fleet, airlines have to still bear 40% of operational costs in MRO activities. Aircraft have not been designed to be grounded for such long durations—a 70 to 90 ton structure standing still in a hanger or on the tarmac for weeks on end undergoes structural stress. The maintenance and assurance it would take to make these aircraft air worthy again for an average fleet size of 100+ would be staggering.
2. Cascaded long term:��Travel is an essential part of life and business. While virtual communication is a necessity at the moment, humans cannot keep their desire to travel, and for personal interactions, in check for long. The question is, how comfortable are we going to be sitting a few inches away from an unknown person in a closed air-locked aircraft for long hours?

The single ray of hope lies in the fact that many global efforts to test a vaccine against the coronavirus are in fast forward mode. As of 23 April, there were six vaccines in clinical evaluation, and 77 in pre-clinical evaluation.⁶��Bill Gates who is taking a major interest in vaccine development (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a COVID-19 therapeutics accelerator⁷) says that one could be in commercial production in the next 18 months.⁸

The aviation industry cannot afford to wait and watch the situation. It must be pro-active. This is the crisis when leaders, despite the odds, can reset and re-shape the future. Our analysis suggests there should be two sets of parallel teams who should be addressing the crisis:

• Team 1 should be working relentlessly to reduce costs and cut losses
• Team 2 should be working on a plan for revival the moment the COVID-19 curve is flattened or a vaccine becomes commercially available

Expecting a 100% normal world in the next few months is absurd. But there appear to be signs that recovery can be quicker than expected, at least in pockets around the world. Bloomberg Economics recently estimated that 85% of activity had returned to China, excluding Hubei province.⁹��China is also putting in place processes that enable workers to return to factories and offices. These processes are shaping new habits and social dynamics (some very interesting insights to be gained here).¹⁰��If they work, these processes may be replicated in other parts of the world. This will be the new normal and will take us months and even years to get accustomed to.

Meanwhile, some things that have drawn our attention when exchanging views with friends in the industry or reading aviation-related research:

• Airlines are investing in customer communication related to new destinations and the new processes they are putting in place to engage customers and retain them in a post-COVID-19 world. Some ideas distilled from our interactions with the airline and hospitality industry include:
  • Create and publicize new no-touch processes, especially in areas such as automated baggage handling, biometric based check ins, remote processes for employees to minimize physical presence and interaction
  • Work with airports to create touchless, biometrics-based boarding gates manned by robots
  • Showcase new mobile and interaction tools such as voice-based in-room assistants used to service customers
  • Create examples around usage of robots and automation for guest/ customer safety and comfort (for example, in-flight videos on how cabins are sanitized, adherence to hygiene standards in the preparation and handling of in-flight meals, etc.)
  • Provide engagement opportunities to guests/ customers by webcasting cocktail and cooking classes, yoga that can be practices mid-flight for healthier air travel, etc.
  • Leverage VR to send guests on “holidays” to hotel properties or airline destinations
• Determine the optimal size and dimension of networks and fleet within the next few weeks
• Consider��M&A and consolidation opportunities; we hear many businesses are considering joining hands while operating certain sectors or market geographies
• Make a stringent checklist for sanitization and hygiene factors and an aircraft certification process for every flight operation to win back customer confidence
• Design new business processes and invest in smart technologies, including IOT, for a contactless flying experience
• Re-look at financial settlements with partnering channels and participating vendors to cut credit time – and better still, to make all settlements almost real-time

Over the last decade, many airlines have become a set of smaller organizations, with regional operations, low cost brands, specialized cargo businesses, etc. It is time to centralize the data across these organizations and use real-time analytics to create synergies, cost saving opportunities and improved efficiencies.

We created a Data centric framework aiming on 4 strategic objective themes:

�� �� �� �� �� �� ������ �� �� �� �� �� �� ��

Each strategic theme will aim to achieve business outcomes that will help airlines realize both its short- and long-term goals in becoming a true digitally transformed airline.

Many of our industry friends are utilizing this time to conceptualize a Lean-IT organization, including offshoring much of their application portfolio and to strengthen their contact centre experience by leveraging cloud, while many are considering ways to use automation to improve operational processes and reduce costs. Finally, some airlines are using sophisticated analytics to back their demand stimulation programs—packages, discounts, loyalty programs, etc., that can be applied to sectors that begin to show lift. And the lift will come, because if anything is inventive and resilient, it is us humans.

Author:
Peeyush Goel
Associate Partner (Consulting Services – Travel & Hospitality)

Reference:

1. EU Travel Ban: Air France and France Most Vulnerable

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