Gopalakrishna Bylahalli, senior vice president and chief technology officer, IT Services at Happiest Minds, is discussing innovations at Happiest Minds and its impact on the company’s growth in 2015.
The advent of Social-Mobility-Analytics-Cloud has led to digital innovation that has possibly led to disruption, thus providing channels for new businesses. This has led to differentiation in various aspects of customer experience. Of course, it started, at least 5 years back.
Now, fast forward, in 2015, there are technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Wearable devices, Robotics, Cognitive Computing and automation that are making a positive impact on the business. That is how these technologies started playing a key role in digital transformation in the enterprise sector.
Our company is born in the Digital era which means, we have adopted innovation as a serious culture. It is imperative for us to differentiate ourselves in the market place through digital innovation. This year we have focused on multiple areas of innovation, such as:
# Digital Content Monetization
# Cognitive Knowledge Assembly and rendering
# Digitally empowered workforce solutions
# Enhancing In-store shopping experience through IoT based solution.
Each of these innovative solutions play a critical role in at least one of the following areas:
# Enhancing Customer Experience
# Bringing Business Efficiency
# Innovative Platform for new business
Our Innovations in 2015
Today’s enterprises have abundant digital assets. This could be documents, pictures, videos, audio, social content and other unstructured content. These assets are scattered across and most of the time enterprises struggle to integrate and channel it to the right consumers at the right time.
Our innovative solution mCaaS (managed content as a service) has the ability to connect to any source and render it to right end consumer platform on any device and form factor. There is a built-in cognitive intelligence which would help assemble right knowledge/information based on end consumer behavior and preferences. This has lead our customers to monetize their digital assets by rendering right content to end consumers, helping them build different pricing models.
Enterprises are facing challenges with respect to educating their workforce and managing the churn, especially in the retail industry. The variety and volume of products is overwhelming for an associate to understand in a short period of time. By the time they understand and start serving their customers, the associate might move on to a new job. This will impact in loss of customers, loss of revenue, increased cost and reduced efficiency.
But, there is nothing to worry as our innovative platform DASP (Digitally Assisted Sales/Advisory Platform) addresses this challenge meticulously. Our platform empowers the associates digitally with necessary information about the products, customers and their preferences, pricing and promotions. This will also provide right recommendation to those associates so that they are empowered to serve the customer instantaneously. It has resulted in customer delight, increased efficiency of associates and increased sales.
Every brick and mortar business is looking at adopting digital Omni-channel solutions to fight against invasion of online players. I believe that this business will not go away that easily. End consumers would still like to have in-store experience and personal interaction that lacks in online shopping.
It is important for these businesses to see what they can do to attract customers. As end consumers we all would like to be treated special. That is why our in-store customer experience solutions (Lo-Mo-Me) are used to address this challenge. Beacon based in-store digital solution helps enterprises understand their customers well than ever before. This will also help convert foot fall into real transaction.
In my view, every business has realized that they have to adopt digital technologies either for their survival or to compete in the market. This is just the beginning. Technology landscape is changing rapidly that it is making a huge influence on business disruption. Every enterprise is looking for a quicker adoption of solutions. This means productized solutions would make huge inroads when compared to grounds up development. Often, it is not very easy for enterprises to build solutions from scratch as the time taken to market them is very critical.
I believe, in 2016, there will be increased competition in the market to acquire and serve the customers. Of course, efficiency is the key. We have already seen customer segmentation through local players acquiring regional consumers. This will also lead to acquisition and consolidation of such players later.
To compete in this tough market, enterprises have to look at modernization of their technology infrastructure and also should focus on state-of-the-art User Experience solutions. Acquiring digital content and building intelligence through analytics on these digital assets would be the key to win this race.
We are focusing on bringing innovative solutions in the coming year to proactively address this market.
It will be an exciting 2016 for all enterprises, technology players and of course for innovative solutions providers like us.
By Gopalakrishna Bylahalli, senior vice president and chief technology officer, IT Services at Happiest Minds
editor@infotechlead.com
