In November last year, Chennai-based LatentView Analytics made a stellar stock market debut listing at a premium of 169 per cent. With the first anniversary of its public issue weeks away, businesslike caught up with LatentView Analytics CEO Rajan Sethuraman to understand what changed since going public, prospects for data analytics, the company’s growth and expansion plans and more. Edited excerpts:

Lessons on empowerment
The training which started on September 16 continued for one hour every day at the respective schools. “In the training session, they taught us everything. They gave us the whole football kit including a jersey and boots. They are also taking care of our food and transportation. In the selection process, they checked the basic skills, who scored more goals, and the discipline of each player in a team. For our diet, the coaches instructed us to avoid oily food and consume more vegetables.

During the games, we drank juice and glucose,” Kaviya shares. With an illuminating spirit, the kids agree that the matches have instilled a sense of pride and happiness in them. A few of them even wish to pursue a career in the sport. Hallan Joseph and Vishal from MMD Higher Secondary School, Arumbakkam, concur that the coaches motivated them to take up an interest in football and continue playing games even after the league.

Speaking about the coaches and the league, Stephen Charles, referees committee convenor, Chennai Footballs Association, says, “The coaches are well-experienced and pay individual attention to the kids. This is a great experience for the kids. When academics is a necessity, we shouldn’t ignore sports. Initiatives like this motivate parents and children to focus on sports. Many NGOs and corporate institutions should collaborate with sports associations and take up initiatives like this and continue empowering children.”

Emphasising that children should persevere to cultivate their talents, LatentView Analytics aims to provide meticulous training by some of the best football coaches in the country. Achyuth, data analyst, LatentView Analytics and ex-football professional, shares, “Right now, the kids are getting an opportunity and they are having tournaments to progress and grow. That is a good start but, it is more about how they are continuing and holding their opportunities. Not many people get these types of opportunities. If you go on in the timeline, you will be getting other obstacles and reasons not to play anymore. Our company provides an opportunity, they have to continue their progress.”

With a focus on education, the global digital analytics consulting and solutions firm looks into providing a holistic approach. “We believe that sports are an important element for the holistic development of a child in addition to education. And CKL is a small step in that direction,” shares Mariam.

Source: newindianexpress.com

The business of marketing, and the marketing of business, is undergoing significant change – more so in the “New Normal.” Stakeholder expectations have been reset, new-age technologies are leading digital transformation, and businesses are trying to lead with “purpose” to create a more human brand.

Against this backdrop, will marketing undergo a paradigm shift in the future? How far will digital transformation impact the new age of marketing? Importantly, what will be the role of data analytics in creating insights and shaping marketing decisions? And what could be the probable pitfalls along this journey?

Data-driven marketing – the challenges and the remedy

Data-driven marketers are outperforming competitors on key metrics such as brand awareness, customer satisfaction and retention, and conversion rates. Taking a data-driven approach to marketing allows marketers to make more informed decisions, with two out of three marketers agreeing it is preferable to make decisions based on data than simply on instinct.

Yet, marketing teams are struggling to use data effectively to drive marketing decisions and actions. For example, less than 25% of companies have developed data-driven cultures within their organizations. At a sectoral level like the automotive and utilities industries, the number drops further. Siloed data sources, investment challenges, and traditional mindsets that deter commitment at the organization level are some other concerns in building a data-centric approach in business.

For marketing to derive the full benefits of data-driven insights, it’s critical to take a robust approach to the discipline. Data mastery – meaning extracting insights from deep data analysis to shape marketing decisions and customer activation – will be key to marketing in the future. Other steps include investments in AI technologies, as well as in talent and skills to create actionable and real-time insights.

A starting point could be building a framework for collecting customer data to enable a single view of the customer. For example, to better serve its 80 million guests, Airbnb restructured much of its processes by gathering key insights from data to assess its best and worst performances geographically; analyse the back data for recommendations; and upscale the level of service. The result? It generated $5.9 billion in revenue in 2021, a 73% year-on-year increase.

Real-time data is starting to be another key enabler for marketers to deliver personalized content and responses. This helps understand how customers interact with brands and when and where to engage with them. Zappos, the US online shoe and clothing retailer, sends an e-mail response to customers immediately after product delivery, with an image of the items delivered and a short quiz inviting feedback. It also has a dedicated space on its website for agents to share their customer stories.

With the subscription economy set to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025, business strategy, organization culture, processes, product, and people are all being driven by a strong foundation of data management and insights. Take the example of Netflix, a pioneer of subscription-based content; if a customer logs in late night, the platform recommends the shows they have already watched or those of shorter duration instead of longer ones. This data-based subscription model saves Netflix over $1 billion per year.

Unfortunately, few marketers can act this quickly. Per a CMO Council study, only 7% of respondents said they were able to deliver real-time, data-driven experiences across physical and digital touchpoints regularly. Many marketers struggle with the volume of real-time insights they access. Only a minority react to online customer interactions immediately – 43% in the pre-purchase stage, 38% during purchase, and just 35% post purchase.

A new trend in data-driven marketing has been the emergence of ‘zero-party’ data as a tool to understand the customer better. Zero-party data is collected when customers agree to share data with a brand to allow a deeper and more meaningful experience. As third-party cookies are gradually phased out, zero-party data has assumed increased significance as a marketing tool.

To connect with a new customer group of younger customers interested in “meme stocks” (i.e., investing based on what they hear on social media), Fidelity Investments started an “Ask me Anything” forum on Reddit for the purpose of collecting insightful data directly from this younger customer base for their campaigns. Needless to say, it’s taken off really well.

With the rise of e-commerce and social media, social-driven growth will be increasingly important to reach customers. The onus is clearly on marketers to use data gathered across customer touchpoints to analyse how customers interact with brands. And marketers can anticipate high revenue from social commerce, an e-commerce subset that involves selling products directly on social platforms.

The future of business … led by data

We are looking at an age where marketing executives will need to have a clear vision in their marketing strategy and build a framework-driven data-collection process. New modes of interaction have emphasized real-time data as the marketer’s biggest asset. Indeed, the profile of the marketing function has evolved over time, and will evolve further, to drive business.

The marketers of today are more purpose-led, more data-driven, and more human-centred and collaborative. The past two years have brought significant change – and opportunities – in how customers approach brands and what they expect. It’s left to marketers to harness this data and shape deeper engagement with customers to deliver a superior experience and in ensuring loyalty and brand building.

Welcome to the new age of marketing … led by data!

Source: cxotoday.com

Parijat Banerjee is Global Business Head for the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector at LatentView Analytics.

Banks have always been in a tricky spot when it comes to innovation—balancing modernity and consumer expectations with compliance and security. The past few decades of rapid technological change have been dizzying for financial institutions, but banks have made notable progress in adopting solutions to improve their online and mobile services. However, it has been a mixed bag, with other digital transformations being considerably slower, especially the migration to the cloud.

Many banks have found it difficult (and expensive) to give up their legacy applications in favor of cloud service providers (CSPs), with very real concerns about information security, customer-sensitive data and the need to build cloud-appropriate risk management frameworks. The reputational and regulatory exposure presented by migrating large amounts of sensitive data is daunting, and the financial services industry has a low tolerance for failure. But risk-averse attitudes are evolving, and quickly.

Eye In The Sky

A recent survey from Accenture of 150 executives at large banks found that more than 8 out of 10 executives surveyed who are already planning to or in the process of migrating functions to the cloud intend to move the majority of their mainframe workloads to the cloud. Within this group, nearly a quarter said they plan to move at least three-fourths of their mainframe workloads to the cloud, and nearly north of 80% are determined to meet their targets in the next two to five years. Regulators have also gotten on board, noting the enhanced transparency, monitoring tools and security features of cloud computing.

Banks know they need to keep pace with the digital features of their less-restricted consumer colleagues and deliver faster, more optimal customer experiences across their digital properties. The cloud enables them to embrace the latest tech without spending time, money and energy creating the infrastructure. This realization has accelerated cloud adoption. Wells Fargo is planning a move to data centers over several years. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are making similar plans, with Microsoft, Google and internal builds assisting with the process. Goldman Sachs announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services for its own migration.

But banks are still transitioning from something they know well (their own in-house data centers) to something entirely new, and pitfalls abound. As the great migration to the cloud continues, here are four important issues banks should consider.

1. Data Organization

According to McKinsey, “Financial institutions have always had to convert information into insights, but today’s data requirements are massive. Not only do banks gather data in greater volumes, but it comes from multiple sources and in multiple formats.” Migrations can’t happen without a clear execution plan with buy-in from all key stakeholders. This is especially important for banks, who are notorious for their shared services that can make unraveling data more complex.

Enterprise-wide cloud migrations are multilayered, involving more than just “transferring” data. Banks must implement automated processes and digital platforms that will not only allow for expeditious data collection but are primarily focused on data organization and analysis.

2. Data Security

Protecting customers’ data and sensitive banking information is critical. By placing valuable information within the cloud via online or virtual platforms, businesses run a greater risk of security infringements or threats. In order to offer customers an online banking experience, it is essential that strict security measures are in place and regulated.

But the reward may outweigh the risk. Once up and running, the cloud offers banks tremendous security advantages. Consumer banks can take advantage by developing cloud-based tools that can help introduce new features in apps, assist in detecting fraud and even use machine learning to assist in detecting money laundering.

Don Anderson, CIO at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, even thinks that ignoring the cloud may “introduce new security vulnerabilities,” as on-premises vendors discontinue support for their products. So, for those banks still on the fence about making the move to the cloud, it appears that the ice cream is worth the headache.

3. Customer Experience

The cloud experience of a financial institution is only beneficial if customers can easily access and intuitively operate it. When implementing virtual platforms, it’s important to ensure that these platforms and technologies are comprehensive and that customers can easily use them to access their data, perform transactions or manage accounts.

One of the advantages of virtual platforms is that customers can interact with an institution from anywhere at any time, increasing their brand loyalty. However, if they struggle to use cloud services to perform the actions they desire (or if the system doesn’t support quick and feasible transactions), it might do more harm than good. Remember—migrating to the cloud is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor, and it requires constant vigilance and maintenance to ensure a seamless customer experience.

4. Legacy Goodbye

In addition to security, ditching the systems that you’ve relied upon for decades (and trained your employees how to operate) is a cold shower. For an effective migration, banks first need a full understanding of their current tech architecture. As mentioned, banks tend to have clustered, coupled systems, and taking anything offline may have disastrous consequences elsewhere. Put another way, you wouldn’t want a surgeon to operate without taking an X-ray first.

Banks should consider implementing innovative systems and technologies in order to fully explore the possibilities of moving toward the cloud. By releasing the hold that banks have on legacy systems, financial institutions can focus on innovative technologies. But overseeing that innovation will require talent, and banks have often competed with fintech and other digital competitors for cloud-experienced engineers. The good news is that these technologies are becoming more commonplace, and there’s a constantly growing number of people with the proper experience and training.

Connected Ecosystem

As digital transformation accelerates and the realities of our post-pandemic online world continue to unfold, financial institutions must be prepared to evolve their methods of working, just like the rest of us. By shedding the burden of legacy systems now, banks will build resiliency and find themselves better equipped to navigate and even more confidently participate in the changing landscape of our digitally connected ecosystem.

Source: Forbshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2022/09/22/forecast-for-the-banking-industry-nearly-100-chance-of-cloud/?sh=56dce9406062

Annu Baral is the Head of Consulting Services at LatentView Analytics, a data analytics and decision science company.

As we step into the second half of 2022, business leaders are thinking critically about their next move. Partisan politics and a likely recession are changing consumer behavior and forcing many C-suite leaders to look carefully at their budgets.

For many businesses, a post-pandemic subscription offering that isn’t generating the desired revenue could be on the chopping block. For legacy subscription players, subscribers are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain for a variety of reasons, forcing them to rethink their core offering.

Could a perfect storm of inflation, market saturation and significant churn mean the end of the subscription model as we know it? Likely not, but subscription-based businesses as well as those who’ve added a subscription service to their regular product offering will benefit from understanding how they can meet customers where they are.

There’s a lot of history here.

New subscription offerings are born every day. The subscription economy runs the gamut of industries and verticals from luxury travel to board games. Standouts like Netflix in media and entertainment, Rent the Runway in retail, Birchbox in CPG and LatentView partner Adobe’s Creative Cloud in SaaS were foundational to the subscription economy and have helped synonymize subscription with convenience and personalization.

But with inflation and the costs of goods and services rising, consumers are becoming wary of subscriptions. Many are opting for pre-subscription shopping habits to avoid paying what may be considered a non-essential convenience premium. Meanwhile, those in favor of subscriptions want to keep the cost down. According to research from The Kearney Consumer Institute, more than half of consumers surveyed would like to pay less than $50 per month for subscriptions.

The value of subscriptions for businesses is clear in their ability to receive mass amounts of customer data and recurring revenue from the consumer. For a subscription offering to survive in 2022, it must continue to provide equal or even greater value to the customer while still being profitable for the company. This is the basis of “Subscription 2.0.”

We’re all riding the wave.

Delivering clear value to customers is inherently tricky for subscription businesses: Many are considered non-essential, or even luxury. For most consumers, entertainment, fashion and boutique fitness can be given up when necessary. We know from Peloton’s post-pandemic subscriber drop that the company quickly reached the threshold of its total addressable market. This is not an uncommon result for subscription offerings with top-tier price tags.

We learned from Netflix’s Q1 2022 valuation that subscribers are fickle and can churn even with the best of brands. To weather these challenges, subscription businesses should focus on two critical improvements: Enhancing customer experience and reducing subscriber fatigue.

Strong CX can be the wind in your brand’s sails.

Good customer experience can buoy your product or service into new markets—but a bad one can have frustrated customers jumping ship and heading straight to Yelp to leave a review.

Excellent customer service brings to mind brands like Chewy.com, with its above and beyond dedication to customer appreciation, or Sephora’s no-questions-asked return policy, which has patrons widely evangelizing their customer-first approach. To successfully market a subscription program, brands must know the end-to-end experience of their customers and lean into CX as a key differentiating factor when price and product are equal.

We must address subscription fatigue.

There are several reasons why subscribers churn. Doubling down on household budgets, more enticing offers from competitors or price increases can all influence customers to cancel their subscriptions. That’s why as we move into “Subscription 2.0,” it’s critical to address subscription fatigue.

Subscribers feel fatigued when they fail to see the value, either based on the amount they are paying or the experience they’re getting. Companies can address this in two ways: by creating value by bundling additional products or services, or by creating more personalization so that customers get more out of the product.

Consider the subscription box FabFitFun. Customers pay $50/quarter for a box of products valued up to $300. The more tailored the products, the greater the likelihood that a customer will like everything in their box—easily convincing them that it was a worthwhile investment. The challenge for companies is to do so in a way that is still profitable to them.

We need to chart a map for the future.

Customer experience is the lifeblood of “Subscription 2.0.” But marketers with tightening budgets don’t have the luxury of experimenting until they discover the perfect user experience. The good news is that they don’t have to.

Whether you are building your subscription journey from the ground up or reevaluating your offering, you should consider how personalized your experience can and should get. What are the considerations of marketing to multiple generations? How can offerings be tailored for families versus single-person households or corporate offices? There are many things to consider, particularly if your customer experience is bridging a digital experience with a physical product.

Using the data at your disposal, hyper-personalization may be the answer to providing tangible value to your subscribers. To get as close to a “segment of one” as possible, aim to tailor your product offering to a single customer without adding additional stress to your marketing efforts.

In media and entertainment, this may look like improvements to your recommendations system for books, movies or music so that users are less likely to become fatigued and leave the app. In CPG and retail, hyper-personalization will mean anticipating purchasing behavior and creating a more seamless buying experience. Retailers should always question how they can make the process easier for their customers.

Highlight the value your subscription offers the customer.

In focusing on CX and combatting subscription fatigue, you can create a model that stands out among the competition. When you design your subscription around the customer, you can reduce churn and create a reliable source of recurring revenue—the ultimate goals of any subscription model.

Thanks: Forbs

Venkat Viswanathan is Founder and Chairman of LatentView Analytics, a marketing analytics and decision science company.

In May 2022, the number of short-term rentals (Airbnbs and Vrbos) available in Manhattan far surpassed the number of year-term rentals. A first for the city, the shift indicates a prioritization of the flexibility of the short-term rental model. As inflation rises, so does the popularity of the sharing economy—partial ownership of goods and services that are more cost-effective than owning outright. Already popular among consumer-facing companies, this change indicates the transformations taking over the enterprise at large.

The history of the rental economy and its widespread adoption can tell us a lot about how this trend will continue to play out in the enterprise. But first, we must understand how the rental economy caught fire. Has inflation driven prices so high that what was once “affordable” is limited to those people that can afford to “live comfortably”? Or do millennials and Gen Z have different priorities—like travel and wellness—than their parents?

History Of The Rental Economy

More than any generation ahead of them, millennials deferred buying their first homes. When they began their careers in the early 2000s, the housing market was falling, jobs were tough to come by and staggering student loan debt meant taking on a mortgage was put on the back burner. Today’s market conditions are not dissimilar, causing younger millennials and Gen Z to lean into the flexibility renting provides.

The youngest in corporate America are exceptionally comfortable with the sharing economy. Many of them remember when Netflix sent DVDs directly to their mailboxes in red envelopes. They grew up with the idea that the sharing economy brings more diversity of choice or a slice of luxury without the expensive overhead. Their generation’s affinity for renting will translate into how they make business decisions, and companies should be prepared to tailor their offering to that model of consumption.

How The Rental Economy And Subscription Work Together

As Gen Z matured, so did the rental economy, and along with it came the widespread adoption of the subscription model. As consumers began to rent the same goods and services repeatedly and the enterprise began to see the value in automatically charging consumers’ credit cards every month, a new way to buy was born.

Why buy in bulk when you could have the exact right amount of paper towels delivered every month for the same price? This is the thesis that Jeff Bezos is hanging his million-dollar hat on. Given the success of programs like URBN’s Nuuly and Lyft’s Citi Bike, the marriage of rental and subscription keeps customers coming back. But as hot new bombshell startups enter the market, the real challenge is creating increasing value for subscribers.

Creating Customer Value

The key to subscription longevity and low churn rates—keeping in mind the benefits of the rental economy—is creating value for your subscribers by building an offering to fit their unique needs. Organizations looking to create a subscription for the first time and hoping to transition existing customers to subscribers should be conscious of timing.

Do you have enough customer data to segment your customers nearly down to one? Further, are you analyzing the data at your disposal to understand the unmet needs of your customers? When you have a grasp on these two things, you can build a subscription model tailor-made for your existing customers rather than one that mimics other subscriptions on the market today.

Looking Ahead

The rental and subscription economy is entering a new phase of growth. To capitalize on that upward momentum, brands should pay attention to where the rental economy and current business trends overlap.

1. Flexibility: Post-pandemic, much of the workforce is asking for flexibility to be built into their daily lives. From where and when they work to balancing work and personal time, millennials and Gen Z are dispelling the traditional 9-to-5 workday and prioritizing creating a custom solution fit to their needs. A good subscription offering should—and often does—do the same.

2. Everything As A Service: The SaaS model fundamentally changed how the enterprise purchases software when it rolled updates, customer service and maintenance into one fixed fee. This model, which offers clear value to the subscriber compared to its predecessor, is being adopted outside of software development. Similar to contract work, I predict that other business functions will become available as a service on an ad hoc basis for roles outside of core business needs.

3. Sustainability: The enterprise is feeling the pressure to operate more sustainably. Minimizing waste by utilizing products and services on an as-needed basis is likely to become popular, especially as millennials and Gen Z become the decision-makers. From sharing physical space to taking advantage of hardware buy-back programs, the rental model is primed to be widely adopted by the enterprise.

The lifestyle preferences of millennials and Gen Z bleed over into how they behave as consumers and, eventually, business leaders. Sparked by the explosion of the rental economy, when you create a subscription model designed to be flexible, adaptable and sustainable, your long-term value will be clear—the key to reducing churn in an already saturated market.

Source: Forbs