SigmaWay Blog

Automatic Call/Contact Distribution (ACD) is a software that enables contact centers to route customer inquiries to the customer support representative who has the skills to best handle their specific needs. Apart from the ability to route customers to the appropriate agent, ACDs have a variety of additional features that help in keeping efficiency high and costs down. Inbound/outbound call blending is another popular offering within an ACD. A quality ACD system imports customer data from company CRMs and passes it along to the agents so they can handle requests with all available information. An automatic call distributor takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of the routing process for contact centers, creating a more enjoyable experience for both customers and agents. Read more at: http://www.incontact.com/blog/what-is-automatic-call-distribution-acd/

A periodic table has been constructed to highlight 131 privately held HR tech companies which were chosen based on CB Insights data on total funding, recency of funding, quality of investors and strength of Mosaic score. The HR tech category broadly includes software in workforce management, payroll, benefits administration, employee development, along with recruiting and staffing platforms and excludes staffing agencies, event and office space management software, and operations companies that provide office cleaning and management. The periodic table  categories into- flexible hiring, candidate management, staffing/scheduling, tech hiring, job board/resources, HR automation, compensation/benefits, workplace culture, screening/vetting, career development and college/graduate hiring. Read more at: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/hr-tech-startups-periodic-table/

MercadoLibre one of Latin America's biggest e-commerce sites, with 130 million registered users and an average of 4.6 purchases made every second of the day. It uses Google Analytics 360 to help the advertisers improving their programmatic direct campaigns. MercadoLibre started by creating audience segments for popular product lines and then made those Analytics 360 segments available to advertisers. Advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager could then negotiate the impression volumes they wanted at fixed CPMs for each of their priority segments. With the Programmatic Guaranteed deals, advertisers are guaranteed reach and precision, as their ads are targeted to well-defined audiences who are likely to buy their products. The results were pretty much satisfactory. Read more at: https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/06/mercadolibre-uses-unique-audience-insights-from-analytics-360-cs.html

According to authors, the remarkable impact of Application Programming Interfaces(APIs), is in the analytics front. From accumulating data from new root to evaluation, it has radically changed the face of analytics and the core role of the citizen data scientists ,by gathering right and reliable datasets ,thereby simplifying advanced analytics and enabling them to devote more time behind identifying and interrogating new and valid questions about data. Developers can borrow functionality from other apps by allowing interaction between two pieces of codes , thereby bringing different bits of software together. Efficiency depends on use. Whether APIs will replace citizen data scientists or not, in future, is unpredictable, as, on one hand, business users will have easy access to analytics without their support and on the other hand, their role will also evolve. Read more at http://blogs.sas.com/content/hiddeninsights/2017/06/23/apis-data-scientists/

According to authors, AI and Machine Learning algorithms, introduces us to an era of intelligent conversational environments , by  bringing about a paradigm shift in technologies and strategies ,thereby collaborating the rate of progress in business and process for automation, thus making an enterprise more smarter ,flexible and conversational. AI mainly focuses on making support systems more efficient across a multitude of applications, processes and business domains, bringing about intelligent collaboration capabilities to the emerging Conversational Workspace platforms, improving workflows, automating repetitive tasks and initiating automated interactions via voice assistance ,thereby, helping an organization to take better decisions and grow. Read more at https://aitrends.com/speech-recognition/idg-contributor-network-the-growing-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-on-workplace-collaboration/

According to authors, both Artificial Intelligence and Pattern-Recognition algorithms, which metamorphoses horses into zebras and winter scenes into summer, have revolutionised healthcare, where robot radiologists, can visually diagnose and examine  X-rays ,stained breast cancer slides and medical signs involving correlations between normal and abnormal health patterns,  in detail and with remarkable precision, thereby empowering the doctors to conduct a detailed research and to better  patient’s welfare. The core activity of AI is to make the machines intelligent and using this intellect, an entity can function smoothly, efficiently and  with perfect foresight in its environment, thus allowing an organisation to flourish and expand its operations. Read more at https://aitrends.com/healthcare/supercharge-healthcare-ai/

According to authors, Artificial Intelligence , can easily and effortlessly make a copy of audio and video content with an  intent to deceive the viewers, in a world which believes in Seeing is Believing. Though analytics, big data, and machine learning have helped  us in unfolding the truth, yet  these technologies cannot be fully relied upon, as it lies, by forging audio and video content, leading us to a fake world. As far as the audio and the video forgery is as concerned, anyone can  generate realistic-sounding speech with  varied intonation, in the voices  of famous personalities  and realistic-looking videos  by changing  both the facial expressions and pitch contour, on You Tube Videos, by using AI-based software. Recently, Adobe is working on similar technology  which aims at producing  “Photoshop  For Audio”. Read more at https://aitrends.com/opinion/ai-will-make-forging-anything-entirely-easy/

According to authors, AI is radically changing  the face of banking.  From daily  customer dealings ,learning from them and interacting  with them to becoming the face of their brand , AI/Robots simplifies complex tasks, by, informing  customers about their account balances, prevailing interest rates on mortgages, securities, making  transfers and payments based on voice recognition authentication, interacting in different languages thereby making transactions smooth and flexible and resolving customer grievances online. AI covers the following three techies :   1) Language processing, enabling  communication between computers and  humans, 2)Enables computers in locating similarities and comparing disparities between new and existing datasets , to sketch out patterns, via Machine Learning  and  3)Advanced software system  that provide personalized advice.   Read more at https://aitrends.com/financial-services/how-artificial-intelligence-will-revolutionize-banking/

The culture of an organization has a significant impact on the overall success rate of change initiatives. Weak process culture implies lack of proper teamwork.  The signs of a weak process culture includes no collaboration amongst different teams, morale is low, and process and change initiatives frequently seem to fail. One of its biggest cause is invisible leadership. Now, to turn around a weak process culture, the following steps maybe followed:

      1.  Demonstrate active leadership

      2.  Empower the real process owners

     3.  Sustain momentum – deploy into structured change

     4.  Provide process guidance

     5.  Sustain communication

With the building blocks for a strong improvement culture in place, teams will feel empowered to collaborate on improvement efforts. Engaged teams armed with the right attitude can take any tools and turn their efforts into real improvement for your customers and for your bottom line. Read more at  https://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/organizational-change/articles/how-to-spot-and-fix-a-weak-process-culture

Flipkart is not the first of the many e-commerce players to start their operations online. All has not been well for this industry in the past, both for consumers and investors. This has happened for various reasons including the entry of diverse competition as well as government policies—particularly demonetization. Following a offline to online strategy is only because of declining growth in the e-commerce industry is an overstatement. The idea is to provide interior designing consultancy and offer a holistic experience to the consumers for better decision making. Another reason for an offline presence is offering a platform for increasing brand credibility and cement its online business. Read more at https://theindianeconomist.com/online-offline-e-commerce-industry-declining/

Customers who have made purchases with a business once, make up a significant chunk of customer database. The second purchase is a key milestone in the customer journey. Now, using data, certain areas should be focused on first time customers that can help to push these customers into their second purchase. They are:

• A varied basket – with items from multiple departments – doubles the chances that a customer will make a second purchase.

• By offering discounts.

• Returns predict a higher customer lifetime value.

Optimizing these above factors can attract many customers on a long term basis. Read more at http://www.optimove.com/blog/ecomm-using-data-push-customers-second-purchase

Artificial Intelligence is development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Therefore, AI can process a lot more data than human brain can, and thus can do more work accurately in less time. Along with data analysis AI can perform much more complex tasks such s determining customer preferences for products based on previous buying habits and understanding unstructured data. AI is augmenting the capabilities of human by solving such complex challenges. The importance of artificial intelligence can also be seen in healthcare industry for suggesting appropriate treatments for patients, fraud detection, financial services and retail. AI can be incorporated in business by using machine, deep and memory based learning which is AI’s core. Read more at: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/artificial-or-augmented-intelligence-talks-with-intel-s-chief

Core Banking Solution (CBS) is networking of branches, which enables customers to operate their accounts, and avail banking services from any branch of the Bank on CBS network, regardless of where he maintains his account. By regional analysis, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World, with North America generating the highest market share owing to higher technology implementation. Due to its capabilities to improve efficiency and better risk management, core banking solutions is growing rapidly. On the basis of solution segment, it offers better customer support service, provides single integrated platform to all the banking channels and lower operational cost, improves efficiency in streamlining process related to customer account management. Read more at: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/core-banking-solutions-market-analytical-insights-and-foresight

Data virtualisation can simplify data access and improve agility. Three uses of virtual data sources are: 1) Merger and Acquisition: Due to merger of data warehouses, OLTP systems are changed which causes the ETL jobs to break. This situation can be avoided by introducing virtual data sources between source OLTP systems and the data warehouse or between data warehouses and data marts, 2) Stabilizing data warehouse ETL processing, 3) Simplifying self-service data preparation for business users to access data across multiple data sources. In conclusion, virtual data sources are useful in practice because of its ability to de-couple physical data sources from ETL processing improve design and introduce governance. Read more at: http://www.datavirtualizationblog.com/overlooked-capability-data-virtualisation/

The last decade saw the massive growth of big data. During that time, all the technologies did not change but there have been a lot of transformations. Cloud analytics, uses a range of analytical tools to help companies extract information from a massive amount of data and present it in a form that is readily available via web browser, has become popular among the companies with the emerging new data sources. With the need to store and process big data, a whole constellation of open source software such as Hadoop emerged, which is used to store and do a basic processing on big data and is also cheaper than a data warehouse for similar volumes of data. Scripting languages like Hive, Pig, and Python along with many open source tools like Spark are gaining much popularity. Read more at: https://hbr.org/2017/06/how-analytics-has-changed-in-the-last-10-years-and-how-its-stayed-the-same

The world is entering the age of abundance, abundance of data. And with this, the age of intelligence is on its way. According to Eric Scht, the author of the original article, in today’s world, science and critical thinking really matter a lot. People are becoming wary of changes looking at the rate at which technological advancement is taking place. With the massive increase in data in almost every field, the need for artificial intelligence and machine learning is being felt in a broad range of sectors including farming, energy, fashion and healthcare. Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2017/jun/22/alphabets-eric-schmidt-google-artificial-intelligence-viva-technology-mckinsey

Slow innovation projects can be just as impact in the long-term. However, they are difficult for organizations to propose, prioritize, and fund. Their scope and pace often run counter to the rhythms of company goals. But there are tremendous benefits. If you’re patient and committed, slow-innovation projects could alert you to an idea, trend, or gap in the market that would have otherwise appeared to “happen overnight.” Some of the tips are:1) Claim your wins 2) Invest in relationship building internally 3) know that the best “slow innovation” work will happen outside your walls 4) Keep budgets lean 5) Don’t forget that seeing isn’t observing, and hearing isn’t listening 6) Be rigorous about fostering serendipity. Read more at: https://hbr.org/2017/06/the-benefits-of-taking-a-slower-approach-to-innovation

Five of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today derive much of their worth from their multi-sided platforms. Many MSPs are more valuable than companies in the same industries that provide only products or services. However, companies that weren’t born as platform businesses rarely realize that they can turn their offerings into one. And even if they do realize it, they often wander in the dark searching for a strategy to achieve this transformation. In this article, four specific ways in which products and services can be turned into platforms and examine the strategic advantages and pitfalls of each are laid out: (1) opening the door to third parties; (2) connecting customers; (3) connecting products to connect customers; and (4) becoming a supplier to a multi-sided platform. Read more at: https://hbr.org/2017/07/finding-the-platform-in-your-product

Microsoft is all set to infuse AI onto Raspberry Pi, a tiny device. They are working on systems that can run machine learning algorithms on microcontrollers as small as a speck of red pepper flake. If not totally tiny, there are devices such as sensors in the current scenario that can collect data and send it to machine learning models running in the cloud. However, the disadvantage of this is that the processing requires a lot of power in data crunching along with occupying a lot of storage space. This is where the team at Microsoft is playing a big role. The only hitch is to get neural network in as small as a breadcrumb sized micro controller. The entire research process is in line with Microsoft’s growing indulgence in the area of AI and machine learning. Read more at:  http://analyticsindiamag.com/making-tiny-bits-smart-infusing-ai-onto-raspberry-pi/

Antitrust, the underpinnings of which are based on industrial-age economic theories, needs new thinking in the digital age to ensure that antitrust policies continue to remain effective guardians of consumer welfare without inadvertently impeding economic progress. The coming battle in antitrust will not be about controlling markets in the traditional sense but about the battle for control over consumers’ information. The tech titans are currently in a race to see which of them can build a better digital replica of their consumers. Tomorrow’s monopolies won’t be able to be measured just by how much they sell us. They’ll be based on how much they know about us and how much better they can predict our behaviour than competitors. Read more at: https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-next-battle-in-antitrust-will-be-about-whether-one-company-knows-everything-about-you