Education, Enablement & Employment

Tata Tea’s socially targeted advertisements, Mahindra’s Rise initiative, and Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement – it’s really a delight to witness this wave of change. Chit-chats are transforming into actions; many social entrepreneurs have begun their journeys.

One of the most targeted sectors for such initiatives is Education. Individuals and organizations at different levels, in India and globally, are working at their respective capacities. Subodh Kumar Gupta, CMD Safal Solutions, is covering the rural streets of Bihar on cycle to explore the basic needs and real status of primary education. Azim Premji Foundation has initiated a `9000Cr. project to launch 1300 schools, two in each district, to impart free and quality education. Silicon Valley VCs are betting US$ 15 Million on free learning sites while World Economic Forum advocates educating the next wave of entrepreneurs to meet the global challenges of 21^st Century.

Each work is commendable and provides a gloomy picture similar to shortly passed India Shining Campaign.  As today, the complete nation is debating whether Anna Hazare’s movement for a strong Lokpal Bill will be able to eradicate corruption from India; no one can deny that it is one of the much needed steps that, if taken positively, will open many other doors in this direction. Similarly, social initiatives for basic and higher education are only the much needed preliminary steps.

When I visit the small towns and villages around my native place, under-graduates often ask me about the employment prospects after completing their colleges. The basic difference why rural people try more for competitive examinations such as government jobs, engineering, medicals and civil services, whereas urban people in metros do not do so at that scale, is the awareness and employment opportunities at their respective locations.

Devanik Shah, Fellow- Teach for India, has very rightly pointed out the real motives of parents sending their children to schools and why girls outnumber boys at such places. Many parents prefer that their children be bread-earners rather than study in schools; because these parents have no confidence that education will provide their children with surviving capabilities, forget about getting employment. The Economic Times on Friday, 9^th Dec 2011, painted a positive picture that job opportunities seem to be abundant in early 2012 as most of the sectors are gearing for hiring spree. As many as 5 lakhs jobs are being offered only by the state-run banks, despite the job cuts by private ones. What is also equally important to note is that 10.5 lakh candidates have already taken examinations for these jobs while 44 lakhs are awaiting their turn for common recruitment tests. 91% would still curse their fate.  

It’s easier said than done. We can paint a picture, boast of promises and win votes. What is more difficult is to build that confidence through real work at the grass-root level and click a picture of the real India Shining. People are more worried about survival. One cannot impose a decision of education when stomachs are hungry. Social leaders need to relate to people the way they can be accepted. Now, this becomes passive voice, rather than active voice. Along with education, we need to build more opportunities in agro-based industries, cottage industries, micro-finance, and related aspects where people can relate, accept and trust. I strongly feel there is an opportunity of mass employment generation similar to one that re-shaped China. No wonder, lots of work is being done by various Government agencies, public-private partnerships, NGOs and several SHGs. Corruption is eating a major pie there too and real transformation is still a distance away.

Bihar Calling ...

By now, Nitish Kumar with his seven member delegation including bureaucrats and representatives from Bihar Chamber of Commerce would be back from China visit. The delegation went to seek Chinese investments and JVs in tourism, infrastructure, trade and business. Innovative mantra and technology used by Chinese manufacturers to achieve quality at very competitive prices could be of use to Bihar. Dialogues on building infrastructure, efficient irrigation, methods to control floods, solar energy, tourism and Nalanda International University etc. can also open new avenues for the state.

With no major results from the CM’s previous foreign visits, Biharis have mixed expectations. It shouldn’t be surprising if a common man doesn’t understand the complexities and cycle time required in business discussions of this stature. However, whether or not this visit fetches any positive results, China can always be positioned as an example to catapult the growth of Bihar.

China pulls one percent of its population out of agriculture every year and puts them into construction and manufacturing (N R Narayana Murthy : A Better India, A Better World). Attempts for such large scale job creation have not yet been made in India. Although one can argue that IT sector has seen such a boom, it was a gradual revolution that happened after the doors were opened to foreign investments in 1991.

Bihar has population of over hundred million (103,804,637 : Census of India 2011, Bihar - Provisional Population Total) but lacks good human capital which is very much necessary for economic growth and prosperity. Majority of population is involved in agro-based livelihood. When patriarchal legacies couldn’t suffice to the growing family needs, people started fleeing to other states in search of livelihood. With one less earning member at the native, the families were still able to manage roughly the same income. In general, if a family of five working members can earn the same with four of them, can one person be pulled out for more skillful work? Will the fifth person look for options outside the state if there is an opportunity nearby?

The biggest question is – How to create this opportunity? How to produce a ‘Good Human Capital’, a population equipped with the skills and resources to participate in the economy?

Global organizations are funding the Government projects. NABARD, Jeevika and many more are working with SHGs at the grass root levels. The limitation is that each one is thinking in the traditional ways and innovative methods of effective livelihood promotion are yet to be discovered. Agriculture, horticulture, poultry, animal husbandry, tasar, handicrafts, handlooms and tourism are some of the most sought after areas. Organic farming is another futuristic vision.

Can the Chinese model be replicated to promote manufacturing in the state? Can the huge investments in skill development be channelized towards promoting manufacturing SMBs? Can the markets for these products be rapidly expanded beyond state and national boundaries? Seems unrealistic in the first thought, yet has practical possibilities.

Bihar has the lowest annual per capita income (`16,119 - The Economic Times, 9th March 2011) and provides the most economic labor force. Access to latest and global technology is not limited. Government is trying hard to attract investments. Law and order is gradually improving. Infrastructure has become a major thrust area. The impact of FDI in multi-channel retail is going to organize technology, logistics and services in tier-II and tier-III cities and towns. Finding the best market globally is no more that challenging.

This is merely an attempt to ignite a spark for those who have left Bihar and are thriving globally. More than your presence in the state, your thoughts from your global experiences can make a big difference. Guys!!! Do comment and share ideas, howsoever foolish they might appear in your senses. More important, if you feel it is worth, share this link with your friends & family, in person or through social media. Just click on any of these sharing links below.

Business Centricity : IT Balance

Continued from my previous article "Insights - Below the line"

Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, Aviation etc. are some of the industries that thrive on huge volume of customers. Customer interaction channels – ERP/CRM Systems, Social Media and Online Systems etc. – provide ample data to understand various facets of customer behaviour. Vast data is analysed for personalized engagement with individual customers. Each customer interaction provides an opportunity to influence buying behaviour, churn and decisions that affect profitability. One who takes the lead is the organisation that can extract data driven insights faster, react faster than its competition while providing its customers with personalized experiences.

If market share or leadership position has any values for a company, can business wait for a report from the IT team? In case a critical report is delayed, can a blame-game between business and IT be avoided? Should the insight driven tactical decisions remain only in the hands of few – the senior management? Can analytics accelerate the operational processes? Is technical knowledge a mandate for career growth in this tech-savvy era? Accept it or not, these are some the questions people and companies are discussing today.

Unlike traditional BI in which the focus primarily used to be on ‘What happened?’, analytics is now focusing on ‘What will happen?’ and ‘What needs to be done to make it happen?’. The other fundamental shift is how the decision making insights are being perceived. BI used to facilitate senior management to make strategic or tactical decisions. Analytics is helping more into operational activities, empowering executives and mid management to take decisions. Also, it smoothens and speeds up the operational activities.

Analytics empowers business users to directly interact with data as they follow their instincts in uncovering customer behaviour embedded in transactions. Operational insights related to customer profiling, segmentation, predictive modelling, campaign management and ad-hoc analysis can be retrieved on the fly, in minutes or seconds, without any need of sophisticated programming, technical or SQL related knowledge. Users can assess selection and segmentation strategies by creating actual counts using easily manageable wide range of customized and complex marketing selection criteria rather than estimates. Insights are supported by charts, grids, Venn diagrams and variety of other data visualization tools with formatting & drill-down options. The results of analyses can be integrated directly into business processes like campaign management. Cause and effect of business activities can be understood to improve the planning and execution of marketing programs.

As users or marketers do right customer profiling and segmentation, they shift from mass marketing to more engaging conversations with individual customers. Customer Centric marketing leads to determining the right campaign per customer instead of the right customer per campaign. Speed and flexibility enable ad hoc, ‘train of thought’ analysis of anything against anything.  Users learn more about their business on their terms and in their time frame, reducing the overall cost of analysis. This ultimately results in increased sales; both up-sale and cross-sale, through the ability to run campaigns more frequently and with a higher degree of precision.

Paradigm is shifting. Technology is getting more business centric. Users, having business understanding and little common sense but no programming skills, are now able to use technology with ease. Dependence on IT is reducing. Can we do away with IT? Certainly not!!!

IT is the creator of these applications. Updates, patches, maintenance and administration etc. are some of the services we cannot do away with. For any BI or Analytical application, integration with multiple source systems, data loading, data cleansing, master data management and reporting through one or more applications are always going to be handled by IT teams. It’s the fine balance between IT and business that’s going to run a successful show. The question is, how do you define the fine balance between Business & IT?

Insights – Below the line

Marketing has traditionally been perceived as a cost centre and defining an optimum marketing spend has never been that easy. Big companies spend huge on brand promotions or ATL activities. BTL managers are usually under pressure to justify ROI from each penny spent. The fact that BTL activities also promote the brand is very often ignored and all you have to answer is the sales that result. Does marketing remain a cost center in true sense?

With experience, intuitions usually drive our judgments. Can technology be leveraged to derive an informed decision? Would better prospecting or understanding of customer segments, behavioral analysis, socioeconomic status, spending pattern, demographics, etc. help in turning customer’s footfall into sales? Can this insight aid in personalizing the campaign instead of keeping it open to masses? Will this personalization help in better engaging with the customer? What level of personalization can be achieved if we are targeting a huge customer mass? Will the response drive numbers? Let us look into these subjects a little more.

When we engage in any conversation, we listen to the other side. We learn from the inputs and understand the context. Then we speak in relevance with the context. The fundamentals always remain the same whether this engagement is with a friend or a customer. In an institutional scenario in which a company attempts to engage with its customers, the engagement persona from Alterian seems highly effective.

Listen:- Collect data from across customer interaction channels, monitor them and convert the data into useful information.

Learn:- Apply analytics to multi-channel customer data, derive intelligent insights and compile customer segments.

Understand:- Design a focused campaign which customers can relate to. Leverage insights to personalize the content and messaging.

Speak:- Deploy relevant interactions across the appropriate channels with the right content at the right time.

Listening is an attempt to gather data about mass customer universe from across the channels. A customer buying ‘X’ with ‘Y’, redeeming coupon or reward points, commenting on Facebook, criticizing on Twitter, writing a review in blogs, recommending a colleague, making a payment, asking for home loan, requesting an EMI for a transaction, defaulting a credit card payment, lapsing an insurance policy, flying a business class or anything that provides data that can be monitored and converted into useful information is a listening form.

Neither are two finger prints same nor are two customers. If a company is engaged with millions of customers, it is never likely that one offering will appeal all. Each customer is unique and thus has unique demands. However based on certain traits, customers with some similarity can be grouped as segments. Adequate customer data provides an opportunity to analyze insights about customer segments. Target segments can very effectively help in doing a up-sale or a cross-sale. For e.g. a set of customers in banking industry who, without fail, have paid home loan installments on time for last one year but do not own a car can be approached for a car loan. A set of customers who hold a current account but do not have a credit card provide an opportunity for credit card sale. Those customers who have shown a spike in their buying pattern may be the target for personal loans.  

Personalizing the contents on one to one basis builds a foundation for effective customer engagements and retaining loyal customers. Analytics integrated with campaign management solutions can build personalized contents that no way look like a mass message. Wouldn’t you feel happy if your bank sends you a personalized happy anniversary message with a discount offer in a multi-cuisine luxury restaurant and also offers to book a table for two if you confirm?

Not all day are happy days. Recently at one of the marketing seminars I attended, Dr. Batra was much talked about for his SMS campaign. Had I been bald, his SMS would have been of interest to me. Though he is spreading his awareness through his campaign, would bombarding a flood of irrelevant messages be termed a positive effect? In my personal experience, I stopped using a credit card from a major bank because I was frustrated by the number of calls I received from their customer care either for a balance transfer or for a loan on EMI.

A right content, at a right time, through a right medium is effective way to boost your sales.  Technology has now transformed mass marketing procedures to effective personalized experiences. A customer can be made to feel these personalized experiences either through emails, SMS or snail mails. Now a day Bluetooth enabled campaigns are effective in mall premises. Contents engaging with a target segment customers can be put on identified places whether inside a store, on the streets or on social media as well. Once you have the customer insight, you are free to apply innovative ideas to attract or retain him.

No wonder these analysis also lead to insights about customer churn and fraud possibilities. Banking, Securities and Insurance industries are very much sensitive to market conditions, inflation rates, currency fluctuations and global economic scenarios etc. See the last quarter's results and you find bad loans and pensioners forced the country's largest bank, State Bank of India, a 99% decline in net profits. Could we forget the recession effect on global banking majors? Identifying risks and managing exposures are very much critical to organization’s profitability. An attempt to identify the segments which are likely to churn or default and drive a retention campaign not only mitigates such risks, though partially, but also helps in making balance sheets look better.

In spite of all these discussed, the critical success factor for a banking organization, or for that matter any industry having huge customer data, lies in its ability on how fast can it assess these insights and respond faster than its competition. Can the organization afford any delay due to its dependency on IT? Isn’t the technology expected to favor the end users? I shall attempt to discuss this in my next blog. To deep dive into such matters and to find an effective solution in customer engagements, I am available at Rakesh.Ranjan@alterian.in .

Hazare : Khwaish Aisi...

Reading a tweet from a well known and responsible senior journalist made me think deeper into the less ordinary life of the so-called middle class hero whose selfless service elevates his stature above that of an ordinary man. While it is unanimously accepted that India needs educated leaders to lead the country, when a responsible, learned and worthy person advocates that media will do disservice by showing Anna as a Mahatma, not only the traits of the leader who unified the country for a noble common cause are questioned but the middle class fraternity is also sympathized for ever remaining the same merciful middle class.

Apart from Cricket or perhaps a New Year celebration, any other joyful occasion when India is truly unified, irrespective of demographical, geographical or communal bias, is hard to find. Unlike political rallies in which people camouflage as volunteers either for free meals or for some induced causes, multiple rallies across the nation supporting Anna witnessed true volunteers with causes of their own. Corruption in India has become so pervasive that its tentacles have grappled even the most revered institutions. It has seeped into the social culture and is affecting umpteen masses. No wonder Rajiv Gandhi once bemoaned that ‘Out of every 100 crore allocated to an anti-poverty project only Rs 15 crore reach the people. The remainder is gabbled up by middlemen, power brokers, contractors, and the corrupt’.

While people talk about corruption reaching monstrous dimensions among public servants, individuals are no less different. Recall Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parikh and now the case of Hasan Ali, the examples are only those few who couldn’t cope with lying below the surface. The more recent 2G scam appears as Public-Private Partnership. Corruption is not only a powerful inhibitor to economic progress of the country but also a moral issue which if addressed maturely will ease the economic prosperity and might also help in narrowing the rich and the poor divide. The stand that Anna has taken and the conviction that he has shown in his endeavors have aroused the nation leading to a new movement. People, media, bureaucrats, politicians and many more have positively acknowledged both Anna and his movement. If the motive is that imposing, the person behind needs an hats off and no surprises if some compare him with more notable personalities whom the history has witnessed.

Campaigning for a bill is only a fledgling step into a mass movement. True success cannot be ensured until the Indian mindset accepts it as a moral responsibility not to indulge in any act of bribe irrespective of its magnitude. This is something very difficult to accomplish. However, well begun is half done. Anna’s power to mobilize the public may partially be accounted to impactful digital social media. The more prominent factor that has propelled Anna to marshal the nation for various social causes, frighten the power goons and shake the government, is perhaps because he has nobody in his family to cry for him. Otherwise, a plebeian is more concerned about his family, his daily wages and thus by choice opts out of contributing to these social causes. Nevertheless, it is the plebeian who either suffers the most from corruption or indirectly contributes significantly in aiding this epidemic. Not to forget, the power of masses endures forever. Until the so called middle class or a common service man bursts out of its cocoon and espouses Anna’s cause without condoning, the wishful success is still a distance away!!!