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Driving Employee Engagement with Chatbots – How Important?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

4 min read

A bot is a software backed application that can converse like humans either via text or text to speech to another individual on the other side, for information provision or clarify a query. Due to this conversational capability, bots are also known as conversational bot or chat(ter)bot or virtual agent (meaning a customer service agent) or smart agent or other similar names. Chatbots got developed to enhance human efficiency and to take care of routine or repetitive actions so that human’s precious time can be applied to do something more value-adding. In modern times, chatbots have gained popularity, more in customer service, and much less for enhancing internal efficiency.

We always opine that customer service is personal and needs a personal touch. If a chatbot is involved with a customer, maybe, we can finish it with a personal touch by way of chatbot transferring the conversation to a physical service agent. Similarly, if the chatbot can be applied to internal processes saving precious time of employees, employees have more time to indulge in customer conversation or create a good experience for customers. I strongly feel enterprises must first start using chatbots internally to improve efficiency rather than jumping to use it for customer service. All of us spend several minutes accessing information, either in search or navigating a series of menus in an ERP or eCommerce application or travel site. If we can save that time spent, we will have more time at our disposal to read or attend to more value-adding tasks. Employees are motivated as it takes lots of routine and mundane tasks out of their functions.

Let us imagine a situation of generating a customer outstanding aging report and mailing it to my boss for a forthcoming review meeting. I may spend between three to five minutes to accomplish this task, depending on the smartness of the ERP system that is in use. If I can indicate the same in a chat with a bot as “mail debtor aging report to the boss and me now,” it takes less than ten seconds for me to type. The time saving is enormous, and the task gets accomplished. Here the bot understands the debtor aging report, and looks for it in the report menu, understands my boss from the organization chart, runs the report, gets the report, and mails it to both. I can give my best each day by delegating my routine tasks to the bot and I can do more productive work. This new way of engaging makes me motivated to contribute to enterprise goals and success. I become an engaged employee ever working towards enhancing enterprise agility and growth.

While designing and developing our Retail Management System, Retail ViVA, we decided to internalize the chatbot for improving employee efficiency before using the bot for customer service. We got Tulsi, our chatbot trained on all twenty-six modules before embarking on training the bot for customer service. We could sense enhancement in employee engagement and productivity in a short period of two months. Employee satisfaction surveys also indicated a more robust engagement than before. Employees also loved the way they can get information on demand and that information being live without any lag.

Any employee would love time-saving methods. Employees feel empowered when they can get information on demand and feel motivated as well. Information on demand helps in their decision making and becomes a sound decision support system. Access to information and delivery success boosts their confidence to grow to the next level of the hierarchy and contribute to enterprise goals.

I recommend implementing a chatbot for internal systems first and then plan to implement for customer service. By getting used to the chatbot, employees can better articulate chatbot design for external customer service options, so that brand equity enhances.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

How to emotionally invoke employee Seeking System?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

4 min read

The Seeking System (SS) is one of the seven dominant emotional tendencies of the brain of every mammal and probably, the most fascinating one of the seven. The SS is the primary system that is responsible for creating the urge or motivation for our desires and survival. Primarily, SS helps us to nurture our motivation, urge to explore, and desire to understand. It is the first point of trigger for every mammal to reach out in an expectant mode. By activation of the SS, all mammals try to seek positive experiences. The SS is also called the science of motivation. If one can always invoke SS, one will perpetually discover knowledge out of sheer curiosity. The chemical Dopamine, play the pivot role of activating the SS, and is often referred to as the “motivational” or “feel good” chemical of the brain.

Every human has an active SS. Let us take the example of receiving a surprise gift. It is human tendency to open the gift and seek what is inside. The SS invokes the urge and expectation to know what is inside and motivates us to open the gift for understanding. Seeking urges one to look for places where resources are available. Every google search is a seeking system invoked, and we go and find a website that can provide us information to learn or study or discover.

Similarly, in the corporate world, structured ways can be created to invoke the SS in every employee. It can be during one’s day-to-day activities or as part of Learning & Development (L&D) or as part of group introspection or combination of them. Every attempt must invoke the element of surprise or curiosity to invoke the SS in an employee. Hence, it is essential that on the job SS can be created that links up to employee’s behaviour and advocates the right training with the extreme curiosity of looking forward to that. If it is linked to L&D, the curiosity and desire must be inter-locked to employee self-development, and self-motivation environment must be created to seek out. Whichever way we look at it, the Human Resource system must be capable of addressing this SS concept by inter-linking organizational process and results into creating the right curiosity and desire.

We live in a knowledge economy, and a learned employee is a gainful employee. Employers who care for creating the right launchpad for active learning is providing purposeful employment. In the knowledge economy, humans want to thrive in the seeking system permanently for perpetual improvement. In our company, we give utmost importance to invoking the SS. One question which dares and stares at us every year is what is that we have put into our employees by way of they seeking more than what they already tried and have in them. We have been very successful in our approach of self-development, and that is demonstrated in our four years of consecutive Great Place to Work certification.

The core to creating the SS is to have well designed Human Capital Management (HCM) Module with matured Learning & Development Module. HCM must take active and real-life business situations that circles around the employees and convert them as curious Seeking System opportunities for employees. If a customer rates an experience as poor or exceptional in a Retail environment, the whole sequence of operations that led to that rating must be converted into an opportunistic seeking system of improvement and curiosity to engage in discussions for betterment. If every single score can be motivated towards active seeking engagement, we can conclude that a successful SS is present. Primarily, situational learning must be initiated, and a loop must be created to actively invoke the SS to the desires of all motivated employees.

While designing the Retail ViVA, the flagship Retail Management System, we have kept a motivational seeking system as one of the ends and built it with an open architecture system for L&D. Any Seeking System must be flexible and configurable for creating surprise and curiosity. I am sure if Retailers can work towards creating the right environment for invoking the Seeking System, they can enjoy the benefit of motivational workforce desiring to achieve the ultimate success of customer satisfaction.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

The power of one is smarter than the pieces of many.?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

3 min read

Enterprise adopts Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products to digitize their operations. Some enterprises settle for one single ERP product which may cover most of their operational needs. Others may opt for multiple products that claim superiority for a specific function and integrate them using the integration method. The first is a single solution approach through a single vendor and in the second, it is a multi-solution approach using multi-vendors or using one system integrator to integrate and maintain them. With the cloud slowly becoming the norm, the single solution of multi-solution has taken the discussions to the next level of debate, as it may be possible to integrate solutions in a hybrid cloud environment. My understanding by way of consultation with several Chief Information Officers (CIO) indicates mixed reactions; for some, multi-solution is a win-win while for some others, it has become a nightmare.

Modern business applications come with connectors for external systems to draw and put data, thereby creating permanent connectivity between two different software systems. Application Programming Interface (API) or other similar interfaces help achieve interaction between multiple systems. However, when two systems interact, there is more exposure to security risk due to users using different connectivity and what is technically known as transport security. Further, cloud hosting has created another new concept known as a hybrid cloud where you connect with multiple systems residing in various clouds, also exposing to security risks. While one can mitigate these security risks through proper security protocols, a risk exposure remains even though mitigation measures are put in by way of encrypted transport protocols.

Let me take, for a moment, example of buying a new motor vehicle. We test-drive many and finally settle for one. We may like individual features of some but may not find all those loved features in the final one we decide. However, we settle for the final one only because it has the most features that we liked, while it certainly lacked few that also we loved. Similarly, in software products, the easiest way to avoid much of security risks, cost of integration, cost of unification and cost of attaining equilibrium in version update between different software is to opt for single solution.

But the future of software is drawing us to same conclusion. When NoCode platforms mature, users can create or add features of their choice to an existing software they use. If the software is built entirely on NoCode platforms, they can add whatever they need or desire. Time is not very far off when this becomes a reality and then, I am unable to see traction for corporate CIO to opt for multi-software combinations. It will be interesting to buy the one which has most features like the example of the motor vehicle above and add the features the enterprise desire using NoCode platforms.

Seeing this future trend, which is emerging, we built 16 of our 26 module Retail Management Software, “Retail ViVA” using NoCode platform of ours, giving absolute freedom for Citizen Users to add features of their choice or re-configure it as they like. If the platform is NoCode rather than LowCode, users can customise the solution to their specific needs under common corporate standards. If a Citizen User can model her/his needs by themselves, why do they need to opt for multi-products of speciality and take the hassles of combining them to one bundle? In the NoCode environments, self-modelling does not consume much time and one can quickly model and achieve desired results. As we mature into advanced NoCode platforms, users may rethink of moving away from specialist SaaS software products to one unified ERP product of their choice and cascade it up by themselves to their most needs. I strongly feel that NoCode platforms will change the landscape of cloud software and its subscription and see some significant disruptions coming along in the medium term of two to three years. Until then, it will be life as usual with multi-software thriving and gaining market share with their excellent specialized offerings. I opine a single solution approach is safe and secure and has long term sustainability so long the solution provider is credible, stable, and resilient.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Customer Financing: Will it convert those on the fence?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

4 min read

Customer Financing is a facility wherein customers choose a pre-defined payment plan options rather than paying the full price of a product upfront. Customers choose to pay in easy weekly or fortnightly or monthly installments. Customers get to use the product right away but pay in easy installments. Retailers promote customer financing as it helps to improve their sales. Simultaneously customers enjoy immediate use of the product while they pay in future.

Customers find products affordable when they can pay through a payment plan. Retailers, in turn, provided multiple financing plan options, so that customers can choose the plan that best suits their requirements. Customers are also able to plan small installment payments in their weekly or monthly pay checks, and their personal budgeting becomes much more comfortable and manageable.

Anyone who does customer financing, be it Retailer by themselves or through a third-party financier, takes the credit risk into its books. If the Retailer is financing, then it becomes a trade-off between increased sales versus delinquency that they need to handle for bad debts. Making Customer financing through third party finance has the benefit of increased sales while not taking any delinquency risk. However, the service and customer relationship are at the discretion of a third party, which might affect long term customer loyalty. One another smart way to handle this situation is for Retailers to finance customers by themselves to keep service and customer relationships at a high degree but securitize the receivables at the back end to reduce their credit risk.

While building Retail ViVA, the 26 modules integrated Retail Management System; we integrated a full-fledged Ready Finance module to provide Retailers the option to provide customer financing. The module covers score track, credit limit generation, credit disbursement, portfolio monitoring, re-aging, tele-caller follow-up, bailiff, repossession, and re-sale as an end-to-end credit management module. It also facilitates third-party financing and portfolio securitization as well. Giving the benefit of commencing customer financing any time is the key objective behind the incorporation of this relevant module into our Retail ERP product.

I have the first-hand experience of involving in over 200,000 customer financing accounts per annum for the last 20 years and have seen the dominant role customer financing plays to enhance sales. I have seen the ratio of customer financed sales nearing seventy percent and delinquency ratios well under two percent. Securitization is an ideal situation of double benefit where a Retailer builds strong loyalty by believing in customers to advance credit while simultaneously reducing the risk of delinquency. We have seen several customers availing repeat financing which demonstrates true customer loyalty. Customer financing pushes customers to Retailers rather than Retailers struggling to pull customers inward.

We are slowly moving to an era of subscription economy where every capital item or service is becoming a small monthly or yearly payment plan. In the new trend of capital spend turning to monthly service subscription, the Retailers providing customer payment plans will be the thoughtful winner and sustain long term customer loyalty.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Citizen Developer: Who is she & What she needs?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

5 min read

Gartner defines Citizen Developer as a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. I, instead, define it as a user who has software solution creation capabilities without indulging in code writing using non-technical platforms that help her develop or maintain software. The variation in the definition is the line drawn between LowCode and NoCode. These two are the significant contributions in recent years which not only help fasten software development but also help to avoid the misery triangle of often delayed IT solution development.

Traditionally, we have been following the concept of central IT department being the torchbearer of software development, and they become the intermediary broker between end-user who desire a systemic digital process and a software development firm that is capable of that digitization. However, in the whole process of ideation and exchange, several communication pollutions creep in leading to delays and imperfect output. While generalizing this aspect, there are also smart tools that create excellent collaboration capabilities across involved stakeholders, but still, more must be done for a user to feel satisfied that they have got precisely what they envisioned. The three-way communication and collaboration process are the misery triangle resulting in the output that is not to the expectation of the user who conceived the digitization.

The Generation Z employees are technology savvy but may not all be technically savvy to write code and fulfill their digitization needs by themselves. In the alternate, they can design solutions based on their needs due to their digital intimacy right from the early stage of their learning. They crave for something that can help design by themselves and invisibly code by themselves for their needs, without indulging in code writing. LowCode and NoCode platforms are born to serve this need and have become quite popular in the recent past. Every fortune 100 technology company is into the race of creating these platforms to capture this steeply increasing market need.

Most platforms today are mainly LowCode, wherein most development work is performed through non-code writing tool with final finishing touches done by a qualified code writer. LowCode method of development is agile and shortens the whole software development lifecycle to successful implementation. There is also NoCode platforms which can do one hundred percent of the work of software development and bring up solution in a ready-to-use form without a code writer writing a single line of code. In the LowCode, the pain of the misery triangle remains but at much-reduced level, while in NoCode, the freedom of self-service excels.

Modern enterprises need to be agile to succeed, and stakeholders demand quick actions, be it customers or vendors or employees or government or civil society. Primarily, they must be responsive to emerging needs and must be able to adapt and adopt quickly. NoCode platforms help enterprises to be agile and take to new situations as it comes without internal or external dependencies. However, this may not be accepted from the Corporate Governance perspective as it advocates central governance of common attributes and not distributed management at everyone’s discretion. The maturity of NoCode tools to centrally configure “must-have” or “cannot have” features, while giving flexibility for citizen(end) users to create their solutions may be the right answer to this dilemma of freedom versus control.

The world of software development is going to explode with NoCode development tools and make every user a citizen developer. The complexity of creating a user-friendly non-technical NoCode platform will be the challenge of repute code writers. I can see the shift from code writing for solutions to code writing for platforms or tools. Code writers need to enhance their skills to develop code on macro-level rather than micro-level development of specific processes or rules or situations.

Retail ViVA, our Retail Management system software, has 26 modules, and 16 of them are designed and developed using our NoCode platform known as “CodeSelfie.” Our agility to re-design or cater to a user request is so fast, and I can see our scalability to build better products. NoCode is the future of software development for citizen users and NoCode platform development is the future of code writers. NoCode is one other fantastic concept that keeps us on edges like AI, IoT, robotic automation, and blockchain. I firmly believe the future belongs to NoCode platform developers.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

The Journey of (native) Embedded Analytics: Why & Where is it today

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

5 Min read

Analytics is a systemic way of discovering data for aligned or non-aligned patterns and presenting it in a visualized manner that the human mind cannot miss the apparent trends that presentation is highlighting. The summarised highlights of data presented in charts and graphs pave the way for easy understanding. Analytics became popular right since accumulatio of business data coupled with the introduction of specialist analytics tools in the marketplace that claimed exclusive data discovery familiarity.

As these tools became popular, we noticed corporate houses performing various analytics for top management by way of relevant charts. This kindled human reaction to those visualization and thus was born data-driven decision making. Senior management makes strategic decisions based on data visualization presented to them. However, in the early days of these tools, the analytics visualization was restricted to senior management, and scarcely, the operational team had access to these analytics platforms. Dashboards were not used by the operational team, least to create it by themselves for their own data analytic needs. However, all the analytics were batch driven then, not providing helpful insights on a real-time basis. It is like the report card of our children which we get every quarter from the school to know what scores they have got and being blank until the end of the quarter to see how the child is progressing in studies.

With the advent of the Millennial and Gen Z workforce, the appetite for self-service and drive for making decisions on their own gained momentum. Their independent cum collaborative working styles required that they own their data, network about their thoughts on data analytics in close circles, and pursue actions from their consideration. Self-service analytics and on-demand analytics came into play to their advantage. On-demand analytics is not possible in batch mode, and the absence of embedded analytics was an apparent frustration to them. All the frontline analytics vendors rushed in to fill the gap with connectors that can export data almost in real-time to provide real-time analytics. Some created common platforms to connect reputed ERP, and other popular cloud software and others provided a generic model of configuring connectivity between systems to pull data almost instantaneously. The Embedded Analytics became the basic norm, not even as a unique feature beyond the primary offering.

However, still, the third-party embedded analytics had its limitations of not being fit for fast throughput online customer-facing data roll situations like stock market transactions or online revenue management systems or the like. Further, some of the online ERP systems cater to high volume eCommerce transactions, and embedded analytics fell short of configuring for alerts integrated with workflows linked to those transactions.

It is in this context, natively embedded analytics came in, developed natively by software product owners, not to miss even the split of seconds that is involved in the transfer of data to the third party data model and produce analytics based on such transferred data. Natively embedded analytics uses the same database rather than using another database replicated online from the central action database. Natively embedded analytics stands superior to third party embedded analytics. However, third party specialist embedded analytics were much superior in product features and performance being specialist products. The trade-off then was what to choose between embedded and natively embedded or hybrid of them. The natively embedded has the advantage of showcasing what-if situations as transactions are captured even before a transaction commit is made if situation demanding and warranting. While one may not do transaction-based analytics in an online manner, there may be situations that require predictive analytics for transactions in the offing. A natively embedded one has an edge to provide that instantly like an instant coffee.

While building Retail ViVA, our Retail Management ERP software, we developed a natively embedded analytics platform of our own so that users need not miss out on their abilities to use the analytics even for transaction-based decisions making. While the senior management may be involved in data-driven decision making, the operational team may be involved in transaction-based decision making. Further, a unified database used for analytics produces one truth which is core in corporate decision-making.

While embedded analytics war is on between various specialist business intelligence vendors, large ERP product vendors have created their own native embedded analytics given largeness and complexities of their data model. Who will win this war is an interesting question and time alone will answer? Whoever be it, the native has an edge, being really at the Edge. Maybe, a hybrid model may best fit to serve multi-purpose needs of modern growing retail enterprise.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Do engaged employees’ matter for excellent customer experience?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

3 Min Read

Engaged employees are those who emotionally connect to their work and performance goals. They perform beyond their call of duty to enhance their employer reputation and derive satisfaction. Engaged employees display a positive attitude towards work and always strive to provide the best in their delivery of work

Gartner defines customer experience as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.” Forrester Research defines customer experience as: “How customers perceive their interactions with your company.” Primarily, in a nutshell, customer experience refers to gatherings from interaction and consequent perception formed in the minds of customers. Customers form an opinion about the Brand in isolation and also compare it with the competition. If their view is superior to the one they have on competition, the positive experience gets established in the minds of the customer.

Let us, for a moment, think which channels are responsible for creating a better or bitter experience in the customer’s mind? It must be either digital or physical interactions or a combination of both. Whichever be the channel, it is the human mind that is behind the creation of both. In physical, human plays a predominant role in creating a pleasant experience. In digital, human indirectly plays the role of designing it for an enjoyable experience. When an employee is fully engaged and motivated to perform beyond his normally expected lines, she/he strives to create a good experience for the customer. The moot point to understand is how employee engagement drives creating an excellent customer experience

To have engaged employees, Retailers must have a robust Human Capital Management system, that is not only transparent but also fosters an open culture of exchange. In designing Retail ViVA, we kept these critical criteria in mind and integrated several tools that will foster collaboration, open communication, peer learning and trust creation. The modules and tool also indirectly bestow corporate cultural impartation.

Retailers need to create an environment that kindles employee engagement proactively. Driving engaged employees to pursue the mission of excellent customer experience becomes a simple self-derivative in the minds of every employee. Customers then start sensing a good feel at every touchpoint and start gaining positive experience. In conclusion, if a Retailer can create an atmosphere for employees to be engaged with the enterprise deeply, a sound foundation is laid for establishing excellent customer experience. I firmly believe that if we can take care of employee engagement first, they will, on their own, strive for creating an exceptional customer experience

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Retailers: Do you want to hire an attitude or skill?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

As human beings, we all have a unique attitude towards various things that we encounter. Attitude refers to the state of mind in different situations. Some people have a normalized attitude most times or change their attitudes depending on context or circumstances. Our attitude differs between person to person or place to place. It is about feeling or emotions about someone or something at that moment.

Skill relates to the application of a body of knowledge to perform an activity or a task. To execute an activity most proficiently, one must go through constant training to sharpen their skills. The speed and quality of output often measure one’s skills.

In the current experience economy, Retail employees are involved in constant interaction with customers. Else, they are involved in designing systems that Customer interacts digitally. Either way, customers must get a good feel of their interaction and it must leave a lasting experience in their minds. Customers then revisit in expectation of another good experience and so on.

Modern-day jobs are relationship and network-oriented and the thriving slogan of success is “People relate to People.” Any relationship can only thrive if attitudes are positive and soothing to fast forward further and build a strong bond of lasting value. Thus, attitudes become so essential and relevant for retail jobs as most often, all employees deal with customers directly in some form or other.

It may be easy to reskill a person or impart new skills absolutely from scratch, but it may not always be probable to change the attitude of a person in the near or medium term. People change their attitudes through constant persuasion or by experiencing negative results toward their current attitudes. Hence, it may often be challenging to re-attitude a person immediately in the near or medium-term and make him believe entirely in new behaviours.

In my personal experience, we changed strategies five years back to focus on attitude while hiring rather than skills. We imparted skills after hiring through the perpetual learning and development process in the public accounting firm that I am involved in. We saw dramatic positive results and to our surprise, three of our associates ranked among the top twenty ranks in the public accountant final examination two attempts back. One more dramatic effect that we noticed is that all our associates pass the examination, which has a low pass percentage of less than 10 percent at the national level.

While developing Retail ViVA, the 26 module Retail Management System, we have kept both factors in mind and designed robust Learning and Development module to skill and re-skill employees while also providing a collaborative working approach to improve attitudes or draw inspiration from employees who echo positive attitudes all the time.

In conclusion, I will weigh more on attitude while hiring rather than betting on skills. My experience has been that attitudes are slow to change while skills are fast to impart.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Retailers: Do you see your daily trading performance?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

3 min read

Reports and analytics give us the pulse of any business. In the case of Retail, it is even more important due to the permanent nature of promotions and offers to attract customers. Once we have the right data, a Retailer can make well-informed decisions to make the right offers, design the right promotions, and stock-up the right products to match promotions. Finally, the bottom line in terms of dollars is the real retail business health check.

Retailers use various reports to engage in discussions with operating teams and chalk out plans for improvement. Reports not only help to analyze business performance but also improve the team’s performance. In Retail, one must review Daily Trading Performance, Weekly Trading Performance and Monthly Trading Performance. These three reports, if structured well, can give the essential performance details, and point towards improvement actions.

Trading performance reports are generally clustered with several columns and numbers. Whatever way a report is designed, following top 5 must reflect in clear terms to any conventional or modern reader

1. How many winning categories

2. How many losing categories

3. Gross Margin

4. How many winning stores

5. How many losing stores

Retail trading performance reports must be done in short sprints and measure category, shop, and margins. The short sprint review helps to make some quick decisions and improve performance on a continuous improvement basis. The trading reports may have a comparison to yesterday’s performance, till date performance of that week, till date performance of that month, till year performance, all of the above compared with a similar period of last year. The comparative trading of today’s to the previous day or this week to last week or this week to the same week of the past year sometimes posts the problem of the number of trading days being not the same due to holidays or extended trading hours. While comparing, necessary adjustments must be made in the previous comparative period to reflect the right comparison. Automation of this adjustment is vital as otherwise; one will get down to spreadsheets to make manual corrections and adjustments.

It will be useful to showcase the top 5 indicators with differentiated visualization so that it grabs attention instantly. One can present information in charts or tables, as per the digital literacy of the Retail enterprise. However, a picture can tell a thousand words and it will be useful to convert them into smart charts that can package five different information without clustering and bringing out essential indicators or insights with clarity as well. Various colour codes can be used to differentiate information so that no one misses review of the critical ones.

Keeping the importance of these three reports, Retail ViVA has got matured reporting formats, perfected over the last 14 years of usage by our clients. Our dashboards also reflect these in single charts without clustering so that users get it at a glance.

If these critical reports are designed well, Retailers can spend less time getting to understand the significant positive and negative drivers and change course to correct them. If the reports are overwhelmed with lots of information, top divergent indicators may get buried and may go actionless. Simple design with all essential information, enhanced decision making and achieving business growth should be the motto of every modern Retailer. On the contrary, an ill-structured report will not only waste management time but also prove to be ineffective for decision making. Hence, Retailers must focus on designing their performance reports with the utmost attention.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

New Hire Digital Onboarding: Can it give the personal touch?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

4 min read

Nowadays, quite often we find new hires going through digital onboarding on their first day, all by themselves. Hitherto, Companies chose a specific day as new hires joining day for HR resources to physically onboarding every new hire. With the advent of digital onboarding setting in, we have overcome this limitation

We are living in an experience economy, and we are also living in the digital economy. Experience is something that leaves you with memories of the past or which gives you great satisfaction during usage. Experience can also be about implicit trust and faith in something like a brand due to continuous good experience gained over time. But then, the experience can be gained from another person or digitally gained by using a gadget or website or a service on the web. As a universe, we seem to weigh good digital experience as equal as personal experiences, if one must conclude from the popularity of social media. Else, the least we conclude is that digital experience is becoming an acceptable norm in the absence of direct personal experience possible.

Companies that adopt digital on-boarding to their new hires must create them with experience as the backbone. They want their new hires to enjoy the digital experience and gain positive emotions, beliefs, and motivation for the purpose and people in the Company. New hires digital onboarding experience can also set the right motto of the company’s drive towards “Digital First & Digital Always,” right from day one. I have often advocated digital onboarding as a tool to know and gauge digital familiarity of new hires and chart a course of training needs for their improvements. After all, the world is turning digital, and if we cannot coach our employees to be exceptionally digitally savvy, we are not going to be strong in the marketplace.

An enterprise that is multi-location driven but has centralized human resource services have no choice but to adapt to digital on-boarding to take care of new hires joining at remote locations. This way, digital onboarding helps to break the geographical barriers. Some enterprises use digital onboarding as a smart HR tool to simplify the creation of employee profiles invisibly by the new hire themselves. Whatever be the reason an enterprise adopts, the moot point is whether it can create the same personal touch as doing a direct physical onboarding?

Let us, for a moment, look at theatre plays and movies as an analogy. While movies have outgrown as the best entertainment medium than theatre plays, all of us have been mentally adapting to proxy presence as something which we enjoy. In the film, dialogue, voice, and scenes create all the emotions. Akin to this, if the digital content can be engaging with good narratives, a soulful voice with good moderation and an elegant portrayal of enterprise core values and other content that is relevant to onboarding, it is possible to achieve the same impact like a physical onboarding.

While there is no doubt that human-to-human contact is superior to anything pseudo, the digital is not too far in catching up with its innovations of delivery. But if you desire strong standardization in your delivery of new hire onboarding experience, I ought to advocate that digital is the best medium to adopt.

When we designed Retail ViVA, we gave the utmost thrust to digital onboarding as creating the best first impression. Hence, we developed a flexible, fully digital onboarding module, that a citizen user can create and configure.

Digital acceptance is more than ever now, and possibly, COVID-19 has accelerated its adoption across generations by default. With the remote workforce growing and becoming a new-normal, digital onboarding is the way to go and considered normal-normal rather than new normal.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

The success of Retail Retailing is in the real tail?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

4 min read

The 21st century Retailing has moved beyond Brick & Mortar to omnichannel mode since the internet, digital infrastructure, and mobile phones propelled at the hands of consumers. The Digital Era allowed Retailers to closely tail (follow) their customer’s digital movements and thus understand their choices and preferences. As a second step, Customers got inducement offers to convert their preferences to buying choice, either online or at a shop, thereby converting an aspiration into real commerce. Some consumers, in this journey of induced buying, made wise choices of fulfilling their dreams, while others made an impulsive choice of buying, only to repent later

The art of tailing a customer closely emerged as a 21st-century practice amid digital traceability, privacy, personal data concerns, and security. However, since data is the new oil, every data of real or potential customers was crunched, and several dots connected to understand the customer’s mind and thinking. The creation of personalized choices of offers or promotions was easy then and targeted against a specific customer of choice, inducing them to make the buying choice.

While data collection and privacy are the hot debate on the questionable side, customization, or personalization is the welcome development from the customer experience angle. Personalization made customer jobs easy in most cases, saving good amount of time for the customer. Predictable models of “what next” for a customer’s desires got developed and probably, made customer decision-making easier of curated choices presented. While customer derived value out of personalization, Retailers derived benefit of knowing customer behaviour and predicting their next behaviour or sometimes influencing their future behaviour to their advantage.

Retailing is the business of fulfilling customer demand for goods through multiple channels of customer convenience and often giving the customer similar or same experience across those channels. However, modern retail places more reliance on digital, and thus data becomes the backbone of every decision-making. Modern Retail ERP software is omnichannel ready and can present a 360-degree view of customer data combining customer actions across the various channel, including customer non-actions

Retail ViVA, our retail ERP, comes with embedded e-commerce and m-commerce modules along with digital marketing tool that can tail digital customer behaviour in Retailer’s eco-system and creates a personalized offer or promotion targeted at that customer without any privacy intrusion automatically. This personalization is the key to the conversion of a customer’s desire to demand to successful sale.

Tailing (following) consumers give us data, and data give us options. Options give us thoughts for customized content and content connects with customers. Customers make a choice, and more data gets generated. Thus, the cycle goes on to target customers again and again with personalization

We have slowly moved to a Customer Experience economy, and thus personalized offers become most critical to creating the best of customer experience. The more personalized a Retailer can target its customers; the more customer experience gets created and more positive buying actions get triggered by the customers. With more digital and more data, this is sure to scale to newer heights in the years to come!

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Day-to-day operational decision-making in Retail: Automate or Systemize or Simplify?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

3 min read

Decision-making is a process of our brain, helping us to choose one of the several alternate options available to us while considering an action. In our decision-making process, we may realize soon that we made a wrong decision and our brain then understands and self-learns not to make that decision again due to prior bad experience. We as humans, have self-learning capabilities, thus.

In busy business enterprises like Retail, where customers come in and go, and transactions happen every second and minutes, there are interactions between customers and operating employees. Some of these interactions may involve some decision-making for the disposal of customer requests. There could also be decisions concerning supply chain, employee matters, governance matters or be it any functional matters that affect a Retail enterprise. Most employees, be it junior or senior management, are involved in day-to-day decision making to discharge their duties. Some of them could be critical that we just can’t go wrong even once

If you digitize your operations, we can lessen the human decision-making process to a greater extent. We can attempt automation in three different ways:

1. Complete Automation: The whole business process is automated, and any involved decision-making is codified for the automation to make it as per logical business rules. This means there are fixed combinations that are codified, and so long situation falls into one of those codified ones, the decision is automatically made and transactions processed

2. Systemize processes: This involves systemizing the procedures to operate consistently that every time it happens, it happens in the same manner. Also, whenever it happens, wherever it occurs and whoever handles it, it occurs in the same way. We hear examples of the systems and standards being uniform across McDonald’s and customer experience being the same all across the world. The decision making here is codified by way of motions and methods and thrust is given to training resources in a manner until they get to operate in a set manner

3. Simplification of processes: Another method that can be considered is the simplification of operations in such a way that decision making is simple and there are no myriads of combinations that may merit consideration, limiting considerations to fix few. Simplification is complexity as much as one needs to understand and reduce unwanted options and prioritize just the most important ones

In digital transformation, Retailers need to ask which method to adopt for different processes. Some may be suitable for complete automation without human intervention, some may be systemized for consistency and experience and some may have to be simplified to realize time and efficiency. If digital transformation is attempted as a simple automation of processes as it is, it is pouring old wine in a new bottle

While designing Retail ViVA, we have cherry-picked each of the business processes to map where it would best fit keeping experience, control and efficiency in mind and have either automated it or systemized it or simplified it.

A good Retail Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product is one that blends all the above decision-making varieties and more so, gives the flexibility to change as times change. Responsiveness is so vital that Retailers must be agile and need not be left with something that was designed rigidly. Every Retail enterprise, to survive the new generation of business models, must be sharp, agile, and responsive to new “normal.” Their ERP products also must be responsive and self-configurable to change as demand arises and operate with efficiency.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Customers: Moving from Relationship to True Loyalty

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Customer Relationship is a process of establishing long term connections with your customers. Retailers must be able to make their customers come back to them often because of the strong relationship built. Customers reward Retailers with repeat buying in case the relationship is satisfying for them.

Customer loyalty refers to strong patronage to a single brand of products or services that a customer gets affiliated to, irrespective of significant noise about competition circling her/him. The critical point to note here is about not being influenced to switch to another brand or service. The loyalty is so strong that it is a deep commitment to re-patronize consistently

In my example, when I need to do international travel, I just lead to Emirates to book my tickets without even looking at what prices other airlines are offering. I do not get motivated to browse umpteen travel sites that provide a price comparison of various operators. Beyond just mere loyalty, this is genuinely blending your confidence onto a brand implicitly

In a Customer Relationship journey, the first step is to build a relationship with customers and then convert them to true loyalty status. To move Customers from relationship to loyalty, customization, and personalization come into play from the service provider angle. In return, the Customer becomes the brand ambassador to others, echoing brand uniqueness time and again.

Relationships are benefits that a customer enjoys over and above the product or service, she/he acquires and views it as her/his personal gain for being a regular customer. When such a relationship attains a solidarity position where he is unattracted to switch loyalties, she/he turns into a truly loyal customer. As the customer reaches true loyalty status, her/his perceived demand would be to get special treatment. If a brand can satisfy that aspiration of a truly loyal customer, the longevity gets further strengthened, and a solid bond gets established. This unshakeable bond makes the customer own the brand as if it is her/his own and fight for righteous demand if things are seen not being up to the regularly experienced brand status

Another critical aspect that merits attention in the Customer journey from relationship to true loyalty is constant communication from the brand to build trust. Two-way communication can enhance trust and lead ways to understand the customer better, further leading way to personalization.

In designing Retail ViVA, this vital aspect of two-way communication and personalization is integrated into our Customer Relationship Module (CRM) design since being so essential to build customer loyalty. A well-conceived CRM module is so vital to convert customer relationships to true loyalty

Every customer you acquire goes through a journey from being just a customer simpliciter to relationship customer to true loyal customer. While customer goes through this journey based on trust, experience, and perceptions, it is Retailers who need to work to enable such trust, experience, and sound perceptions. To conclude, the Retailer must give utmost importance to enhancing the relationship with customers to true loyalty.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Strategy: From Top Floor to Shop Floor: Is it really communicated?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

A strategic plan is one that helps a corporate to navigate from its current Mission to envisioned Vision of the future. The strategic planning process is a long-term thinking exercise, broken down into short term and long-term tactics aligned with corporate culture and values. While the strategic planning happens at some level in Retail organizations, very few organizations can draw a process forward for its articulation across the length and breadth of their organization. If the strategy can’t be communicated to everyone, the time and money spent on the strategic planning exercise just goes waste. One Harvard Business Review study found that 95% of employees at most midsize to large companies don’t understand the strategy of the Company. Lack of communication is the primarily reason for this 

Most corporates do not have a smooth and fulfilling workplace communication method. Whoever sets the strategic plan, they do not have a credible communication channel or mechanism to communicate that down the line. The remote workforce does not get the context of strategic planning and is far from owning, involving and executing it. Finally, the strategic plan ends up in a spreadsheet and the creators’ update and analyze it periodically, without any informed participation by all in the organization 

One must examine the questions as to how a strategic plan will get aligned to the Mission and Vision of a corporate and how does the plan get integrated into the day-to-day works of every employee in Retail organization. After all, several critical components of a strategy get executed at the bottom of the pyramid in any organization. A corporate must drill down its strategic plan to levels of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and attach to various associates linked to their functions. While doing so, they must inter-align the larger picture of Mission and Vision to every KPI through which associates can gauge how their KPI achievement contributes ultimately to the Vision of a Corporate. This will not only help associates to know about the Vision but also develop a pride of having committed to the Vision of Corporate that she/he works. This pride will ultimately enhance engagement and long-term loyalty 

In building Retail ViVA, we created our Strategy module that links the Mission, Vision, Values, Strategic Plan, KPI and employee wise performance in a seamless manner that everyone is on the same page and aligns with that one purpose. It helps to achieve the ultimate corporate purpose of what is good for my company should be good for me as well and makes employees commit to the strategic plan with a sound understanding 

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Is your Retail ERP system designed to provide Unified Commerce capability?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Retail has evolved over the years. I have vivid memories of going to a store to buy things along with my mother. In the late 90s, I first encountered online shopping (web) in one of my foreign trips and had my first experience of web shopping. It was not that much fun then but still was an innovation that I could shop very distanced from the store. Then in 2008, Apple created its APP Store, and slowly from there, mobile application development started. I recollect reading in 2012 about the popularity of mobile applications for the first time, more than web and more usage of mobile apps for online purposes. We have seen three channels of trade in Retail, the store, the web, and mobile.

As different channels emerged, companies that were running old and legacy ERP systems struggled to cope up to online and did patch systems to present online as a discrete web development, unintegrated to their legacy ERP systems. Soon CIO and business users realized that they are unable to provide unified customer experience across channels. Alongside with the proliferation of technology and its adoption by younger generations, customer experience as a “movement” started gaining momentum. Customers were demanding good experience and repeated their purchase, where they felt good experience was the norm.

Retailers, who felt happy that they are offering omnichannel experience, fell short of providing unified commerce. Unified commerce is about unifying all platforms as if it is a single platform, both in the front-end experience as well as the back-end ERP applications of a Retailer. Most Retailers failed to unify their back-end for omni channel capabilities. Most often, they had multiple administrators managing store, web, and mobile configurations of offers, promotions, and discounts. Contradictions in offers were visible due to time lag in configuration updates.

While designing our Retail ViVA ERP, we kept the critical maxim of single administration for all channels, be it physical store or web or mobile. What customers see is the same across channels as administration is unified for all.

Unified commerce-enabled systems also provide visibility of stock company-wide, analytics of customer behaviours channel-wise, and thus facilitates more understanding of the customer from Retailers’ point of view. Any personalization can’t be attempted without the above basics. It is personalization that enhances customer experience and thus enhances customer retention.

Don’t settle for just Omnichannel enablement in your ERP, settle for unified commerce, and single administration of all channels. That’s key to the success of enabling excellent customer experience!!

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Using AI for supporting contextually relevant and on-demand information

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Today’s business world is competitive, full of intelligent strategies to create new brand vibes and experiences. Strategic intentions require the weighing of various alternatives. Today’s data science algorithms facilitate data analytics, presentation, and visualization and thus become a sound decision support system. However, the challenge still lies in getting context-relevant information during the decision-making process. Even if the relevance is adequate, the question of intelligent information to decision-making on-demand comes next

When you are in the moment of strategic decision making, you often find that you are short of that one or two unanticipated critical relevant information to make the right decision. The pre-set analytics or data visualizations need to be re-drawn to another created moment aborting the current moment where a reasonable amount of time invested in making a decision. A second moment has its own warm-up time and thus, cumulatively, we spend more time to make the right and intelligent decision. Most corporate decisions are made not in one moment, and delay in decision-making is one of the most inefficient processes that pull down an organizational success. Unless you have context-relevant information on demand, you need another moment and another moment and so on.

Any information system should facilitate providing information to users as they demand so that all moments are fulfilling with full set of information to make the right decision. This way, you don’t need to anticipate a variety of information needs and prepare for it. The foundation information for the decision making can get prepared in advance, but all artifacts of information surrounding them should be accessible on demand.

To solve this problem, we built “Tulsi,” our AI-powered on-demand information bot, which then brings up information from our Retail ViVA database to the user’s command. In any moment of your meetings, you can get all contextual information to make your intelligent strategic decision.

A real on-demand information system is the one retailer look for today. Like a stitch in time saves nine, a decision in time may save hundreds of dollars! A modern Retail ERP system must have on-demand information provision for saving precious management time.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Tomorrow’s ERP will be those that empower Citizen Developers

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

We are just a day away to start a new 2020. 2020 is going to be a year where consumers of ERP systems (users) are going to demand more opportunities for self-development. They will be less likely to continue to accept rigid systems, multi-clicks to do one simple job, non-intuitive screen movements or data picks, or non-responsive systems.

Technology is transforming year after year, and we have seen some intuitive and beautiful technology showcases in simple applications. But when it comes to ERP, it is always the case of big, long, highly validated, and continuously synchronized screen captures with multi-woven approval flows. Younger users are demanding change and severe change. They want to be citizen developers to develop themselves as situation demands. They do not wish the central IT to control what they need, but would like to define, design, and demonstrate what they need by themselves.

Their needs are genuine, as businesses need to be responsive to market dynamics. And market dynamics are very fluid and fuzzy, due to strategic and competitive forces. Hence, the time to change is minimal. But young users are willing to strategize within limited time as situation demands but want the system to be an excellent companion to be able to adapt to dynamic changes.

ERP vendors have spent millions of years, developing several screens and process flows. Will 2020 change the dynamics of these persistent efforts being questioned? Can ERP vendors provide responsive systems where citizen developers can make changes by themselves in minutes or seconds and achieve their objectives? Will just an excellent user interface provide good user experiences in the future? Will the ability to change by themselves will topple all the other goodies that ERP vendors are offering today? Will the cloud be restrictive for citizen developers without having the flexibility to make design changes that they desperately need?

My prediction is that 2020 will start the revolution for ERP users to demand very dynamics solutions that they can interpret, re-design, re-deploy, and re-energize themselves. And by 2023, we will see all the ERP vendors, who have rigid screens built-in on the great maxim of best practices being questioned, being voted unhealthy from user needs perspective, and being rejected unwieldy from user needs perspective.

The best to survive are the ones who provide responsive solutions built on no-code frameworks, where every user becomes a citizen developer to define their own needs. They will make their own ERP playlist, like how they make their music playlists.

That’s precisely the reason that we have built most of our Retail ViVA ERP modules on no-code, intending to make it fully no-code in the next year to come. We want to celebrate the making of citizen developers soon, and we are striving hard to achieve that objective. I hope that I can update more positively on this during 2020, and on the eve of 2021 as well. Till then, it is all going to be making more for the citizen developers from Sathguru!

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Tetra: Brand identity

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Tetra, our embedded collaboration tool, auto-creates groups and thus facilitates seamless collaboration. The intelligent grouping which ERP does when creating new grouped collaboration threads is one of the hallmarks of our ERP embedded collaboration tool. The collaboration is so native that it understands the whole context of transactions to crate the right grouping and unify communication for effective decision making. The Tetra logo was designed by us to portray this unique intuitive communication and collaboration invisibly created by our ERP.

Tetra fishes school together in unison and instantly changes direction without colliding is always a sight to watch in any aquarium. They move so seamlessly as if they all have one single mind. In this unison approach, they never collide with each other. What a way they perform their act of schooling and moving. This marvellous piece of their movement is the inspiration of our logo and name of our collaboration tool.

Our Tetra favours one(same) way of thinking and one(same) way of doing and one(same) way of communicating. This one way of doing, without any collision of mind, favours utmost business collaboration and paves the way for grouped people to achieve that one purpose. In the 21st century designed flat organization structure, our Tetra facilitates all of them moving in unison as if there is one commandant, but they are more controlled as self-commandants in the same tandem to achieve that one purpose.

No one has ever figured out the complexity of how Tetra fishes move in unison without colliding, leaving the impressive unison movement as a treatise to your eyes. Similarly, our ERP handles the complexity of grouping or schooling relevant people to facilitate collaboration, making it simple and awesome to use and achieve the purpose.

Our Tetra is a pleasurable experience for every user, leaving all the complexity handling within Retail ViVA ERP. Enjoy the flow of our Tetra when you use our Retail ViVA ERP

Workflows: Defining process-person relationship

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Workflows in software help to define the route a process would follow and how exchanges (of data or governance or control) would happen. It primarily defines the process-person relationship and the process flow under a defined pathway. Workflows perform the most important function of sequencing, scheduling, and consummation of a transaction flow. It is generally customary for ERP software to have defined workflows.

Workflows can also be routed depending on conditional aspects, and thus, it can take multi-route depending on previous action results. Workflows help to prevent frauds, improve efficiency, and push action by people. Workflow can push things in an inbox or push an e-mail notification or push a notification in any collaboration software enterprise uses. A well-structured workflow provides visibility to know where the bottlenecks are, and who is overloaded with several workflow approvals. This analysis helps in improving process efficiency and thus improve process completion time with the aim of better customer satisfaction

Because of the dynamic business needs of modern enterprises, workflows often need to be tied to conditions that users want to impose. Workflow designs need to be flexible enough for users to add or delete conditions and point to the human resource hierarchy for escalations. Timeliness is a customer efficiency concept and workflows can monitor process time by triggering escalations for inordinate delays

In our Retail ViVA ERP, we have left workflow configuration at user levels with plain English like commands for conditional workflow definition. More intelligently, workflow understands human resource hierarchy and can point to better governance management. Workflows can be immediately triggered, scheduled in summary, or escalated push, and users will be able to configure them on their own, maintain them and achieve governance and regulatory compliances.

Does your ERP have a flexible workflow definition linked to the HR hierarchy?

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Do you want your Retail company to be one connected community driving towards the purpose?

Posted on by Ragunathan Kannan

Businesses run better when people are connected.  It is, even more, better when they connect to the relevant group to achieve a common purpose.  Companywide instant communication is becoming an important tool to leverage better and quicker results

Millennials today desire quick communication and feel very easy to connect with anyone to achieve their purpose.  Often, in an organization, we see silos of human hierarchy, which functions in a not so connected manner, frustrating the Millennials.  Instant communication tools have become the torchbearer to solve this important cultural issue and help businesses flourish.  After all, time lost is customer lost or profits lost.

If you are a dispersed organization by geographies, it is also important that we connect them closely to bridge the geographical distances.  The use of instant communication tools makes and feels everyone is connected, and distance gets buried.  You see an inclusive organization and inclusiveness is very important to drive that one purpose for which the organization is striving for.

There are external communication tools that organizations use to get this connected community culture in an organization.  What if it is embedded into your ERP auto triggering group communication for action and allow the community to address that instantly.  Rather than using a general instant collaboration tool, it is better to use an ERP embedded tools that senses and auto groups people to communicate, avoiding all the pollutive overload that these types of tools can create.  Get the alerts in-group community form, exchange ideas quickly by way of chat, act, and flourish is the norm these tools set, and it works, and it works to efficiency!

Social communication tools have become a habit for people in their personal lives, so will be corporate and ERP embedded communication tools as well.  Employees, who see them as one community through these tools, will want to use them, rather than seeing it as something they are forced to use.

We embedded our “Tetra” tool in our Retail ViVA ERP precisely for this reason so that the whole organization can see, feel and act as one community, driven to one purpose

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com