www.arcgate.com

The Leap Taker

As our founder Kunal Bagla shares his vision and thoughts on “The Leap Taker” series on CNBC on what makes us tick; we Arcgations can’t help but feel filled with pride of not only his accomplishments but the fact that we all work together – each day with passion – toward achieving such milestones. And about our founder, what can we say – his journey has been commendable to say the least.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs think it’s necessary to move to a bigger metropolitan city to make it big – particularly if that business is of IT and ITES services. However, in this modern age of entrepreneurship, location did not stop him from starting Arcgate in Udaipur and dreaming big! In fact, he used it to his advantage. He moved back from the US to start Arcgate, in Udaipur – his hometown, where he wanted to stay put and in doing so, he also created opportunities for young professionals who could now do what they love with the advantage of being closer to their families and in a city with a better quality of life (think less traffic, more parks, lesser commute time..).Although not everything has been hunky-dory in getting where we are today – as we all understand that recruiting is hard with a smaller population, but that did not stop him from following his heart – he honed his pitch to hire and recruit from the talent of pool of surrounding and neighboring cities as well. Our company in Udaipur – is a living example that it is possible to build a thriving company of 2000+ people in a location other than the likes of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram and all!

So here’s a big cheer to him and all of us! Keep dreaming and keep it movin’ as we like to call it.

The market and use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to grow exponentially over the next 18 to 24 months across all industries. Although it is already being used to make processes efficient in factories, logistics and information systems, most big opportunities have not yet been tapped.

Majority of industries are playing catch up to the recent technological advancements made possible due to AI. Food and beverage industry is also leveraging AI for profound transformations such as to improve food consumption, precision farming, personalized nutrition services, optimize operations, and deliver a better customer experience. For example, there are apps now, which act as a personal diet coach. Users have to simply log what they have eaten in order to get personalized nutritional advice and also to estimate the amount of calorie intake. An innovative approach to logistics with the use of AI technology can change the course of food delivery by scheduling deliveries, managing vendors and inventory, or paying bills; thus making every step in the workflow efficient and fast.

Predictive analytics and machine learning together can solve many issues and can make food delivery more efficient by forecasting preferred meals by location, or hour of the day, game seasons etc. AI in conjunction with data analysis techniques can increase efficiency, broaden the reach, make advance recommendations, help with new product development and improve consumer engagement. Companies are using machine learning algorithms to determine user’s ideal diet, along with speed and image recognition to estimate nutritional content of a meal from a photo; which in turn can help consumers save time while logging their meals. This will encourage users to quickly enter more data, and is more likely to track their behavior and analyze the invaluable data. It can help plan weekly meals according to dietary preferences, demonstrate cooking tutorials, supervise the pantry, organize shopping lists, and arrange grocery delivery.

AI, food databases and analysis combined together can help in chalking out tailor made nutritional patterns, and companies can compete to be more transparent, traceable and trustworthy in their delivery of healthier, more sustainable and more delicious foods. Technological advances have made on-demand food ordering possible and the industry is pivoting towards more innovative approaches in logistics to meet and exceed customer expectations seamlessly across multiple channels. Today vast quantities of data is generated in the food industry from numerous resources which includes data from point-of-sale transactions, staffing needs, restaurant reservations, delivery service records, managing vendors, inventory and paying bills. In the field of AI, more data equals better learning, which is precisely why startups are focusing on that. In fact, predictive analytics is an essential business technology and is critical to success in competitive markets. As a result, artificial intelligence is making its way into the food and beverage industry and it is vitally important for companies to consider how AI can work for them or risk being left behind. AI can help the industry tap into consumer sentiment to offer new products and services before the consumers even realize they need it.

Data is the Star of All Artificial Intelligence Technologies

Outsourcing: Opportunities & Challenges

Companies around the world have derived significant operational efficiencies and profitability due to the global labor force and the flattening of the world. Outsourcing is about sourcing talent from where it is best available, without being constrained by national boundaries.

Outsourcing has allowed companies to break down service and manufacturing activities into components, with each task performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. Several companies have mastered the art of orchestrating a global network of vendors to deliver high-quality products to its customers. In manufacturing, there are several examples such as Li & Fung, a company that specializes in global sourcing, that orchestrate a worldwide network of vendors to deliver high quality products to their customers. A product may be assembled in Texas, with components coming in from China, Japan and India.

The services business is new at this compared to manufacturing and is learning to modularize business processes. Unlike manufacturing, IT and Business Process Outsourcing involves information and interaction with people which makes it more personal and challenging.

Outsourcing Realities

Your odds of succeeding are about 50/50. With Information Technology sourcing, it’s worse. Of all IT deals, a staggering 80% don’t achieve desired results according to a study by Gartner. The reason behind this shocking failure rate is that sourcing is far from strategic. Companies jump into outsourcing without the experience and planning. They draft contracts with short-term goals.

However, if you do it right you will create a unique competitive advantage due to the signification cost savings and efficiency gains by outsourcing certain processes.

The typical sourcing lifecycle consists of four phases:

Outsourcing Strategy

Vendor Evaluation & Selection

Contract Negotiation

Engagement Management

The problem is that many companies focus excessively on the vendor selection process and getting the contract in place. They go into it without any strategy and don’t have a plan to manage the outsourcing relationship from an operations and tactical standpoint.

Start with Engagement Management

It’s important to get the operations and your plan right.

What are your expectations and goals for the project?

Define key metrics to measure success and ROI

Identify and allocate the resources with the required skills and experience from your team who will be assigned to the initiative.

Create a steering committee that will be responsible to take key decisions.

Identify a process to correct problems (you will run into issues!)

If you are exploring outsourcing, you must answer a fundamental question: What precisely do you expect to get out of it? You have to be clear on what you are trying to solve and how you will manage the process before you jump to outsourcing as a solution to save cost.

Outsourcing Strategy

Create a business case

Identify capabilities that your company wants

Define the precise business problem that needs to be solved

Identify the right mix between internal and external resources

Be aware of risks and ways to avoid common pitfalls

Create achievable and realistic metrics for measuring success

Make sure the strategy is based on long-term benefits and vision

Cost savings are useful for all companies. However, lower costs alone are not the true measure of success. You should use outsourcing to change a process or function in a fundamental way. Think more aggressively about what to outsource. Focus on the work, not where it is done or who does it. A well though out outsourcing roadmap will lead to better decisions. The right strategy can deliver tangible, measurable and predictable value that does more than reduce costs - it increases shareholder value. Most importantly, create a strategy with long terms goals in mind. Short-term benefits such as cost savings alone will result in a poorly thought out plan.

Good Advice - Talk to People

Get someone on your side who has been involved in outsourcing deals. The right advisor will know the price for the work and help you with the vendor selection process using a tried and tested methodology. This person can help you identify the right questions to ask and avoid common pitfalls. The advice should of course be independent and impartial. Good counsel can help you select the right outsourcing partner.

Explore – Meet Multiple Vendors

You should shop around when selecting your outsourcing partner. Competition is good. You will save money and get a contract that works in your favor. Negotiations and evaluations help you get clarity. Stay away from providers that promise to do everything under the sun. I feel that RFPs are a waste of time. Try to evaluate the vendor on qualifications, references and if you feel you will be able to trust them and build a relationship. Look out for how flexible the vendor is because things are never constant and you will need a partner that is open to change and quick to change direction if required.

Cost – The Right Price

Don’t automatically assume that the cheapest deal is the best one. Outsourcing deals are almost always pitched on the basis of cost savings. Clients tend to underestimate the ongoing cost of managing the relationship. Look for business benefits and new capabilities, not just cost shedding. Vendor expertise, collaboration, flexibility, trust, understanding and culture are more critical for success than a low price. Work to create relationships with trusted providers who understand your industry and put mutual interest before self-interest. You vendor relationship is an ongoing partnership and thus you have to ensure that both sides win over time. You deserve excellent service at a reasonable cost. At the same time vendors should make a profit and enjoy an open relationship with the client. While it is easy to find vendors that promise cost savings, it is much harder to find partners who can deliver on their promises. If the provider isn’t making money on your deal, service level will suffer as time goes by.

The Engagement

Describe the essentials of the deal in clear language and great detail. Outline all the functions that the Outsourcing Partner is expected to perform including roles and responsibilities. There is always a cost attached for extras. Build flexibility in the Statement of Work. Service Level Agreement (SLA) should be well structured.

Culture & Communication

Focus on “soft” skills such as communication so that you can motivate and coordinate team members from vastly different cultures. Teams from different cultures have different strengths and working methods, which must be matched to their assigned tasks. Formal requirements are no substitute for frequent communication, which is critical for resolving unanticipated problems.

It’s important to create an infrastructure - a set of tools and standards for sharing data - that allows dispersed teams to work together seamlessly. Failure to do so puts a project at risk. In 2006, Airbus revealed that its flagship A380 aircraft would be delayed two years, at a cost of billions of dollars, because partners’ use of different versions of design software resulted in 300 miles of wiring and 40,000 connectors that did not fit together. A company’s success is increasingly tied to its ability to orchestrate and integrate the efforts of hundreds of global partners.

People & Leadership

People are key to outsourcing success. Build a seamless team with multiple touch points and the right people. Get management involved. Assign the right people from your team to the project. Determine the roles people will need to play to make the relationship work. Identify the required competencies. Find an executive sponsor with vision and a solid general manager to take charge. Outsourcing provides an opportunity to do more - to hire ever-greater numbers of people with high levels of expertise in an ever-widening range of disciplines.

Alignment

Once your deal is signed, the work has just begun. Sourcing partnerships can quickly go out of alignment due to miscommunications and lack of clear understanding of expectations. Put a mechanism in place to monitor and correct problems. Are expectations realistic?

Measure Performance

Benchmark key metrics before you start outsourcing to give you a baseline. Measure performance on a regular basis. Reward partners for exceeding expectations. It’s not a numbers game. Benchmark performance constantly and maintain open and frank communication with your provider. Treat them as a Partner and not a Vendor.

Outsourcing & Innovation

Focus on core business activities. Use innovation to move up the value chain. Changing skill levels to stay competitive. When companies free their employees from the mundane transactional work, they can actually spend more time servicing the customers.

Use innovation to move up the value chain, and create new products and services which your competitors have not been able to do. Use outsourcing to result in higher productivity or higher revenue per person. Your employees need to be trained and equipped to manage changing demands of today’s global environment. The existing skill levels of the labor force must be improved to stay competitive.

Delight your customer — Always!

In a customer driven market, excellent customer support is key to success. When you provide an awesome customer support experience, you are actually working to set yourself apart from your competition by delighting your customer. And the faster you are able to delight your customer, the sooner you are creating a sticky consumer experience and making it hard for the customer to walk away.

Customer support done right can save you a lot of money and directly translates to more revenue. Think marketing costs — a good customer experience will result in good recommendations and word-of-mouth publicity for your product or service. And that itself makes for a pretty solid case for doing customer support right! Great support lets you keep customers at a cost way cheaper than getting new ones. Acquiring a customer definitely costs more than retaining one, and hence it is imperative to have a system in place to retain existing clients. Agree, right?!

So what makes for a “delightful” customer support? Well, we say start right off the bat! In other words, ensure proper on-boarding — don’t wait for your customer to get frustrated trying to figure out how to use your product or service. This is your touch-point where the customer relationship can go wrong, as the customer needs the most information and support as they begin to engage with your product or experience your service. At the same time, make sure you don’t abandon your customer after you finish your sale. There are numerous studies that clearly show that customers are willing to spend more with companies that provide excellent after sale service and support.

Put emphasis on both reactive and proactive approaches for your customer support. With reactive we mean — make your customer complaints your top priority! Acknowledge, agree and react to provide the best solution. And mind you, it doesn’t end there. Follow up to ensure the solution provided helped the customer and all is taken care of now. Well, so that was focusing on your reactive approach. Time to look into your proactive approach — Make the first move! Yes, you have a customer on-board; now don’t wait for them to contact you at the time of an issue. If you detect a problem, reach out to your customer before they do and offer the solution. Now, that’s also building customer loyalty at the same time.

We don’t need to point out the obvious that makes for a great customer support experience — and we won’t elaborate on those too but here is a quick take on it — personalize your communication with your customers, respond to their email and phone calls promptly and never miss an opportunity to add value wherever you can and as much as possible. Pursue their valuable feedback, ask for suggestions — it will not only give you a chance to fix a problem you may have not realized, but would also help you improvise your product or service with their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Smarter Prospecting — Better Closing

As a business owner, focusing on the quality of your marketing campaigns, leads and customer relationships should be fundamental to optimizing your sales process, outreach efforts and demand generation. The quality of the contacts data is a key component of the buyer funnel in any business. When it comes to data on your prospects, it’s not only about numbers, but also about accurate information to help you get to the right decision maker. Low quality leads end up wasting your sale organization’s time on research, data collection and chasing stale leads. On the other hand, high quality leads facilitate smarter targeting, segmentation and marketing automation.

In our experience, B2B sales and marketing databases decay over time. Your business contacts data gets out of date sooner than you realize. When your contact database is not actively enriched and cleansed, your sales teams do not realize the full potential from their email marketing and outbound calling efforts due to high bounce rates. Eventually they end up doing their own research on LinkedIn, Google, ZoomInfo and other tools. This doesn’t help your organization’s growth goals since you would rather have your star sales reps closing deals instead of building prospect lists.

Your contact database is always in flux. People are hired and fired. Companies shut down or get acquired. New positions are created. Businesses fail and succeed every quarter. People are always on the move to better or different opportunities. Thus not only does an organization need to make a constant effort to grow their CRM database with new accounts and contacts to prospect; but they also in parallel need to keep updating the existing data to make sure it is accurate and targeted.

Lead generation is the first step; lead enrichment is an ongoing process that should not be ignored. After all, how effective is your sales strategy if you are still nurturing a contact at a company who no longer works there or is not the right decision maker? Thus, it is imperative for today’s highly competitive sales and marketing teams to have access to accurate and updated customer data to run an efficient outbound sales operation.

You can look out for a few indicators that would tell you if your CRM database is in dire need of lead enrichment:

What is your email bounce rate? How many emails bounced back from your last email campaign?

How many of your emails get auto replies which are not “out of office replies.” Was your email delivered? The person you were email nurturing may have left the company and the “undeliverable” email will not even show up in your bounce report.

Is your team reaching out to prospects on personal emails? Well, pull that list out and enrich those Gmail, Yahoo and others free personal emails with business emails.

When was the last time your team got in touch with a prospective contact? If it has been more than 6 months then it’s highly probable that the contact person may have changed or has a new position in the company.

If your “lead” hasn’t responded even after repeatedly attempts then there can be two possibilities a) they are clearly not interested. b) You may have the wrong contact information.

Navigating through the eCommerce world!

Ecommerce is driven by technology, but there’s still a lot of work that people have to do. Someone has to write product descriptions, upload product images, create listings, provide customer support, and manage accounts and marketing and much more. However, of all these tasks — product description, classification, categorization and navigation are a backbone for successful marketing, discovery and sale of products listed on ecommerce sites, be it the likes of Amazon, eBay, Craigslist or any other.

Classification plays an important part in product discovery on any ecommerce site or marketplace; hence it is extremely crucial that the products are listed in accurate categories. Most of the ecommerce marketplaces have a large number of business users list their products and expect to find buyers for their products that come in all sorts of colors, sizes, brands, prices etc. It is pivotal to get this categorization right in ecommerce as it helps consumers find what they are looking to buy.

Navigation is incredibly important for online retail success. It sounds pretty obvious and straight forward, but if customers cannot find what they want to buy on the website, chances are, they will walk away without buying any stuff. Not only bad product categorization, but poor product photography and poor product descriptions are conversion killers. However, these are issues that all ecommerce players have a control over, yet many of them still end up losing on their sales because it is not done correctly and effectively. Good product categorization drives conversions, retention and growth. So improving your product photography, product description and product classification can increase the find-ability significantly, which means, your customers can easily find what they are looking for on your site. Ecommerce sites or a marketplace which fail to convert some of their customers is simply because they ignore or lack good product meta data.

The Great Data Dash

As technology advances at breakneck speed, our lives are becoming increasingly digitized. From Facebook feeds to sensor data to smart devices, companies are collecting a massive pool of big data yet starving for actionable insights and information. Big Data which is set to transform society is at the foundation of all the mega trends that are happening today, from social to mobile to cloud to gaming. Most likely, you’ve heard a lot of the talk about the volume, variety and velocity of big data and how challenging it is to keep up with that explosion of data.

This huge pool of data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather weather information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cellphone GPS signals to name a few. However for the purpose of this blog we will divide the key driving factors for contributing to this tsunami of data as: interactions, transactions, and automation.

Data generated through interactions is mostly from social media, search engines, electronic yellow pages, emails, texts, Facebook likes, user generated contents, blogs etc. Basically, this covers any data generated through communication and interpersonal interactions and a fair amount of this kind of data is unstructured.

Data generated through transactions is mostly structured data and examples of which can be invoices, travel itineraries, payments, company records etc. This kind of data can exist within organizations in ERP’s, CRM’s, etc. along with many other business processes and events.

Data generated through automation is mostly Internet of things (IoT), which includes smart devices, vehicles, sensors, and many other items which are embedded with software and network connectivity that collects and exchanges data. Some examples of this include GPS coordinates from a person that visits a website on their mobile phone, or RFID chips in debit / credit cards etc.

Today there is data available on how many steps customers took, how many products they compared, and what attributes they focused on, such as price, features, brand comparisons, recommendations, defects, and so on. Talking about all this data also makes us wonder about what are the vantage points for collecting, and categorizing this data.

A few we tried to put together are as follows:

Location: Our location has become an integral part of our phones, smart watches, and every other connected device we carry. New technology is learning to adapt to us and using our location data to get more and more responsive, useful and intuitive. Our smartphones ability to pinpoint our exact location and for companies to use that piece of information as an actionable insight to deliver services — a meal, a cab ride, a deal coupon — is a reason for excitement.

IoT and smart products: As products become increasingly electronic, for example: heart monitoring implants, automobiles with sensors, wearable devices etc., they collect a lot of useful data with the help of valuable technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) may sound like a consumer fantasy come true — who wouldn’t want to be able to turn on the lights at home from a few miles away, or leave it to their refrigerator to make sure they know when milk, butter need to be replenished? But there’s more to the IoT than lifestyle enhancement. It also includes a corporate side, enabling organizations to collect and analyze data from sensors on manufacturing equipment, pipelines, weather stations, smart meters, delivery trucks, and many other types of industrial machines etc.

Cookies: As consumers we love our healthy oatmeal cookies. But as a company, a service provider, an advertiser, a product seller etc., they all love web cookies to create a profile for our online activities. Data collected by cookies can be combined to make our web browsing experience better by remembering items in our online shopping carts, our log in ID’s, our preferences like always showing the weather in our home town, and even recommendations for things we may like based on our search history, and much more.

Electronic touch points: All the social media sentiments about a product in question, our friends liking an item or sharing a piece of news, endorsements from our favorite celebrities, online shopping, a purchase or a payment, review of our favorite restaurant, customer feedback for an app we used to plan our travel, or deals on the websites we are prospecting to shop at etc., act as electronic touch points and data generated from these touch points are monitored and measured for more efficiently and can go on to create an unparalleled experience not only for us as consumers, but for companies to foster repeat customers, improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and create competitive advantages to result in increased sales and revenues.