Amitava Kundu
In 2012, on the two biggest shopping days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales grew by 26% and 20% from the previous year. Don’t believe the apocalyptic news hype, retail is not dying, not even close. Retail is evolving to giving the customer exactly what they want, when they want, and how they want it. If customers don’t want to go to your store, they shouldn’t have to. If they want to shop on their phone or tablet, you need to fully support that.
This is exactly what sellers are struggling to do – make all customer touch points equally accessible, with a completely shared experience, so customers can be engaged at the moment of their purchasing decision.
Time is a Luxury, Methods are Not
Sellers have always tried to maximize customer spending through upselling and cross-selling. Methods which were successful in the past need to be replaced with newer techniques for today’s more aware, less patient customers.
Shopping on the internet is the best example. The probability of customers checking out the offers they receive via email is lower than when they see those offers in real time on the screen when they are shopping online. [Read more...]
In the last decade, the world population has increased by more than 700 million to reach seven billion today. And by 2050, there will be two billion more people to feed. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food insecurity is a major global concern today. With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves by more than 30%.
Getting the right apps into the hands of your customers quickly requires an infrastructure that can handle the load. Assembling the components is tricky because there’s a combination of new data and old to manage in the moment for the best customer experience. Telecom companies like T-Mobile need to be able to handle this exponential increase in data volume, and also analyze this new source of data to deliver the right services to each customer.
Companies experience significant inefficiencies and they know it. Too often, the decision is made that it’s too difficult, too political, and too disruptive to operations to do more to manage how work gets done. Just as often, people won’t stop to capture process in flight because they believe it will change by the time it gets published. People learn to live with these problems and think, “It will always be that way.” We’re going to show you why that statement isn’t true.
Every large business has services common to many departments across geographies, so it makes sense to integrate these services into a single entity, commonly known as a 
