Day 3 opened to a Mastermind Keynote Interview with Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India, by Gartner’s distinguished analysts Partha Iyengar and Chris Howard. We couldn’t help but be awed by Rajan’s sharp, affable personality, as he handled Partha and Chris’ volley of questions with ease. One such answer was, “10% growth is not growth.. 10x is good, but what we need is 100x!” He stated the fact that every company out there is busy planning with a billion ‘internet’ Indians in mind. But realistically, as Rajan put it, tackling the trio of challenges – #Connectivity, #Lowering Device Cost, and # 22 official & 1576 recognized languages, is what will actually take us there!
Some of the sessions I was privileged to attend included the one on Sentiment Analysis by Daniel Yuen, where he expanded on how some of the biggest corporations are currently implementing real-time social media sentiment analysis into its forecasting and policy models. Social media, blogs, and forums have now collected a vast sea of data. Therefore, mining them to understand a customer’s mindset will give a marketer tons of actionable insights on buying behavior. This could then help in creating a unique buying experience, or increasing customer delight. But yes, the semantic outcomes are clouded by the wide variations in the usage of grammar, punctuations, and spelling mistakes, which are obvious to the human eye. Think @bout !teching a mchine … da meaningz of dis line!#! Neural networks could approximate the meaning, and you might end up placing your online ad on a site filled with filthy reviews of your product! That’s the last thing you want if you are a customer centric company!
Gene taking the CEM session
Customer Experience Management, another hot topic also did the rounds. Gene Alvarez created a magic moment at the Gartner Symposium, taking us through some of the leaders in the realm of creating CEM, like Apple and Nike. How do they create it? The answer is ease of use & friendliness, design, engaging users, gamifying, solving a current problem, visualizing, crowdsourcing.. And the list just goes on! How then, do we then measure its impact? As Gene so clearly put it, it’s not just about Customer Satisfaction Surveys. It’s also about measuring your Net Promoter Share, and Customer Effort Scores. So, what are the results? Better quality, brand advocates, and loyalty!!
The Nike Fuelband – high on CEM
Some more predictions and technologies that we could see hitting us, (If it hasn’t happened already!), was shared by David Cearly. He spoke about device diversity; internet of everything & the derived big data boom; BYOD; Moving from client/server architecture to cloud/client architecture; journey to the programmable everything; the API economy and a whole lot more.
The message for the day? The future is moving to digital, at a speed we cannot fathom. Let us not be left behind!]
Disclaimer: My interests lie in creating that delightful moment, when you engage with us at Suyati. As a result, you might find my thoughts being skewed towards certain areas of technologies. Do feel free though, to let us know if your interests lie in any particular specifics.
Just in case you missed out on the other days, read them here:
GartnerSym Day 2
GartnerSym Day 1
