customer experience

Digital Transformation in Restaurants and Food industry

Posted by Sandeep raut on October 2, 2017 at 5:35

Digital disruption is omnipresent, get on board or get thrown off the track.

Digital is no longer a purview of only Banking, Insurance, Healthcare or Retail. The Restaurant industry is having pressure from multiple directions.

Today’s consumer expects fresh food, whether it is in season or not, with an exotic dining experience.

Successful restaurants recognize that the easy path to their customers' stomachs begins in their minds. They need to grab customer's attention and entice them with a memorable experience in order to trigger repeat visits.

Here are some of the applications of Digital disruption in the restaurants & food service industry:

Digital Signage to deliver eye-catching graphics to engage customers the moment they walk through the door
Online reservations using mobile app & flexibility of customization of menu as per customer taste
Chatbots: Restaurants are using virtual assistants to respond to customer inquiries and to process and customize customer orders. Taco Bell, Pizza hut have adopted chatbots to automate ordering process from a social media platform.
Robots – Restaurants are using AI-driven robots to increase capacity and speed of food preparation and delivery.
Recommendation engines – Developers are designing applications which use AI to help consumers choose meals & suggest foods based on their eating preferences.
Wi-Fi enabled dining spaces for truly engaging customer experience
Kiosks – Restaurants are integrating AI-driven self-service Kiosks to reduce customer waiting time and enhance the customer ordering experience.
Pay by phone and flexible paying options
Loyalty programs based on frequent visit
Digital supply chains to accurate demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and cost reduction.

Restaurants generate vast quantities of data through software that controls everything from scheduling food delivery and shift staffing to taking reservations to managing vendors and inventory to paying bills.

Today almost every consumer is making dining decision on their smartphone. They have tried new menu item based on the mobile ad. Mobile payments have become the norm now in this industry. Customers would like to order quick meals via mobile and want to use mobile payments.

McDonald’s was the first store to accept Apple Pay.

Starbucks is a leader in digital transformation. Using more than 50mm Facebook fans & over 15mm Instagram followers at their disposal they mastered the social media engagement. First, they created an app to pay for coffee and food in their restaurants. Then they added the loyalty program, starting to craft hyper-personalized offers and experiences for their 24-hour connected customers. The company also developed new digital services to be enjoyed in their physical stores, achieving a highly praised omnichannel approach.

Pizza Hut has started an order and payment-enabled pepper robot. Customers can now have a personalized ordering, reduce wait time for carryout, and have a fun with the frictionless user experience.

TGI Fridays, Wendy’s and other big names have all adopted digital technology to lure their customers.

OpenTable, GrubHub, and Zomato are some of the latest apps showcasing nearby restaurants with high-quality pics, presenting a menu with exotic pictures, price, ratings etc. you can also get offers, deals instantly.

The digital technology available to restaurants has streamlined the lives of restaurant owners much like smartphones have bettered our daily lives.

Digital has entered the restaurants and food industry through the front door and brings many exciting trends.

As consumers expect Apple to come up with a new iPhone every year that makes the earlier model obsolete, similarly they want fresh ways of serving food with fantastic dining experience which is made possible by Digital disruption.

How do you measure the success of Digital Transformation?

Posted by Sandeep raut on September 3, 2017 at 14:09

Digitization is disrupting every business and is spreading like a wild fire across every sector such as Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Retail, and Manufacturing.

Digital Transformation does not happen overnight. It is a continuous process. That is why it is very hard to plan too far ahead in a digital transformation program. The technology is evolving so rapidly that your plans will certainly change.

How do you measure return on digital transformation in order to make the timely course correction and improve its success rate? It is even more important that people who will measure the progress know the actual meaning of digital and customer behavior. You will be surprised to know that how many employees/leaders take the customer journey themselves – buying an online policy on their own website, purchasing a merchandise or calling their own customer center to complain.

One of the ways is to break the long term plan into small doable projects with specific KPI’s. These should not last more than six months.

While traditional metrics of revenue, costs, customer satisfaction should be measured, companies should move beyond these quarterly revenue and margin guidance as they keep pulling them back to short term tactical focus. The new metrics have to be added to get the right control and visibility of progress.

Some of the new metrics which can be considered are:

· % of marketing spend that is digital

· Brand value in market

· Reach of organization in the market

· Digital maturity quotient of the employees including board and senior leaders

· % revenue through digital channels

· Contribution to digital initiatives from each department like purchasing, finance, HR, IT, Sales & Marketing

Customer Focus:

· Net promoter score

· Rate of new customer acquisition

· Number of customer touch points addressed to improve customer experience positively

· % increase in customer engagement in digital channels

· Reduction in time to market new products to customers

· Change in customer behavior over time across channels

Return on innovation:

· % of revenue from new products/services introduced

· % of the profit from new ideas implemented

· Number of innovative ideas reach concept to implementation

· Number of new products or services launched in the market

· Number of new business models adopted for different class of customers

· Rate of new apps and APIs to offer new products/services inside and outside the company

Always keep these metrics simple and measure right things and celebrate even the small successes so employees are motivated.

A digital transformation is a big culture change so there is plenty of fear which leads to resistance. Such inertia has to be changed with clear communication, as to why it is needed to change and what benefits it will bring to each department and employee.

A lack of urgency is the greatest obstacle businesses face when considering the value of digital transformation. Proper planning is important but more than that execution as per the KPIs you select, is what take you through.

What are Microservices in Digital Transformation?

Posted by Sandeep raut on January 7, 2017 at 19:17 in OSes

Today’s organizations are feeling the fear of becoming dinosaur every day. New disrupters are coming into your industry and turning everything upside down.

Customers are more demanding than ever and will abandon the service that is too slow to respond. Everything is needed yesterday to make your customers happy.

Now, there is no time for organizations to implement huge enterprise applications which takes months and years.

What they need is, more agile, smaller, hyper focused teams working together to innovate and provide customer value.

This is where Microservices have gain momentum and are becoming fast go-to solution for enterprises. They takes SOA a step further by breaking every component into effectively single-purpose applications.

Microservices, show a strategy for decomposing a large project, based on the functions, into smaller, more manageable pieces. While a monolithic app is One Big Program with many responsibilities, Microservice based apps are composed of several small programs, each with a single responsibility

Microservices are independently developed & deployable, small, modular services. Each component is developed separately, and the application is then simply the sum of its constituent components. Each service runs as a unique process and communicates with other components via a very lightweight methods like HTTP/Rest with Jason.

Unlike old single huge enterprise application which requires heavy maintenance, Microservices are easy to manage.

Here are few characteristics and advantages of Microservices:

Very small, targeted in scope and functionality
Gives developers the freedom to independently develop and deploy services
Loosely coupled & can communicate with other services on industry wide standards like HTTP and JSON
API based connectivity
Every service can be coded in different programming language
Easily deployable and disposable makes releases possible even multiple times a day
New Digital technology can be easily adopted for a service
Allows to change services as required by business, without a massive cost
Testing and releases easier for individual components
Better fault tolerance and scale up

There are some challenges as well, while using Microservices:

Incur a cost of the testing at system integration level
Need to configure monitoring and alerting and similar services for each microservice
Service calls to one another, so tracing the path and debugging can be difficult
Each service communicates through API/remote calls, which have more overhead
Each service generates a log, so there is no central log monitoring.

Netflix has great Microservice architecture that receives more than one billion calls every day, from more than 800 different types of devices, to its streaming-video API.

Nike, the athlete clothing and shoe giant & now digital brand is using Microservices in its apps to deliver extra ordinary customer experience.

Amazon, eBay are other great examples of Microservices architecture.

GE’s Predix - the industrial Internet platform is based on Microservices architecture.

So, if your IT organization is implementing a microservices architecture, here are some examples of an operating system (Linux, Ubuntu, CoreOS), container technology(Docker), a scheduler(Swarm, Kubernetes), and a monitoring tool(Prometheus).

The technical demands of digital transformation, all front/back-office systems that seamlessly coordinate customer experiences in a digital world is achieved by Microservices as the preferred architecture.

Microservices help close the gap between business and IT & are fundamental shift in how IT approaches software development and are absolutely essential in Digital Transformation.

Customer 360º view in Digital age

Posted by Sandeep raut on October 3, 2016 at 3:44 in OSes

In today’s digital age of customer hyper-personalization, organizations identify opportunities for real time engagement based on data-driven understanding of customer behavior.

Customers have taken control of their purchase process. With websites, blogs, Facebook updates, online reviews and more, they use multiple sources of information to make decisions and often engage with a brand dozens of times between inspiration and purchase.

It’s important that organizations collect every customer interaction in order to identify sentiments of happy & unhappy customers.

Companies can get a complete 360º view of customers by aggregating data from the various touch points that a customer may use, to contact a company to purchase products and receive service/support.

This Customer 360º snapshot should include:

Identity: name, location, gender, age and other demographic data
Relationships: their influence, connections, associations with others
Current activity: orders, complaints, deliveries, returns
History: contacts, campaigns, processes, cases across all lines of business and channels
Value: which products or services they are associated with, including history
Flags: prompts to give context, e.g. churn propensity, up-sell options, fraud risk, mood of last interactions, complaint record, frequency of contact
Actions: expected, likely or essential steps based on who they are and the fact they are calling now

The 360º view of customers, also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data (data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database), with unstructured data (data like audio files, video files, social media data).

Many companies like Nestle, Toyota are using social media listening tools to gather what customers are saying on sites like Facebook and Twitter, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next.

What are the returns of Customer 360º:

All customer touch point data in a single repository for fast queries
Next best actions or recommendations for customers
All key metrics in a single location for business users to know and advise customers
Intuitive and customizable dashboards for quick insights
Real time hyper personalized customer interaction
Enhanced customer loyalty

Customer 360º helps achieve Single View of Customer across Channels – online, stores, marketplaces, Devices – wearables, mobile, tablets, laptops & Interactions – purchase, posts, likes, feedback, service.

This is further used for customer analytics – predict churn, retention, next best action, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, profitability, life time value.

Global leaders in customer experience are Apple, Disney, Emirates.

A word of caution though - Focus & collect only that customer data, which can help to improve the customer journey.