December 2018 - Business Intelligence Info

Monthly Archives: December 2018

Stopping Traffic To Help Someone Cross The Street

December 31, 2018 Humor

Faith in helping those in need at inopportune times.

“Just when you least expect it… this amazing moment happens.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/kd8n4.

Arms Race?

December 30, 2018 Humor

It is amazing that anyone thinks that it is even possible to build a wall all the way across the southern border of the US. That’s just under 2000 miles long.

Even more amazing is that anyone believes that even if it is built, that this will stop illegal immigrants from entering the country. After all, the “iron curtain” or the Berlin wall were much shorter and built on easier terrain, but they ultimately failed.

And finally, a desire for a wall requires that you think immigrants are a bad idea. And yet, almost all the people who think they want a wall are the descendents of immigrants in the not-too-distant past.

Also published on Medium.

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Political Irony

Rethink Marketing podcast: Creating a Successful Reporting Process

December 30, 2018 CRM News and Info

I bet if you had a nickel for every reporting dashboard you started or that someone passed over to you … Yeah, me too. Wouldn’t it be awesome to get it right the first time? In this episode of the Rethink Marketing podcast, Phil Bosley explains you can create a successful marketing analytics reporting process.

Bosley is a returning guest to the show. He is founder and CEO of Tactical Marketing Automation, an Act-On partner. In the episode, he shares what is his number one metric that he tracks inside of Act-On, as well as explains the three D’s to creating a successful analytics reporting process: define, document, and develop.

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Act-On Blog

We could all soon own shares of ‘digital property funds’

December 30, 2018 Big Data

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal will be remembered as the tipping point that finally convinced us to take control of our personal data assets. None of us can predict exactly what trajectory this will take over the next few years, but it is already unleashing new forces that will transform markets for our personal digital property.

Last year, Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch argued, in reference to Carpenter v. United States, that cell phone data is personal property and so is protected under the Fourth Amendment. If his stance — that cell phone data is personal property — catches on, we could soon see a market driven fix for many of the data breach issues we’re seeing today.

Specifically, as owners of our phone data, we could restrict how its used and who can access it. And anyone who does use our data should expect to pay us for the privilege. But how are we supposed to negotiate with the giant companies that currently control our digital property?

Consider this: A hundred years ago, small individual investors had a very hard time making investments in securities. Then, in 1924, the first mutual fund was created to amass the power of many small investors. Today the mutual fund industry, led by firms like Fidelity Investments and Vanguard, constitutes the most powerful investment arm in the world, managing over $ 49 trillion in assets globally.

It’s time to create something similar for digital property called a “digital property fund.” If you’re having trouble wrapping your mind around how this might work, don’t worry. Let’s take a quick trip into the future and see for ourselves. Three years should do it.

A trip to 2022

It’s Monday, January 10, 2022, and you’ve just read an article on these new digital property funds in VentureBeat. The author projected that over 1 billion people globally will have digital property fund accounts by 2025 due to growth in India and some wildly popular integrations with personal digital assistants. You decide it is time to sign up. First, remember, you’re hiring a firm to manage YOUR personal data. So, the first step is to make a contribution of your personal digital property to a fund of your choice.

How do you do this? In current mutual fund lingo, it’s called an “in kind contribution.” In other words, your contribution isn’t money but an assignment of your digital property. You download the app and click on an initial data profile that communicates your preferences to the digital property managers at the fund. You decide to go back later and spend more time configuring preferences, but this will get you started. Wow! It only took nine minutes!

The thing to remember about this fund contribution is that you are free to move the management of your digital property to another fund at any time. Specifically, you’re hiring the mutual fund to act as your agent. Now, instead of simply clicking “I Accept” to terms of use agreements written by the Facebooks and the Googles, professional asset managers at your fund negotiate terms that produce maximum returns for you and hundreds of millions of other small digital property owners. This year the funds will move to a blockchain public ledger for secure broadcasting of your terms of service to all companies that might create or interact with your data.

The fund retains a small percentage of all earnings on your digital property as a management fee and passes the balance through to you. An annual report recaps these money flows in detail. This small percentage will exceed $ 16 billion in 2022 global fee income for the funds.

Now, back to 2019…

Individually we have very little power to manage our digital property. But we don’t have to go it alone. We can hire professional asset managers to represent us in these negotiations. The improvements in AI and machine learning coming over just the next few years means that the value of our digital property is set to increase dramatically. This vast new opportunity is just too big for the financial services industry to pass up, and our data is too valuable to continue to manage it by simply clicking on unread terms of service agreements.

Brian Mulconrey is an advisor to insurtech startup Sureify Labs, a cofounder at Force Diagnostics, and a futurist. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

6 E-Commerce Shipping Strategies That Level the Playing Field for SMBs

December 29, 2018 CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on Sept. 4, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

E-commerce continues to become more competitive as large companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart soak up market share and customer attention. Shipping window expectations have become shorter, and many online retailers struggle to keep up, particularly small to medium-sized businesses. How can SMBs compete?

Not only is competing possible, there are many SMBs that have been finding exceptional success through smart and streamlined optimization of their processes, and have been using their unique place in the market to stand out from larger competitors.

Attempting to compete dollar for dollar with large corporations is a losing strategy. Instead, SMBs need to focus on their approach to internal processes, minimizing costs to compete in the market, and building repeat business from customers who already have purchased from them. Following are strategies that can help SMBs win more business and revenue in today’s fiercely competitive market.

1. Automate your order processing.

Larger businesses have the luxury of dedicated shipping teams and departments — a luxury not always afforded to up-and-coming SMBs. Whether your shipping is handled by a “department of one” or members of a small team who manage it when they can, having automation in place can help avoid costly mistakes and maximize time spent on building your business.

Automation may sound out of reach and complex for some SMBs, but it really comes down to creating rules to tell a shipping technology how to process tasks. Depending on the software, setup can be relatively simple with straightforward IF/THEN statements.

For example, let’s say you have set up your shopping cart to allow customers to choose the carrier service for their orders. Using a combination of shipping automation, a shipping category, and saved carrier selections, you can set up a rule to automatically apply the correct label options as soon as the order pulls in.

Filter your orders by the category you created and batch print labels for all orders using that carrier type. Adding this automation rule, and others like it, literally can cut hours per day spent processing shipments one by one.

In some cases, automation can even be set up to purchase and print labels without a human touching the shipping software. Couple this with automation to print a packing slip at the same time as the label, and the shipment just needs to be packed up and sent out the door.

Automating the label purchase and printing process is just one way automation helps online sellers streamline. When SMBs take a multichannel approach to selling, automatic order import into one central platform — a feature offered by several shipping software technologies — can help import orders from those channels to manage them all at once.

Without having to retrieve orders manually from each selling platform, SMBs can save precious time, not to mention avoid mistakes and missed orders.

2. Minimize costs so you can offer free, fast shipping.

Many SMBs fall into the rut of shipping one way and one way only, because they don’t have the time to research and compare. What they seemingly save in time could be incurring heavy costs to the bottom line.

The most important element of minimizing shipping costs is ensuring that you have the best rates. That means gaining access to Commercial Plus Pricing from USPS. (As you scale and grow, you be able to negotiate rates with FedEx and/or UPS.) CPP rates from USPS can be obtained through most shipping software providers, historically reserved for only the highest-volume shippers.

Once you have access to these rates, you can optimize your shipping methods based on delivery window, distance, weight and more. You can take advantage of additional features you may need, such as signatures, delivery confirmation or insurance. This is where shipping software becomes particularly useful.

Rather than browsing from carrier page to carrier page, you can select your carrier and shipment method in one screen, drastically cutting down time. It’s even possible to set up saved carrier selections, which act like quick reference options to access often-used shipping methods.

Your rates aren’t the only way to optimize your shipping costs. Many online sellers don’t realize that there are cost savings in using recommended packaging from USPS, FedEx and UPS. Additionally, you can have that packaging delivered right to your door, absolutely free. Here are links to each carriers’ page detailing which supplies are free:

When you’re comparing carriers and rates, you minimize the effect on your bottom line of offering free shipping to your customers.

Perhaps you simply cannot afford to offer free shipping outright, even with great shipping rates. That doesn’t mean it’s completely inaccessible to you. Threshold-based free shipping, which encourages customers to reach a certain item or spending threshold to “earn” free shipping, is a smart way to make free shipping less of a cost burden.

By increasing your average order size/value, your business can offset the added cost of covering free shipping. As long as the threshold isn’t unattainable or unfairly high, customers often are willing to add another item or two to get free shipping, particularly from an SMB they want to support.

Even with all of the above optimizations and approaches, shipping may still end up being, at best, a breakeven element of your business. With large marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart continually pushing the expectations customers have, shipping may not end up being a money-making endeavor for SMBs, but you can still stay competitive and in consideration with online shoppers.

3. Connect order and shipping data to CRM.

A competitive advantage that SMBs can have over larger businesses in e-commerce is the trusting relationship they can create with customers. SMBs are often less likely to be seen as the faceless company. This opens up the ability to create more brand affinity, which can lead to repeat business and lifelong customers.

Eighty-one percent of consumers want brands that understand them better, according to MarTech Today. Many brands and marketers simply aren’t successfully making the effort to connect — even with the data available to create personalized experiences.

This is where smart SMB owners can capitalize through a combination of online buyer data, data collection to further personalize down the funnel, and personalized marketing to build business.

4. Use customer data to personalize ordering.

You already know the name and location of your customers or the recipients of their orders. Your confirmation emails and packing slips should reflect this. Consider including a personalized note, thanking them for their purchase.

Is your store set up to allow people to mark something as a gift? If so, the packing slip shouldn’t note how much the item costs.

Is a customer a first-time buyer? Welcome them with a unique welcome message in the confirmation email or packing slip, possibly sending them to your social pages to gain access to special deals.

If there’s a repeat purchase or a top customer, recognize that and make a customer feel special. Small details like this help you form a better relationship with your customers through a more personalized experience — often easily done through automation.

5. Use purchase data to move customers further down the funnel.

SMBs now have automation tools available to them at price points that businesses of this size actually can afford. These tools allow SMBs to begin building out customer profiles and trigger email marketing campaigns based on purchase behavior, items purchased, personalized information like birthdays and anniversaries, and more. Some of this information is readily available to you, and some you will need to actively collect.

For example, you know when a customer’s first order is. This is something you can easily point out, celebrate, and use to encourage another purchase or to further develop the relationship with your customers.

Same goes for the last time a customer marked a purchase as a gift. Triggering a reminder email a year later is an opportunity to invite another purchase. These personalized moments move your customer further down the funnel from occasional buyer, to repeat buyer, to lifelong raving fan.

When you tie shipping and order data to your marketing, you create a powerful brand experience that can end up helping your bottom line. Personally identifying information like geographic location can allow you to create more localized marketing experiences to show your customers you know more than just who they are — you know where they are. It also can allow you to create shipping promotions to customers it may be cheaper to ship to.

6. Convert shipping data into marketing data.

This goes beyond sending “Hello, [name]” emails. That level of personalization has become relative table stakes. Putting order and shipping data to work for you in conjunction with marketing automation, you can really drive brand experiences with your customers.

Customers want brands to understand them better. Product recommendations based on previous purchases show your customers that you know what they’ve bought from you, and that you’re able to anticipate their next need, offer that perfectly complementary item, or know when their purchase is about to run out and require a refill. All of this can be automated.

For example, let’s say you sell beauty supplies or makeup. You likely have a general idea when a customer might be nearing time for a repurchase. Using email automation and order data, you can set up a campaign using parameters such as this:

If purchased item equals X, send X days after an order is shipped (or delivered, if that is supported).

Then, when the product is almost gone, your customer will receive an email promotion reminder to refill from your store, perhaps heading off any inclination to look elsewhere. This creates a loyal, repeat buyer because it shows you’re paying attention and fulfilling a customer’s particular needs. Successfully growing businesses are built on repeat business relationships.

All these tactics are accessible to the vast majority of SMBs. After a little research and investment up front, the combination of data, automation and optimization can set up any SMB for success.

Katie%20May 6 E Commerce Shipping Strategies That Level the Playing Field for SMBs
Katie May is CEO of
ShippingEasy, a one-solution hub that provides e-commerce retailers with cloud-based shipping, inventory management, customer marketing, order management and fulfillment solutions, enabling order consolidation across multiple channels and multiple carriers, including USPS, FedEx and UPS.

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CRM Buyer

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Application Portability

December 29, 2018 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The Customer Engagement Application, formerly Microsoft Portals (and before that, ADXStudio Portals) is a Software-As-Service (SAS) web application run by Microsoft in the Cloud. It utilizes Microsoft CRM as the persistence layer for business data and application metadata. The latter defines the web application’s look, feel, behavior, and restrictions. Deployment of such Portals in version-controlled scenarios may present substantial challenges that prevent efficient testing of the target environments and make it problematic to roll back any deployed changes. In today’s blog, we will review the issues, available tools, and options to solve the task, as well as detail the methodology of achieving positive results.

Let’s start by discussing the challenges. Typical Portal deployment consists of three steps:

Deployment of Portal solutions into the target CRM
Deployment of business customizations related to the Portal (entities, forms, views, option sets)
Transfer of the data stored in Portal-related entities

In the typical scenario, Microsoft provides step #1 by installing a new Portal into the target CRM instance. Once this is done, Microsoft also populates Portal configuration entities with sample data and makes a Portal available for modification. This approach assumes a single production environment and does not imply any development anywhere other than the target CRM. Such development may involve business customizations to the CRM objects, as well as modification and expansion of the Portal configuration data.

In the development workflow, where any business customizations are done in DEV environment and then ported to the target PROD or QA CRM, Step #2 above is managed consistently and presents no challenge. However, in case when both source and target CRM environments are bound with appropriate SAS Portal applications, any development related to the source Portal represents data that requires transfer to the target CRM, presenting the following challenges:

Both source and target CRMs may have Portals with the same name and any data transfer may create collision and confusion in the names of the data elements
Portal-dependent child records in both CRMs may have the same unique identifiers (GUIDs) – in those cases when one environment was procured as the clone of another and any data transfer from the source to the target will respect the update and insert operations but not deletion
In case of existing target Portal data, there will be no option to roll back the deployment in case of any issues
There will be no option to create a new instance of Portal record in the target CRM when the record with matching GUID exists (true for any dependent child records, as well)

Now, let’s discuss our options. Presently, there are only two tools available to transfer Portal data:

XRMToolbox plugin for Portal transfer – this uses proprietary data encoding format and inconsistent data schema with several compatibility issues; it allows for updating only existing Portal records in the target environment. When the target Portal is not selected and the GUIDs of the source and target data sets match, it produces unusable results. Also, this tool has issues with transferring M:M-related data, which makes it out-of-scope for Portal deployment.
CRM Configuration Migration Tool – provided by CRM SDK – is a universal tool that may properly handle linked data transfers and M:M relationship migration in several iterations. This tool exports data according to the selected schema (which can be easily built for the current version of the Portal) and imports it as is. In those cases when GUIDs in the source and target match, the update is executed. There are extensive options for updates but there is no way to force it to create new records or delete obsolete ones. This is the only viable tool for our purposes, so we will see how it can be used to attain our objective.

Next, let’s examine our solution. The happy path for Portal data deployment must follow this sequence of events:

In the target environment, the Portal record is renamed for archival purposes and to avoid name collision with the new Portal.
The source data is extracted and stored into a file.
In the source data file, all GUIDs identifying Portal records are replaced with the new ones to avoid collision with any of the target entities.
The modified source data is imported to the target CRM – the new Portal record and dependent data set is created.
In the target environment, the Portal SAS application is switched from the archived Portal record to the newly imported one.
If testing of the new Portal is failing, the SAS application may be switched back to the archived Portal record.

Step #3 is a simple regular expression replacement of an existing found GUID. For example:

[a-fA-F0-9]{8}-([a-fA-F0-9]{4}-){3}[a-fA-F0-9]{12}

However, we must not forget that many unique record identifiers may be referenced multiple times within the data source file (linked entities), and such repeating GUIDs must be replaced with the same new GUID as the first one met. A further complication is related to the fact that we want to replace only GUIDs defined as record IDs in the data file, not the GUIDs that are referenced only: this is because many records refer to the entities outside the scope of contents of the Portal schema.

The solution is a simple command-line tool developed internally as a universal Reg-ex replacer with default patterns searching for record IDs, building a dictionary for those mapping them to the new GUIDs, then replacing all GUIDs in the file according to the dictionary. Those GUIDs not in the dictionary are not replaced.

This tool had produced a data file that, when imported, creates all brand-new target Portal entities and all brand-new dependent entities, while any of the imported entities linked to existing data outside of the Portal schema stay properly linked.

Since the new record set is created in the target environment, there is no issue with deleting obsolete configuration records: those stay linked to the archived versions of configurations and will be deleted automatically when the old Portal records are purged.

The only insubstantial complication in the suggested deployment process is related to the contacts assigned with the web roles. We are not porting or updating the contacts during deployment. We cannot assume that the contacts in the target environment will match those from the source. So, the web role assignments will be lost if we attempt to transfer them. For the purpose of clean data transition, it is recommended to drop all web role assignments in the source environment prior to exporting the Portal data. Those assignments may be backed-up before and restored in the source later to maintain the ability to unit-test in DEV.

In summary, with a simple command-line tool developed internally, we can use the standard CRM Configuration Migration application to transfer the Portal data from the source environment to the target in such a way that the new Portal record and dependent child records are created, making it available for SAS application to switch to. At the same time, the previous versions of the Portal records in the target environment are not destroyed or overwritten, thus making it possible to roll back the SAS assignation to any previous state of release.

A special note: with the slight modification of the default search-replace regular expressions, it is possible to use our tool to condition the data file extracted by XRMToolbox plugin for the Portals. While the data transfer experiment was successful, it is still not recommended to use because of the internal issues found within this plugin, as well as its inability to migrate M:M relationships properly.

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PowerObjects- Bringing Focus to Dynamics CRM

A look back at some of AI’s biggest video game wins in 2018

December 29, 2018 Big Data

For decades, games have served as benchmarks for artificial intelligence (AI).

In 1996, IBM famously set loose Deep Blue on chess, and it became the first program to defeat a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. But things really kicked into gear in 2013 — the year Google subsidiary DeepMind demonstrated an AI system that could play Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert at superhuman levels. In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo won a three-game match of Go against Lee Sedol, one of the highest-ranked players in the world. And only a year later, an improved version of the system (AlphaZero) handily defeated champions at chess, a Japanese variant of chess called shogi, and Go.

The advancements aren’t merely advancing game design, according to folks like DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis. Rather, they’re informing the development of systems that might one day diagnose illnesses, predict complicated protein structures, and segment CT scans. “AlphaZero is a stepping stone for us all the way to general AI,” Hassabis told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “The reason we test ourselves and all these games is … that [they’re] a very convenient proving ground for us to develop our algorithms. … Ultimately, [we’re developing algorithms that can be] translate[ed] into the real world to work on really challenging problems … and help experts in those areas.”

With that in mind, and with 2019 fast approaching, we’ve taken a look back at some of 2018’s AI in games highlights. Here they are for your reading pleasure, in no particular order.

Montezuma’s Revenge

A look back at some of AI’s biggest video game wins in 2018

Above: Map of level one in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Foundation

In Montezuma’s Revenge, a 1984 platformer from publisher Parker Brothers for the Atari 2600, Apple II, Commodore 64, and a host of other platforms, players assume the role of intrepid explorer Panama Joe as he spelunks across Aztec emperor Montezuma II’s labyrinthine temple. The stages, of which there are 99 across three levels, are filled with obstacles like laser gates, conveyor belts, ropes, ladders, disappearing floors, and fire pits — not to mention skulls, snakes, spiders, torches, and swords. The goal is to reach the Treasure Chamber and rack up points along the way by finding jewels, killing enemies, and revealing keys that open doors to hidden stages.

Montezuma’s Revenge has a reputation for being difficult (the first level alone consists of 24 rooms), but AI systems have long had a particularly tough go of it. DeepMind’s groundbreaking Deep-Q learning network in 2015 — one which surpassed human experts on Breakout, Enduro, and Pong — scored a 0 percent of the average human score of 4,700 in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Researchers peg the blame on the game’s “spare rewards.” Completing a stage requires learning complex tasks with infrequent feedback. As a result, even the best-trained AI agents tend to maximize rewards in the short term rather than work toward a big-picture goal — for example, hitting an enemy repeatedly instead of climbing a rope close to the exit. But some AI systems this year managed to avoid that trap.

DeepMind

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org in May (“Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube“), DeepMind described a machine learning model that could, in effect, learn to master Montezuma’s Revenge from YouTube videos. After “watching” clips of expert players and by using a method that embedded game state observations into a common embedding space, it completed the first level with a score of 41,000.

In a second paper published online the same month (“Observe and Look Further: Achieving Consistent Performance on Atari“), DeepMind scientists proposed improvements to the aforementioned Deep-Q model that increased its stability and capability. Most importantly, they enabled the algorithm to account for reward signals of “varying densities and scales,” extending its agents’ effective planning horizon. Additionally, they used human demonstrations to augment agents’ exploration process.

In the end, it achieved a score of 38,000 on the game’s first level.

OpenAI

Above: An agent controlling the player character.

Image Credit: OpenAI

In June, OpenAI — a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel — shared in a blog post a method for training a Montezuma’s Revenge-beating AI system. Novelly, it tapped human demonstrations to “restart” agents: AI player characters began near the end of the game and moved backward through human players’ trajectories on every restart. This exposed them to parts of the game which humans had already cleared, and helped them to achieve a score of 74,500.

In August, building on its previous work, OpenAI described in a paper (“Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning“) a model that could best most human players. The top-performing version found 22 of the 24 rooms in the first level, and occasionally discovered all 24.

What set it apart was a reinforcement learning technique called Random Network Distillation (RND), which used a bonus reward that incentivized agents to explore areas of the game map they normally wouldn’t have. RND also addressed another common issue in reinforcement learning schemes — the so-called noisy TV problem — in which an AI agent becomes stuck looking for patterns in random data.

“Curiosity drives the agent to discover new rooms and find ways of increasing the in-game score, and this extrinsic reward drives it to revisit those rooms later in the training,” OpenAI explained in a blog post. “Curiosity gives us an easier way to teach agents to interact with any environment, rather than via an extensively engineered task-specific reward function that we hope corresponds to solving a task.”

On average, OpenAI’s agents scored 10,000 over nine runs with a best mean return of 14,500. A longer-running test yielded a run that hit 17,500.

Uber

OpenAI and DeepMind aren’t the only ones that managed to craft skilled Montezuma’s Revenge-playing AI this year. In a paper and accompanying blog post published in late November, researchers at San Francisco ride-sharing company Uber unveiled Go-Explore, a family of so-called quality diversity AI models capable of posting scores of over 2,000,000 and average scores over 400,000. In testing, the models were able to “reliably” solve the entire game up to level 159 and reach an average of 37 rooms.

To reach those sky-high numbers, the researchers implemented an innovative training method consisting of two parts: exploration and robustification. In the exploration phase, Go-Explore built an archive of different game states — cells — and the various trajectories, or scores, that lead to them. It chose a cell, returned to that cell, explored the cell, and, for all cells it visited, swapped in a given new trajectory if it was better (i.e., the score was higher).

This “exploration” stage conferred several advantages. Thanks to the aforementioned archive, Go-Explore was able to remember and return to “promising” areas for exploration. By first returning to cells (by loading the game state) before exploring from them, it avoided over-exploring easily reached places. And because Go-Explore was able to visit all reachable states, it was less susceptible to deceptive reward functions.

The robustification step, meanwhile, acted as a shield against noise. If Go-Explore’s solutions were not robust to noise, it robustified them into a deep neural network with an imitation learning algorithm.

“Go-Explore’s max score is substantially higher than the human world record of 1,219,200, achieving even the strictest definition of ‘superhuman performance,’” the team said. “This shatters the state of the art on Montezuma’s Revenge both for traditional RL algorithms and imitation learning algorithms that were given the solution in the form of a human demonstration.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Is Weak Data Integrity Foiling Your CRM?

December 29, 2018 CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on Aug. 29, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

American companies spend an enormous amount of money on training. Spending reached more than US$ 90 billion in 2017, an increase of over 32 percent from 2016, according to Training magazine’s annual
survey about the kinds of investments companies with 100 or more employees make on training activities, including everything from the salaries of internal training staffers to expenses for travel, facilities and equipment.

Though it’s not highlighted specifically in the survey, it’s unlikely that even a small share of the billions spent on training last year were devoted to educating and motivating employees to regularly and accurately input data into a company’s CRM. Maybe it should have been.

If companies devoted even a modest amount of time and money to creating a culture in which employees made it a regular part of their day to input data into their CRM, both employees and employers would benefit. Broad acceptance that this is an activity that leads to career and company success is what the concept of data integrity is all about.

Unfortunately, regular dedicated use of CRM is not the norm, for a wide variety of reasons. One is that in some businesses a CRM represents change, and change often is resisted, even in businesses that have a dynamic culture. To a sales person or an employee working in customer service, inputting data into the CRM may seem like a task that is administrative rather than essential.

There’s also a demographic component. The introduction of a CRM to replace either highly manual customer management and sales processes or to institute more structured processes often is resisted by those who have found success with their own ad hoc approach to tracking prospects, tracking orders or managing relationships.

Why Data Integrity Matters

CRMs have become an indispensable tool for business success for reasons nearly as diverse as the industries and companies that have embraced them. Manufacturers are a great example. Manufacturing is an industry known for fierce competition, thin margins, and a landscape that rewards companies able to anticipate and respond quickly to perpetual changes in customer preferences and tastes.

Flexibility and responsiveness aren’t just nice-to-have qualities for manufacturers; they’re absolute necessities for survival. Why? Only with accurate forecasts of the demand for products are manufacturers able to deliver for their customers in an economical and time-efficient manner.

Put simply, the ready availability of the proper amount of raw materials to fulfill customer orders quickly isn’t achieved through good fortune or the innate knowledge of experienced executives. It comes from the visibility that is possible when the entire workforce of a manufacturer diligently maintains the company’s CRM. Good data — that is, complete data — is required for good outcomes.

The benefits of a CRM defined by data integrity go well beyond the reduction of back orders and waste that manufacturers can enjoy. No matter what industry a company is in, a CRM with updated and comprehensive data becomes a tool to forge the kind of strong personal relationships that keep existing customers happy and eager to expand their partnership with you.

For example, a powerful CRM provides transparency into the status of an order, which means that customer service reps always can provide customers with up-to-date and accurate information, and take proactive action when a problem is identified.

In other words, maintaining a CRM provides transparency between a company and its customers. The ability to cultivate strong personal relationships — and to explore new business opportunities — also enhanced is with a CRM with accurate and timely information when certain sales functions are automated. When that happens, sales reps have more time to explore market trends and gather insights that existing customers and prospects will value.

The Data Integrity Quest

Grasping the many benefits of a CRM with a high level of data integrity often requires a change of mindset and behaviors within a company.

The question is how to drive that change? Some companies may opt to mandate routine CRM data entry. All sales teams have regular calls to provide updates about progress toward quotas and to share challenges and ideas about the best way to pursue new opportunities. If a feature of those calls and meetings is to publicly recognize who has and who hasn’t entered data into the CRM, it’s likely that behaviors will begin to change.

Then again, some companies may reject what amounts to public shaming as anathema to a collaborative and supportive culture. It’s also an approach that runs counter to the argument managers correctly make that the regular use of a CRM helps employees do their work more effectively. Change through executive fiat can backfire, causing normally diligent and conscientious workers to balk at what they may view as a burdensome intrusion.

A different way to tackle the dilemma of data integrity comes through streamlining reports and widgets in the CRM that track employee usage. Done properly, this allows managers to audit the CRM to see which employees have touched which records, how they edited them, and when the work was done.

To do this right involves asking the users of a CRM to prioritize which data is most important and how they want it used, which typically takes place during the CRM implementation process. By better understanding the data that is most important, and by tracking how employees use the CRM, it’s possible to tweak the system to make it more intuitive and useful for those who need it most.

The Power of Gaming

Another approach is to transform the task of inputting CRM data into a game. Literally. So-called gamification has become a handy tool to motivate employees to take certain actions with, well, the help of a little fun and competition. The ultimate goal here is to boost employee engagement, a worthwhile business goal if ever there was one.

In fact, employees with high engagement rates were 21 percent more productive than their less engaged counterparts, the research organization Gallup found.

That elevated productivity translates into earnings per share that are nearly 150 percent higher for companies with engaged workers, according to the firm.

The problem, however, is that only about 13 percent of all employees across the globe actually are engaged. Tapping the power of gaming — and anybody who’s had to drag their teenage children kicking and screaming from the controls of Fortnite knows how powerful gaming can be — to encourage workers to consistently input data into a CRM can work.

There are plenty of real-world examples of how the thirst to compete and the ability to transform work tasks into a fun game have made a big impact on worker engagement and morale. For example, the toolmaker Ingersoll Rand has unleashed the innate competitiveness of its workforce both to boost the company’s productivity and to benefit the employees themselves.

Here’s how: The company takes advantage of the software attached to its smart screwdrivers to track how quickly workers complete their assigned tasks. The company then broadcasts results about the number of units produced per shift, and it uses those final tallies to hand out financial bonuses or paid time off to the winners.

None of this means that gamification is a one-size-fits-all solution to boost CRM usage. Managers need to understand their company cultures well enough to know the sorts of gaming approaches that could boost data integrity, and devise ways to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to participate.

Having a good sense of the sorts of rewards your employees will value for improving data integrity is more complex than it initially may seem. Nobody begrudges a bonus or a paid day off, but different demographics are drawn to different flavors of rewards.

Millennials, for example, have been shown to appreciate recognition in particular.

Two in five millennials want to be recognized more for their contributions at work, the consultancy O.C. Tanner has found, based on 20,000 interviews over the course of 10 years.

Further, nearly 80 percent of people quit because they don’t get the recognition they feel they deserve, the research suggested.

No matter how companies approach the challenge of boosting their data integrity, actually accomplishing it has self-perpetuating benefits. That’s because employees who become engaged and consistent about inputting data will see the benefits of a robust CRM in helping them do their jobs. When that happens, games and other incentives to improve data integrity will become less and less important.

Mickey%20Patton Is Weak Data Integrity Foiling Your CRM?
Mickey Patton is president and CEO of
Clear C2, the leading CRM for manufacturing companies. Patton joined Clear C2 in 1998 and has extensive knowledge of how manufacturers can use technology to streamline and maximize their customer relationships throughout the most complex sales cycles and ecosystems.

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December 29, 2018 Humor

I assume that everyone reading this is just like Sparky the Penguin, am I right?

I think this comic captures a big difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. It seems to be true that almost all Republicans believe the holy “talking points” and repeat them endlessly. While Democrats all have their own opinions and endlessly argue amongst themselves.

Also published on Medium.

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Dynamics CRM Reports complaining Reporting extension(SRS Data Connector) is not installed

December 29, 2018 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Hey all-

I am starting a series of re-posts from my personal blog site. Recently, I decided not to maintain separate personal blog site and now my personal blog site is offline. Here is the first one…

——-re-post———-

Here I am talking about an interesting issue while running Dynamics CRM Reports. When I faced this for first time it felt rare corner scenario but recently I worked with a couple of more customers who ran into same issue. This type of strange issues can take good amount of time to investigate/troubleshoot so worth sharing.

Running any CRM report fails with error stating Reporting Extensions (Data Connector) is not installed. Of course Reporting Extensions (Data Connector) is installed and in fact it’s been removed and reinstalled in attempt to fix the issue, but no difference in error. Below is how error reads/looks like:

Reporting Error

Reports cannot be run because the Connector for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, a required component for reporting is not installed on the server that is running Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

Looking deeper, SSRS Event logs reports failure loading CRM extension.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Report Server (MSSQLSERVER)
Date:          7/10/2015 3:11:55 PM
Event ID:      108
Task Category: Extension
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      SSRSBox
Description:
Report Server (MSSQLSERVER) cannot load the MSCRM extension.

Same event log error is there for other Report Server extensions as well. MSCRMFETCH, SQLPDW, TERADATA are other exception those fail to load within SSRS.

Report Server Service log file also complains about not being able to load the file or missing files.

extensionfactory!ReportServer_0-1!9f8!07/08/2015-02:28:31:: e ERROR: Exception caught instantiating MSCRMFETCH report server extension: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL ‘SRSDataConnectorBootstrapper.dll': The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)
at Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.DataExtensionShim.Common.NativeMethods.CreateManagedObject(String fullAssemblyPath, String assemblyName, String typeName, Object& obj)

extensionfactory!ReportServer_0-1!9f8!07/08/2015-02:28:31:: e ERROR: Exception caught instantiating TERADATA report server extension: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Teradata.Client.Provider, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=76b417ee2e04956c’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
File name: ‘Teradata.Client.Provider, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=76b417ee2e04956c’

All the files being reported in above exceptions were present on expected path and Report Server service account was given adequate permissions. ProcMon comes to mind as handy tool for investigating file access issues. After good analysis of working and non-working logs could nail it down to VC++ runtime dlls missing or being wrong versions on non-working environment. VC++ runtime is a required component for SSRS extensions to load and function properly.

Once we knew its VC++ runtime fix was relatively easy and quick. Either replace the corrupt or missing file with appropriate version from working environment or remove and reinstall Visual C++ Redistributable Package from Microsoft download page. The Visual C++ Redistributable Packages that ships in Redist folder of Dynamics CRM installation media can also be used.

The file msvcr100.dll in C:\Windows\System32 folder was missing in one of the environment, just placing this file from a working environment resolved the issue. After correcting missing/wrong file or reinstalling VC++ runtime, restarting SSRS, IIS on CRM server and clearing IE cache resolves the errors loading SSRS extensions and CRM Reports render w/o any issues.

Hope this helps! Cheers!

Bhavesh Shastri

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