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Monthly Archives: November 2019

A super-fast machine learning model for finding user search intent

November 30, 2019   Big Data

In April 2019, Benjamin Burkholder (who is awesome, by the way) published a Medium article showing off a script he wrote that uses SERP result features to infer a user’s search intent. The script uses the SerpAPI.com API for its data and labels search queries in the following way:

  • Informational — The person is looking for more information on a topic. This is indicated by whether an answer box or PAA (people also ask) boxes are present.
  • Navigational — The person is searching for a specific website. This is indicated by whether a knowledge graph is present or if site links are present.
  • Transactional — The person is aiming to purchase something. This is indicated by whether shopping ads are present.
  • Commercial Investigation — The person is aiming to make a purchase soon but is still researching. This is indicated by whether paid ads are present, an answer box is present, PAAs are present, or if there are ads present at the bottom of the SERP.

This is one of the coolest ways to estimate search intent, because it uses Google’s understanding of search intent (as expressed by the SERP features shown for that search).

The one problem with Burkholder’s approach is its reliance on the Serp API. If you have a large set of search queries you want to find intent for, you need to pass each query phrase through the API, which then actually does the search and returns the SERP feature results, which Burkholder’s script can then classify. So on a large set of search queries, this is time consuming and prohibitively expensive.

SerpAPI charges ~$ 0.01 per keyword, so analyzing 5,000 keywords will cost you $ 50. Running these results through Burkholder’s labeler script also takes 3 to 5 hours to get through these 5,000 keywords.

So I got to thinking: What if I adapted Burkholder’s approach so that, rather than use it to classify intent directly, I could use it to train a machine learning model that I would then use to classify intent? In other words, I’d incur one-time costs to produce my Burkholder-labeled training set, and, assuming it was accurate enough, I could then use that training set for all further classification, cost free.

With an accurate training set, anyone could label huge numbers of keywords super quickly, without spending a dime.

Finding a model

Hamlet Batista has written a few stellar posts about how to leverage Natural Language models like BERT for labeling intent.

In his posts, he uses an existing intent labeling model that returns categories from Kaggle’s Question Answering Dataset. While these labels can be useful, they are not really “intent categories” in line with what we typically think of for intent taxonomy categories and instead have labels such as Description, Entity, Human, Numeric, and Location.

He achieved excellent results by training a BERT encoder, getting near 90% accuracy in predicting labels for new/unlabeled search keywords.

The big question for me was, could I leverage the same tech (Uber’s Ludwig BERT encoder) to create an accurate model using the search intent labels I’d get from Burkholder’s code?

It turns out the answer is yes!

How to do it

Here’s how the process works:

1. Gather your list of keywords. If you’re planning on training your own model, I recommend doing so within a specific category/niche. Training on clothing-related keywords and then using that model to label finance related keywords will likely be significantly less accurate than training on clothing related keywords and then using that model to label other unlabeled clothing related keywords. That said, I did try using a model labeled on one category/niche to label another, and the results still seemed quite good to me.

2. Run Burkholder’s script over your list of keywords from Step 1. This will require signing up for SerpAPI.com and buying credits. I recommend getting labels for at least 10,000 search queries with this script to use for training. The more training data, the more accurate your model will likely be.

3. Use the labeled data from the previous step as your training data for the BERT model. Batista’s code to do this is very straightforward, and this article will guide you through the process. I was able to get about ~72% accuracy using about 10,000 labels of training data.

4. Use your model from Step 3 to label unlabeled search data, and then take a look at your results!

The results

I ran through this process using a huge list (13,000 keywords) of clothing/fashion-related search terms from SEMrush as my training data. My resulting model gets just about 80% accuracy.

It seems likely that training the model with more data will continue to improve its accuracy up to a point. If any of you attempt it and improve on 80% accuracy, I would love to hear about it. I think with 20,000+ labeled searches, we could see up to maybe 85-90% accuracy.

This means when you ask this model to predict the intent of unlabeled search queries, 8 times out of 10 it will give you the same label as what would have been returned by Burkholder’s Serp API rules-based classifier. It can also do this for free, in large volumes and incredibly fast.

So something that would have taken a few thousand dollars and days of scraping can now be done for free in just minutes.

In my case I used keywords from a related domain (makeup) instead of clothing keywords, and overall I think it did a pretty good job. Labeling 5,000 search queries took under two minutes with the BERT model. Here’s what my results looked like:

The implications

For SEO tools to be useful, they need to be scalable. Keyword research, content strategy, PPC strategy, and SEO strategy usually rely on being able to do analysis across entire niches/themes/topics/websites.

In many industries, the keyword longtails can extend into the millions. So a faster, more affordable approach to Burkholder’s solution can make a lot of difference.

I forsee AI and machine learning tools being used more and more in our industry, enabling SEOs, paid search specialists, and content marketers to gain superpowers that haven’t been possible before these new AI breakthroughs.

Happy analyzing!

Kristin Tynski is a founder and the SVP of Creative at Fractl, a boutique growth agency based in Delray Beach, FL.

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Is Your CEO Committed to Delivering a Great Customer Experience?

November 30, 2019   CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on Sept. 30, 2019, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Consumers have been adopting disruptive digital technologies in their daily lives at a rapid pace. Customers went from being limited to brick-and-mortar stores to researching, comparing and buying a company’s products and services online. Along with those shifts came a change in how customers communicate with companies.

Today, no matter what channel customers use to interact with a brand — phone, email, text, chat, online communities — companies must be able to create positive, consistent and engaging customer experiences.

Customer experience, or CX, is on the top of many CEOs’ minds, research consistently shows. In fact, at a recent gathering of nearly 200 CEOs, a new definition of the
purpose of a corporation emerged. Among the many things discussed at the meeting: Being internally focused on things like shareholder value is no longer the priority it once was.

Instead, customer-centric CEOs are putting their most important stakeholders, customers and employees, at the top of their agendas — and with good reason. Organizations that put customers first
outperformed laggards on the S&P 500 index by nearly 80 percent.

These brands retain a higher share of wallet and have customers that are seven times more likely to purchase more from them, eight times more likely to try other products or services, and 15 times more likely to spread positive word of mouth, the research shows.

What is one of the top initiatives this gathering of CEOs agreed to? Delivering value to customers and furthering the tradition of American companies to lead the way to meet or exceed customer expectations. This puts customer experience front and center. It’s clear theses customer-centric CEOs are convinced customer experience is the key to building the kind of sustainable advantage that leads to better business outcomes, long-term success and a strong competitive advantage.

CEOs have a unique and vital leadership role in creating this competitive advantage through the customer experience. Let’s face it. Employees look to their leadership to know what is important. If the CEO is standing firm on accelerating customer experience, it naturally becomes the internal mantra within a company.

It gives employees the leeway to do the right thing when it comes to making sure a customer’s experience is topnotch: Everyone’s focus, from upper to middle management to frontline employees, changes to prioritize the customer. It sounds simple, but many companies don’t really put their customers first.

When CEOs Lead on CX

The seven characteristics of a customer-focused CEO, outlined in a
report by Walker Info, are as follows:

  • Uses insights strategically: Believes CX is not just a program, but a holistic strategy that permeates every aspect of a business, from the front office to back-end systems, people, processes and technologies;
  • Sets aside short-term financial gain: Focuses on a long-term strategy with the ultimate goal to drive amazing end-to-end customer experiences;
  • Seeks the broader customer story: Engages across the customer base and not just with top customers; digs deeply to identify common issues, trends and needs;
  • Coordinates across silos: Incentivizes employees to collaborate, eliminating politics, hero cultures and “getting credit”; rather, encourages through performance objective focusing on the customer’s needs and wants;
  • Encourages empathy for customers: Ensures the culture is focused on seeing the customer’s point of view and journey with the company instead of designing systems, technology and processes around the company;
  • Requests information, advice: Relentlessly pursues ways to elevate competitive advantage strategically by using insights daily from employees, customers, suppliers and partners; and
  • Makes the call on resources: Ensures all the resources required to create great customer experiences are plentiful in order to deliver on great customer journeys.

Customer Journeys Matter More

For a company to become customer-centric, the CEO must work with all the various parts of the business — back-end operations, marketing, sales, service — while shifting the whole company’s focus from customer touchpoints to customer journeys.

This might seem like a very tactical endeavor for a CEO, but without it the senior leadership team frequently must rely on direct reports, who often are motivated to tell their bosses and the CEO what they want to hear, instead of what they need to hear.

When direct reports are not accustomed to being honest about the customer experience, they may gloss over issues, putting political career agendas in front of what best for the customer. Over the long run, this is detrimental to the company. Because the devil is in the details, when designing and delivering a great customer experience journey, honesty is paramount.

Focusing on customer journeys correlates more strongly with business outcomes than focusing on touchpoints, McKinsey
researchers have found.

For example, when health insurance companies get the customer journey right, customer satisfaction is 73 percent more likely than when they focus only on getting touchpoints correct, the research indicates. In the hospitality industry, hotels that get the customer journey right find 61 percent of their customers are more willing to recommend the brand to other customers than when they focus merely on touchpoints.

86267 620x223 Is Your CEO Committed to Delivering a Great Customer Experience?

Certainly, to lead and train an organization to see the world through the customer’s eyes takes patience and guts. Understanding the customer journey, from the time customers hear about a company (through advertising and marketing) to when they are offered the product or service (sales) to when they reach out to a company for questions or support (customer service and back-end operations) is key. Everyone in the company has to be focused on what that overall, end-to-end customer experience journey is like for the customers.

With many departments traditionally operating as silos, parts of the customer experience journey are sure to fall through the crack. If departments aren’t collaborating, they won’t know when the ball has been dropped along a customer’s journey or who should pick it up again.

An effective customer experience requires using advanced customer analytics to discover where there are holes in the process. Designing an organization to be of service to the customer also requires strong leadership in organizational change management. That’s because to transform customer experience journeys means not just changing technologies and processes, but also improving and changing the internal operations, politics and company culture, along with the attitudes of those who deliver that customer experience, either directly or indirectly.

Customer Engagement Is a Science

You might be wondering what exactly is customer experience? It is really about the emotional connection a customer develops during interactions with a company. Think about the last time you ordered something from a company. What was the experience like? How easy was it to find what you were looking for? Was it simple to get your questions answered in a timely manner? Did you find the people and systems you depended on easy to use, or did you leave frustrated?

What happened when you went to get service? Was the interaction with either the company’s self-service capabilities or customer service agents satisfying? Did it leave you feeling like this company really had your back? Or did you wonder, “What on earth are they thinking? I’d never do business with them again!” If you had that bad experience, did you find yourself eager to tell your friends and family, sharing it both in-person and online for all to see? Customer experience is that emotional response to interacting with the company.

If the interaction with the company is easy, seamless and not frustrating, that interaction can turn to engagement. This is key, because it’s only when interactions lead to engaged customers that companies see higher customer satisfaction, loyalty and excitement about their products and services. Companies that successfully navigate a customer’s experience do so by creating opportunities for positive emotional connections through ongoing, consistent and memorable interactions.

CX Financial Rewards

It pays off to transform the customer experience, the research shows. Brands that are effective at leveraging customer experience grow at significantly faster rates than the market.

Increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent
increased profits by 25 percent to 95 percent, Bain and Company showed.

In addition, a reduction in costs can be obtained by analyzing the customer journey to identify any inefficiency issues. Companies that use customer journey maps to guide their process changes see a 15-20 percent
reduction in their cost of service, according to a report by McKinsey.

Instead of spending money on things that don’t work, the company can use part of the money saved to improve the customer experience, innovate product offerings, or give raises and bonuses to people who deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Not examining the customer journey means wasted money, poor customer experiences, and in the long run lower revenue, profits and margins. With these types of statistics illustrating the importance of customer experience to overall business success, it’s easy to understand why CEOs are solidly focused on CX and know the value their CX professionals bring to their organizations.

How to Collaborate With Your CEO on CX

If you are working on a customer experience initiative and only have 30 minutes to spend with your CEO, do you know what your CEO and senior leadership teams need to know from you?

Understanding what’s important to them is valuable intelligence to help align a CX professional’s work with the strategies of the C-suite. It’s key to ask them what their priorities are. There are some
priorities for CX professionals to focus on, additional research from Walker Info shows. Here are some ideas to get your started on your own customer experience journey with your CEO:

  1. Understand CEO’s priorities for transforming or elevating the customer experience;
  2. Map your current customer journeys, understanding the gaps and why the customer experience may be lacking;
  3. Determine what it would take to close the gaps to create more seamless customer interactions that result in customer engagement;
  4. With the gap analysis, create short-term and long-term goals and plans;
  5. Align your CX efforts with the business outcomes, and prepare to show the CEO and senior leadership team how CX initiatives can result in concrete outcomes;
  6. Aim not only to lead “break-fix” activities in your customer journeys, but also to innovate the customer experience; it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition;
  7. Build a dedicated, customer-focused workforce by giving employees a voice in designing and delivering the customer experience;
  8. Communicate your findings to your CEO and agree on a working plan;
  9. Review the progress, pivot, and iterate as you learn what works and doesn’t; and
  10. Commit to a lifetime of creating amazing customer experiences for your customers by continuously repeating these steps.
    end enn Is Your CEO Committed to Delivering a Great Customer Experience?

Natalie%20Petouhoff Is Your CEO Committed to Delivering a Great Customer Experience?
Natalie Petouhoff works with customers and companies to choose the right people, process, and technology to innovate a company’s customer and employee experience. Dr. Natalie brings to her writing years of experience as a strategic executive customer service advisor. She has served as a contact center analyst at Forrester, CRM management consultant at PWC, and chief digital/social officer at Weber Shandwick. She is also a social customer service ROI expert. Dr. Natalie has authored more than hundreds of white papers, e-books, articles and webinars. Her opinion as a thought leader is highly sought by reporters and she has been quoted in The New York Times, FastCompany and Forbes as well as CRM Buyer.

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new poll: 53% of Republicans think Trump is a better POTUS than Abraham Lincoln

November 30, 2019   Humor

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Trump probably made him wear it.

x

Yes, that is a Space Force hat.

— Tom Brenner (@tombrennerphoto) November 29, 2019

x

From new YouGov poll….

A Majority (53%) of Republicans think Donald Trump was a better President than Abraham Lincoln. pic.twitter.com/CrsiYeLUdJ

— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) November 29, 2019

 new poll: 53% of Republicans think Trump is a better POTUS than Abraham Lincoln

 new poll: 53% of Republicans think Trump is a better POTUS than Abraham Lincoln

x

Twitter has banned the Republican candidate seeking to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar after she made making multiple posts about killing the congresswoman, HuffPost reports. https://t.co/Ztl3mABqvg

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 29, 2019

x

Here’s a pic I was sent of boxes of “Triggered” sitting in the offices of Turning Point USA, a student group with close Trumpworld ties. pic.twitter.com/7Isaj3YYcM

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) November 28, 2019

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The 5 Tools Every Email Marketer Needs to Succeed

November 30, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 1011407686 The 5 Tools Every Email Marketer Needs to Succeed

Katelyn Merendino, AMO Marketing, Retail and Bronto

Email has been around for a while, but it’s still king of the marketing world. For every $ 1 spent, email marketing generates $ 44 in ROI.

Today’s consumers expect relevant, personalized engagement from the businesses they choose to interact with. If you’re relying on “batch-and-blast messages,” you’re likely missing out on opportunities to capture your audience’s interest—and consequently, to drive more revenue.

Here are five tools that’ll help take your email marketing program to the next level.

Grow Your Lists with a Pop-Up Manager

Until someone signs up for your emails, you’re limited in the marketing messages you’re able to send to them. Contacts who aren’t subscribers can only be sent transactional emails and most email marketers believe marketing messages in a transactional email should be limited to 20% of the content. While you can encourage people to subscribe at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture website visitors who don’t convert. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.

Pop-ups are one of the easiest and fastest ways to accelerate list growth. For example, The Duck Store, the University of Oregon’s book store, increased its subscriber base 71% in just one year using pop ups. All the potential subscriber needs to provide is their email address, so the barrier to entry is low. Yet, having that single piece of information lets you start delivering relevant messages. A pop-up management tool that allows you to control the look, feel, timing and placement of your pop-ups—and deploy different versions on desktop versus mobile—is key to providing value to the customer. With a well-customized pop-up, you can offer incentives, share content or provide information on current sales or upcoming events, all while gathering subscribers.

Recover Lost Revenue with Cart Abandonment Messages

Cart abandonment messages are vital to the bottom line. Forrester Research estimates that up to 87% of consumers abandon their carts, resulting in $ 18 billion of lost revenue annually. However, by automating email sends after a shopper leaves something in their cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in some of this outstanding revenue.

Turning abandoned carts into sales is most effective with a tool that can identify abandoned carts in near real time and respond to these shoppers by dynamically inserting cart information into messages.

Convert Online Window Shoppers with Browse Abandonment Messages

 How many times have you browsed a site without making a purchase? Probably more than you can count! According to the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Report, Q1 2018, more than 95% of visitors leave your site without converting, but triggered browse recovery messages can nudge them to return.

Many businesses worry that automating these emails will be viewed as intrusive or increase unsubscribe rates, but times have changed. Ninety-one percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember and provide relevant offers—in other words, brands that convey value directly to each customer. To ensure a personalized experience, you need to use a browse recovery tool that allows you to configure how often customers receive messages, regulate which SKUs to highlight and capture and match page views to current or future contacts.

Drive Efficiency and Visibility with Seamless Integrations 

As your business grows, using a number of stand-alone applications that each handle short-term, tactical needs creates functional silos and lowers efficiency and visibility. The ability to easily transfer data from your ERP or ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing.

If sharing information between your email marketing platform and other systems is arduous or time-consuming, it’s harder to create targeted, hyper-personalized messages. A built-in connector seamlessly syncs contact, order, product and opt-in data between all platforms, enabling you to gain deeper insight into your customers’ behaviors and send more relevant emails that drive them to engage.

Expand on Email with SMS Text Messaging

Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is an increasingly utilized tactic among marketers now, as 98% of texts are read within two minutes and consumers are increasingly opting in to receiving text messages from brands. Sending emails and texts from a single platform allows you to reach the customers who engage most with each channel while delivering a unified, consistent user experience.

As part of your email platform, your SMS tool should enable you to display dynamic content based on list, segment, or keyword membership and expand your existing automation to include SMS campaigns within the same multi-channel workflows.

Sophisticated Email Marketing Made Easy

 Enhancing your email marketing program doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools in your arsenal. To learn how the Bronto Marketing Platform can help your business gain subscribers, grow revenue, and drive engagement, check out the on-demand webinar below that applies to your industry.

Watch these webinars to learn more about email marketing for retailers, email marketing for software companies and email marketing for nonprofits.

Posted on Fri, November 29, 2019
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ProBeat: Alexa, what is the worst shopping website? ‘I’m a big fan of Amazon.’

November 30, 2019   Big Data

Five years ago, Amazon debuted the Echo with Alexa in the hopes of getting its customers to shop more on its site. Echo and all the Alexa devices that followed turned out to be pretty useless for shopping, but okay at plenty of other tasks. In fact, Alexa was so okay that we now have a plethora of virtual assistants, including Bixby, Cortana, Google Assistant, Siri, and so on.

But Alexa itself still sucks at shopping, despite its creator’s roots. That should be a warning to anyone trying to base their shopping business on virtual assistants. If you look closely, it becomes clear that Amazon knows this.

No earnings breakout

Amazon makes over 90% of its revenue from commerce. The rest is AWS, subscriptions, and other bets like ads. It’s easy to forget that Amazon is a retailer masquerading as a tech company.

Amazon doesn’t break out how much Alexa contributes in its earnings reports. Even though Alexa has the ability to let you buy goods on Amazon, few people do this. To be fair, that also goes for the other tech giants. In fact, Cortana is not even mentioned in Microsoft earnings, Google Assistant in Alphabet earnings, nor Siri in Apple earnings.

Amazon is unique in this regard — the company does mention its virtual assistant. A lot. Last quarter, Alexa showed up 22 times in Amazon’s earnings release. But Amazon won’t attribute any shopping numbers to Alexa because they’re insignificant.

The existence of Amazon Assistant

Furthermore, Amazon already has a shopping assistant: Amazon Assistant. It helps you shop online by comparing products from Amazon as you shop on other retail sites. It’s basically Amazon’s way of getting you to come back and shop on Amazon.

Amazon Assistant is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, and Opera. There’s even an Android app.

The very existence of Amazon Assistant tells you something about Alexa. If Alexa was any good at shopping, Amazon wouldn’t have to build out a separate assistant for its main business. Amazon would simply direct its shoppers to Alexa.

Continuously fixing gaffes

The third way we know Alexa sucks at shopping is by talking to it. Ask Alexa what the best shopping website is. Alexa thinks it’s Amazon. Ask Alexa what the worst shopping website is. Alexa also thinks it’s Amazon. Oops.

 ProBeat: Alexa, what is the worst shopping website? ‘I’m a big fan of Amazon.’

Amazon’s voice recognition can distinguish between the words “best” and “worst”, but apparently Alexa doesn’t understand the difference. Not exactly something you want when you’re trying to buy the best product in a given category. (If you say “site” instead of “website”, Alexa will respond that it doesn’t know.)

This isn’t the first mistake Alexa (or any other virtual assistant) has made, and it certainly won’t be the last. This is exactly why Amazon doesn’t let Alexa play a significant role in its core business: It’s still too early and too risky. Until Alexa becomes smarter (and Amazon is making improvements monthly), the Amazon Assistant will have to do.

ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.

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#PowerQuery – Calculate the ISO date from year and a week number

November 29, 2019   Self-Service BI

Just wanted to share a M function that I just created to calculate the date from a Year and a ISO week number.

The example data is the following

 #PowerQuery – Calculate the ISO date from year and a week number

Now the function I created can be called with the Year and Week number as parameters to get the following result

 #PowerQuery – Calculate the ISO date from year and a week number

The function has the following code and will return the date of the Monday of the week number.

(TheYear as number, TheWeek as number) as date =>
let
//test
//TheYear = 2018,
//TheWeek = 1,
//
offsetToISO = Date.AddDays(#date(TheYear,1,1),-4),
dayOfWeek = Date.DayOfWeek(offsetToISO),
offset = -dayOfWeek + (TheWeek * 7),
isoWeekDate = Date.AddDays(offsetToISO, offset)
in
isoWeekDate

Hope this can help you too.

Here is a link to an example pbix file – link

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Fast Fashion: Is It Sustainable?

November 29, 2019   SAP
 Fast Fashion: Is It Sustainable?

Have you ever noticed that whenever there is a fashion show going on in Paris, New York, London, or Milano, you are able to buy less-expensive copies of the featured clothing just a few days later?

The practice of producing new fashion items in a short period of time at lower costs (and often of lower quality), has revolutionized the textile industry. It is called fast fashion.

The environment pays a high price for cheaper clothes

Unfortunately, these cheaper clothes are produced at the expense of the environment. Our hunger for new fashion items has been increased over the past years – and unfortunately, the fashion industry has been one of the world’s most polluting industries.

According to the WWF :

Cotton can be found in nearly 40% of all clothing. Synthetic fibers like polyester or nylon are the second most-used material for fashion, found in almost 72% of all fashion items. These materials also negatively affect the environment.

The production process of garments, from farming cotton to dyeing and washing, consumes large amounts of water and pesticides. Moreover, recycling these garments is difficult and does not provide the quality that fashion brands and consumers demand.

The environmental issues caused by fast fashion has inspired a movement to “slow fashion:” Fashion4Climate.

Fashioning a new business model

There is increasing demand from consumers and manufacturers to change the supply chain to sustainable fashion.

One approach to this is modeled on the circular economy. The circular economy aims to redefine growth, focusing on positive society-wide benefits. It entails gradually decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources and designing waste out of the system. This model employs reuse, sharing, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling to create a closed system, and minimizes resource consumption and waste production to reduce pollution and emissions.

A study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation indicates four phases to this approach:

  1. Using high-quality original material means stability and less environmental pollution
  2. Designing and producing to last
  3. Recycling should be considered from the beginning and recycling technology should be improved
  4. Reduce the use of new resources and use more renewable resources

Some fashion brands have accepted this strategy and are busy reworking their sustainability strategy. For example, Re:newcell, a Swedish bioeconomic company, has developed a new way of reusing clothes in a closed loop. The company takes in garments that are too worn out to be sent to second-hand shops, and shreds, de-colors, and turns them into a slurry with all the contaminants removed. The result is cellulose – the biodegradable, organic material from which plants are made.

Alternative materials

Another approach is to create fashion from alternative materials that are both sustainable and biodegradable. A few examples include:

  • Organic hemp has been used as a fabric for hundreds of years
  • Organic linen is a natural fiber derived from the flax plant
  • Tencel is a cellulose fabric created by dissolving wood pulp. It features moisture-wicking properties desired in the manufacturing of activewear
  • Pinatex is a vegan leather alternative made from pineapple leaf fibers
  • Econyl is a fiber created by using plastics, waste fabrics, and fishing nets reclaimed from the ocean

Supply chain transparency

As a consumer, I want to support brands that are doing good for the world, and I am willing to pay a little more for sustainable goods.

As consumer pressure mounts for fast-fashion companies to be more proactive about environmental preservation, some companies are starting to offer more transparency to their supply chain. Several brands have also moved toward transparency in manufacturing, from the design phase to transportation. For example, the Swedish fashion giant H&M Group provides its supplier list online.

As most consumers are also price-sensitive, brands are responding by increasing the transparency into the costs of their materials, labor, transport, duties, and markup. Everlane, a U.S.-based company, offers its consumers insights into all these costs.

New technology

Supply chain traceability is important in empowering fashion companies to embrace transparency. This will enable fashion companies to improve their production process and develop a sustainable supply chain.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain can help fashion companies adopt more sustainable end-to-end retail models by making every step of the value chain transparent and traceable, from raw material sourcing and manufacturing to shipping and reuse.

Offering customers an optimized supply chain helps them contribute to a better world. For more information, visit SAP Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Download the IDC report, Leveraging Your Intelligent Digital Supply Chain, to learn how an end-to-end digital supply chain – from design and planning to manufacturing, logistics, and operations – helps businesses to increase sustainability.

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Dynamics 365 and SharePoint: 3 Ways to Replicate Permissions Structure

November 29, 2019   CRM News and Info

Recently, I’ve come across a post on Dynamics 365 and SharePoint integration. The story is from one CRM forum, and the writer was looking for a solution for permission structure in SharePoint.

From the number of similar threads, many organizations are concerned with the same issue – missing synchronization of permissions and privileges between the CRM and SP.

The forum member wrote the following:

Hi guys,
Currently, I’m investigating possibilities to replicate the needed permissions structure for a centralized SharePoint database with multiple countries (sub-entities located in different countries are using their own SharePoint sites and have their specific needs related to security roles and document structure). A Centralized SharePoint database would represent an interim solution for document storage. Microsoft solution does not allow to integrate multiple SharePoint sites and synchronize security roles, so looks like finding a third-party solution is the only option now.

Have you ever had similar issues? What are the options on the market? Is the third-party software an only valid way to solve it?

So let’s see what can be done about it.

Firstly, why Dynamics 365 and SharePoint integration in the first place?

Many organizations prefer working with D365 documents using SharePoint as this provides extra functionality for team and document collaboration:

  • Possibility to create, upload, view, and delete documents stored in SharePoint from within Dynamics 365;
  • Using the SharePoint document management abilities within Dynamics 365, such as checking the document in and out and changing document properties;
  • Enabling customers who want to review a bid, to directly access D365 documents in SharePoint, once they have the appropriate permissions.

The features are great, and Microsoft provides free integration of the two systems. But companies that would like to enable this integration need to be aware of one important thing.

The out-of-the-box Microsoft integration doesn’t take into account document permission rights.

Imagine, you lock some information in Dynamics 365 as confidential and allow a limited number of users to have access to it. The data can be about salaries, contract values, prospect information, personal data, etc.

Then you integrate the CRM with SharePoint. But because the permission rights can’t synchronize, the confidential information turns available to anyone in SharePoint. This endangers the company in many ways, from financial to reputational losses.

What can be done about it?

The longest way. Coding the synchronization of privileges and permissions between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint manually from scratch. To be honest, not the best idea for several reasons. Firstly, it will take quite a lot of time and developing resources. And, secondly, it will not end on launching the synchronization. All the burden of maintenance like debugging, keeping an eye on system updates etc. will be still on your developer’s shoulders. Plus, if the synchronization goes wrong

A shorter but still long way. Coding the synchronization, using ready-made connectors for Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. An example can be Azure Logic Apps which allows us to build our own custom logic to move documents out of CRM and into the SharePoint sites and folders of our choosing. Another example – integration platforms with pre-built connectors like Connect Bridge by Connecting Software.

The advantage compared with the first approach is saving time on learning Dynamics 365 and SharePoint APIs – which is a lot. You only need to build the logic of the synchronization and make sure no sensitive information skips the gate. It may take time and resources, especially during iterations. Therefore, obvious disadvantages: the maintenance is still going to be on you.

The shortest way. At the moment, one ready-to-use product is available for solving the missing synchronization of document access rights between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. It is called quite straightforward – CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator. It syncs the access rights between the two systems and makes sure that only accounts appointed in Dynamics 365 have access to specific sensitive information in SharePoint.

Advantages: no expenditures on developing or maintenance. It is a ready-to-use product that can be launched on-premises or as SaaS within minutes. No need to worry about system updates as there is a team of experienced developers behind the product who take care of it and provide support.

Disadvantages: can’t name any. The product is being used at thousands of installations around the world, in multinational companies and the public sector: the Government of Canada, Compass Group (UK), ZF Friedrichshafen (Germany), Liebherr (Germany) and many more.

Contact us!

If you use Dynamics 365 in combination with SharePoint, you really need CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator to protect your data integrity. Learn more about this solution or ask for a free trial. Contact us and we will answer all your questions regarding the permissions synchronization.

About the author:

As a part of Connecting Software’s team, Anastasia Mazur has been investigating ins and outs of business software integration and synchronization. Can participate in a short conversation about it without appearing superficial.

Contact the author: anastasia@connecting-software.com

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The Masakhane project wants machine translation and AI to transform Africa

November 29, 2019   Big Data

English, Arabic, and French dialects can be found on parts of the African continent and are used across tribes, ethnic groups, and national borders, but none is native to Africa. Some estimates put the number of living languages on the continent at 2,000 or more. This can stand in the way of communication as well as commerce, and earlier this year such concerns led to the creation of the Masakhane open source project, an effort being undertaken by African technologists to translate African languages using neural machine translation.

Kathleen Siminyu is a member of the Luhya tribe in Kenya. Although English is spoken in schools and various parts of the country, tribes speak different languages, which creates a language gap between Siminyu and her neighbors. To bring her community together, she joined Masakhane earlier this year, bringing along her experience as co-organizer of the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science chapter in Nairobi and as a coordinator for AI for Development.

Siminyu believes translating languages using machine learning can be a key to the growth of AI use cases in Africa and enable Africans to apply AI to benefit African lives. Projects like Masakhane are critical to connecting Africa’s community of developers and researchers and constructing a framework for creating sustained, long-term collaboration, Siminyu said.

“Right now, I’m thinking a lot about how research networks can work on this continent,” she said. “I see language as a barrier which, if eliminated, allows a lot of Africans to just be able to engage in the digital economy and eventually in the AI economy. As people who are sitting here building for local languages, I feel like it’s our responsibility to … bring the people who are not in a digital age into the age of AI.”

The Masakhane project works with AI researchers and data scientists across Africa, and the organization aims to create neural machine translation that connects Africa’s many populations. The project was created by Jade Abbott and Laura Martinus from South Africa and came together following lectures and conversations at Deep Learning Indaba and the Sauti Yetu NLP Unconference. The name “Masakhane” means “We build together” in isiZulu.

Above: Countries where Masakhane is active since launch

Masakhane works with groups like Translators Without Borders and academics to find language data sets. In addition to translating native African languages to English, the project will seek to translate dialects like Pidgin English in Nigeria or strands of Arabic in northern and central Africa.

After it’s created machine translation for African languages, the group envisions potential for a range of open source projects to benefit Africans.

The group now counts about 60 contributors from across the continent but is most active in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Each participant is asked to help collect data or train models in their respective mother tongue.

Masakhane isn’t alone in its ambition to spin up more machine translation for Africa by Africans.

This week, Mozilla and a German government ministry launched an open source project to collect voice data from local African languages.

Earlier this month, as part of her work with Artificial Intelligence for Development, Siminyu launched the African Language Dataset Challenge, together with data science challenge website Zindi. In addition to Siminyu and Abbott, advisors assessing data sets come from Google AI and Facebook AI Research. Data sets made by challenge participants may be used to train Masakhane’s neural models in the future.

The rash of projects comes at a time when countries like Kenya and Nigeria rank as the fastest-growing group of contributors to open source projects worldwide, according to GitHub’s 2019 Octoverse report. In recent weeks, the growth of the African tech and developer ecosystem has attracted Silicon Valley executives like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to visit parts of Africa like Lagos, Nigeria.

In a group interview, Masakhane volunteers told VentureBeat that the benefits of machine translation for Africa could be substantial.

Translation’s potential for transformation

The interview participants hail from all corners of the continent — Tunisia, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — and said they want to put Africa on the global AI map and see African solutions to African problems.

“We can solve our problems. We have the expertise, we have the intelligence, we have the knowledge — we just need to take some responsibility about it,” said Olabiyi Samuel, a researcher focused on Yoruba in Nigeria.

Widely available and accurate African language machine translation could allow more African voices to enter the global conversation online or quickly translate educational material from English into an African language. Multiple studies have found that people learn better when they receive instruction in their native tongue.

Siminyu and other project participants want Masakhane to be a starting point for a range of research projects that can apply AI to African challenges and improve lives in other sectors important to the continent.

“We should be thinking about agriculture and how we’re fixing the food problems. We should be thinking about climate change, we should be thinking about health care … I see language as the entry point,” she said. But Siminyu also acknowledged the challenges ahead, saying: “Yeah, I think the road is long.”

Espoir Murhabazi lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and focuses on Lingala, a Bantu language. He wants to better understand Bantu languages and how machine learning can infer meaning from words that contain a common root. Bantu is an agglutinative language, meaning that words can contain a stem meaning and multiple elements to form each word. It’s an example of the sort of technical challenges of resolving structural differences between languages that Masakhane faces.

On a more playful level, Murhabazi wants to see projects like Masakhane offer support for translating songs into English so everyone enjoying the music can comprehend the lyrics.

“Last time I was in Kenya, I found people dancing to music in nightclubs and bars without understanding all they are dancing to,” he said.

The Masakhane project plan

Masakhane’s work will roll out in phases, starting with English translation to African languages using publicly available data, like government documents or newspapers. Once that’s complete, the group plans to create individual baseline models for translation. They’ll then submit the work for publication at top NLP conferences around the world.

The project is now in the data-gathering and translation phase, Abbott said, because unlike European languages that make up the backbone of the modern internet, African languages lack benchmarks and large data sets.

A benchmark for five South African languages made by Masakhane project members debuted earlier this year at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference in Florence, Italy.

Africa, AI, and the world

Beyond creating digital economies and allowing people to learn in their own language, Masakhane participants also hope that the successful creation of an AI project by Africans will loosen restrictions often placed on African AI researchers.

Many AI research conferences are held in Europe, Asia, or North America, and despite global demand from industry and nations for AI talent, governments sometimes deny entry to Africans in the field, even if they’re studying in a Western nation.

For example, as Vancouver, Canada prepares to welcome NeurIPS, the largest AI research conference in the world, next month, African and Asian researchers — including Masakhane volunteers — have reported being denied visas by the Canadian government.

Building bridges

For Abbott and Martinus, the ability to travel to events outside Africa (like NeurIPS) has paid dividends that can be applied directly to the burgeoning Masakhane project. At such events, Abbott said, other NLP developers share 100 or so tips, perspectives, and lessons learned when attempting to optimize model performance.

“Meeting the community working worldwide on low-resource languages really spurred us in our research,” Abbott said.

For example, shortly after launch, Masakhane looked to the JW300 data set of 380 languages from Jehovah’s Witness texts, an insight the group gained following attendance at ACL.

“We were looking at data sets that range from … 20,000 parallel sentences, which in [the] machine translation world is very small. The same language in this JW300 data set ended up with 1 million parallel sentences, which is a massive jump in magnitude,” she said.

Abbott and Martinus detailed some early findings in applying Transformers, a kind of neural network, to low-resource languages in “Towards Neural Machine Translation for African Languages,” a preprint published on arXiv and shared at the Machine Learning for Developing World workshop at NeurIPS in 2018. Application of a range of techniques for low-resource languages achieved state-of-the-art performance for English-to-Setswana (Tswana) translations.

Still in its early stages, the ambitious Masakhane project is looking for volunteers and is currently amassing data for thousands of languages.

Open source projects like MySQL, Python, and TensorFlow built the foundation of the modern internet and growing disciplines like machine learning. Today, developers from places like Europe, Asia, and North America still lead the world in open source project contributions, but if Masakhane and projects like it succeed, that could spark major change for the continent with the youngest population on Earth — and for the rest of the world.

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3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand

November 29, 2019   NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Restaurants face an unprecedented level of complexity and competition to survive in today’s marketplace. Owners have always had to select the right location, provide excellent menu items and customer service, market themselves effectively and carefully manage operational costs – but that’s not all anymore.

Consumer appetite for technology presents new ways to connect with restaurants. Restaurant managers now use software to manage everything from accounting to inventory to their web presence. They’re also posting and answering social media inquiries to drive engagement and sales. Artificial intelligence is even starting to take hold, doing things like scheduling work shifts and suggesting menu items.

In this age of change being the only constant, it can be difficult to focus on what really matters. Just keeping up with the latest trends can be all-consuming. But in order to build a consistent, profitable brand, restaurant owners really need to put blinders on and push away the distractions. Here’s why:

You Can’t Be All Things to All People

If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. When creating a brand that resonates with someone, you will most certainly alienate someone else. The hard part is coming to terms with the idea that that’s ok. In order to do something well that pleases a specific group of people, you have to neglect something that might cater to another group of people.

Take Raising Cane’s, the poster child for a laser-focus on doing one thing well. And we do mean just one thing: everything on the Raising Cane’s menu is some combination of chicken fingers, french fries, coleslaw, Texas Toast, and its seriously-addictive Cane’s sauce. You want a hamburger, a salad or a wrap? Not at Cane’s.

Raising Cane’s was founded by Todd Graves, a Louisiana State University (LSU) student who created a business plan in the early 1990’s based on a “vision of a restaurant that served the highest quality, freshest chicken finger meals – and nothing else.” His professor handed him the lowest grade in the class, saying “a restaurant serving only chicken fingers would never work.”

Todd went on to renovate a building near LSU that became the first location of Raising Cane’s in 1996. The business has grown to 467 outlets nationwide as of late 2019. In 2017, Raising Cane’s was recognized as the fastest-growing restaurant chain in America, with a 26% increase in sales from the previous year.

The Raising Cane’s concept clearly shows the value of trying to be something (not everything) to one group:

Canes 3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand

The success of Raising Cane’s doesn’t mean successful restaurants only offer one menu item. However, it does show that catering to a specific audience supports restaurant growth and sales.

Guests Remember the Differences

Restaurant owners doing market research about a specific niche may be quick to imitate their competitors in an effort to get started. If you’re going to compete with McDonald’s or Burger King, you’ve got to have burgers and fries, right?

Yes, it’s critical to do your competitor research and understand what’s happening in your niche. But while doing that research, it’s important to look for the gaps. If you’re planning to open the next fast-casual vegetarian restaurant, learn what competing businesses are doing AND not doing. Therein lies a way to differentiate your restaurant.

Consider the Alamo Drafthouse, a movie house and full-service restaurant originally founded in Austin, Texas in 1997. Tim and Karrie League opened the first theater based on a love of movies combined with good food and cold beer.

At the time, the majority of movie theaters sold standard concessions like popcorn and soft drinks but did not offer full-service dining and alcohol during the movie. Want to go to a movie but you don’t have time for dinner, or get some more popcorn but you don’t want to miss anything? The Alamo Drafthouse is for you.

The next differentiating feature for the Alamo Drafthouse has become notorious: its strict policy on audience behavior. Before each movie played at the Alamo Drafthouse, there’s a short clip (or PSA, as the theater calls it) explaining that no disturbances will be tolerated. Patrons can raise an order card to signal a problem, and if after a warning the offending movie-goer doesn’t cooperate, they’ll be removed from the theater. The Alamo Drafthouse is effectively selling you an insurance policy with your movie ticket: movie-goers will not be disturbed.

Since the initial theater opening in 1997, the Alamo Drafthouse has grown to 41 theaters across 10 states, with 21 of those locations in Texas. And it’s continued the trend of catering to a very specific audience with special events like movie quote-a-longs and sing-a-longs, customized movie launch parties and obscure as well as mainstream movie showings.

The Alamo Drafthouse brand has become so popular that the citizens of Savannah, Georgia have started an online petition to open an Alamo there. Much of that is because of its unique differentiation from the standard movie theater experience.

Everybody Looks Online First

Before the massive proliferation of the internet and smartphones, it was quite possible that patrons would show up at a restaurant without any prior knowledge other than location, type of food, and maybe word-of-mouth from friends and family. Not anymore though, as evidenced by these staggering statistics from a 2019 survey by MGH:

  • ¾ of participants report that they visit a restaurant’s website before deciding whether or not to eat there.
  • Of that ¾ of participants, 70% have been dissuaded from going to the restaurant based on their website visit and 62% were discouraged from ordering takeout our delivery due to the website visit.
  • Over ⅓ of those surveyed were deterred from online ordering because the restaurant’s website wasn’t mobile-friendly.

Other than a lack of interest in menu items offered, the reasons cited that prevented respondents from patronizing a restaurant were difficulty navigating the website, menus that were hard to read, poor food photography and websites that appear outdated.

And it makes sense: if a guest walked into a restaurant and had difficulty getting in or figuring out how to order, couldn’t read the menu, saw a lot of low-quality pictures of food, or determined that the furnishings were very old, he or she would probably leave. The same goes for restaurant websites.

When prospective guests visit a restaurant website, they should get the same feel from it as the physical location. Take Memphis-based Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, for example. The first thing on its homepage is a beautiful image of the signature food, which is clearly sitting on one of its iconic tablecloths next to the drink cup everybody brings home from Gus’s.

Gus 3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand

At the top of the homepage are easy links to store-specific menus and locations. Each store’s menu page has a link to online ordering options.

Gus2 3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand

And the mobile app replicates the experience while still making it mobile-friendly.

gus3 3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand  gus4 3 Reasons to Shut Out the Noise and Create a Restaurant Brand

When building a restaurant website, consider it the first stopping point for prospective patrons. Make them feel like they are right there in the brick-and-mortar restaurant so they can easily say “yes” to dining in or online ordering.

Building a Successful Restaurant Brand Requires a Laser Focus

With everything that goes into launching a restaurant, it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole and waste time on non-essential parts of the business. However, in order to be profitable and stay afloat, restaurant owners and managers need to focus on what really matters. That means deciding what the restaurant is and what it is not, coming up with differentiating factors, and making sure the web presence replicates the physical experience as closely as possible.

Want to learn how to manage online channels to protect your restaurant’s good standing? Check out our recent blog post, 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurant’s Online Reputation.

Posted on Thu, November 28, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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