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Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

January 9, 2021   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Prepare to become more of a fan of your favorite mapping solution within Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps with Maplytic’s December 2020 release! This release is dedicated to enhance popular features that are highly useful to the management teams.

The advancements to the features in this release will allow managers to optimize the creation of their schedules, automate their territories creation, do more with Detail Map without switching screens, and optimize their security access process!

So without further ado, let’s unpack this latest release!

Feature Upgrade #1: Advanced Auto Scheduling

With the latest Auto Scheduling feature Auto Scheduling feature, managers and admins can create an automated schedule for multiple users at once. The routes for different users will be shown in different colors on the map. They can also choose to show the routes planned for the selected days only to the required users.
Along with this multi-user scheduling convenience, managers can also consider the existing meetings of their field reps while planning as well as set other advanced preferences.

xadvance auto scheduling 625x286.png.pagespeed.ic.Vyo44cUw7r Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

Feature Upgrade #2: Auto Creation and Drafting Territories

Territory Management just got easier. This latest release allows users to automate their territory management. Users simply have to enter the required records and the regions for creating the territories, enter the number of territories to be created and run the territory operation. Maplytics will start intelligently calculating the inputs and then distribute the plotted records into the territories created and provide the desired number of balanced territories.

xcreate territory 1.png.pagespeed.ic.5ihlUp5gDt Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

xauto creation 625x299.png.pagespeed.ic.zfbLujZW6S Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

Draft Territories

Couldn’t create all the territories you wanted in one go? Unsatisfied with the created territories and want to rework? Need to re-optimize territories after feedback? Whatever the reason, Maplytics can help in any situation. Users can now leave their half-completed or under-progress territories as a draft and continue on the same before finalizing and creating territories in the CRM. There are no limits on the rework process, after every rework users can choose to finalize and create the territories or simply save it again as a draft.

xdraft territory 625x295.png.pagespeed.ic.Jzsa4LG3on Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

Feature Upgrade #3: Detail Map Control

PowerApps Component Feature (PCF) allows users to perform actions without switching screens. The most recent release added four PCF controls and Detail Map PCF controls and Detail Map was one of them. It enabled the users to perform some of the Maplytics features like Proximity search, Route Optimisation, Categorisation, and POI on the dataset page itself without switching to any map pages.

This release takes the efficiency of Detail Map PCF Control forward and allows users to use more Maplytics feature within the Detail Map control. Users can plot multiple data sources, categorize multiple data source based on respective attributes selected, plot data By Region or By Drawing and also plot the current GPS location as the current location on the map while using the mobile.

xdetail map control 625x294.png.pagespeed.ic.A4WTgUcG d Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

Feature Upgrade #4: Selective Security Access to multiple users and teams

Security is an integral factor in any organization. Maintaining a strict need-to-know and need-to-access system helps businesses maintain confidentiality and data integrity. With Maplytic’s Security Templates Maplytic’s Security Templates, managers and admins could achieve this by providing selective access of Maplytics actions to their users or teams. This feature allowed them to create a template with selective actions enabled and then assign it to the required Maplytics users.

We went a step further and added a level of efficiency to this by providing the ability to assign the template to many users or teams at once. Bulk assigning can be done by selecting multiple users or even the whole team that needs to be assigned with a template. Tracking is also easy because managers or admins can keep a track of which Maplytics features each user has access to.

xselective security access 625x293.png.pagespeed.ic.brrbpYKoLQ Auto Scheduling, Territory Management and More Exciting Updates in your Favorite Maps Integration App for Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps December Release!

This was the latest updates from the latest 2020 December release! With Automated Territory creation, Multi-user Appointment Planning, Advanced Detail Map PCF control, and bulk security templates, users can truly tap into the convenience and intelligence provided by Maplytics.

So what’s the wait? Upgrade your Maplytics version to this latest Maplytics solution to enjoy the upgraded benefits! You can also send us an email at crm@inogic.com to get a live demonstration of all the latest features.

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Teradata Extends Hybrid Multi-Cloud Capabilities as Customers Move More Workloads to the Cloud

December 21, 2020   BI News and Info
teradata extends hybrid multi cloud capabilities.jpg?width=640&height=336&ext= Teradata Extends Hybrid Multi Cloud Capabilities as Customers Move More Workloads to the Cloud

Teradata QueryGrid Expands Access to Data with Broad Ecosystem Connectivity Enabling Customers to Leverage Data as their Greatest Asset

Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the cloud data analytics platform company, today announced it is extending the hybrid multi-cloud capability of Vantage, enabling customers to access data and analytics across heterogeneous technologies and public cloud providers with new cloud-native capabilities. With the latest release of Teradata QueryGrid, Teradata customers can connect to a vast array of new data sources regardless of where the data resides – in the cloud, on multiple clouds, on-premises, or any combination thereof – for timely and cost-effective analytics.

As organizations increasingly move all or part of their data infrastructure to the cloud or multiple clouds, the number of different data sources and processing engines continues to increase, as does the demand for timely access to data. Companies need to be able to connect to, access and combine information from all data environments at the same time, and at scale, to enable truly effective analytics. This scalable, parallel access to data sources helps companies leverage data as their greatest asset, providing them the information they need to make the best business decisions possible.

“Our customers are the largest and most complex companies in the world, and their data infrastructure and processing environments reflect this complexity. When it comes to these enterprises, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to data analytics. They require the ability to query multiple data sources across any environment – in the cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid or on-premises – at the same time, without sacrificing speed or accuracy, and at the lowest possible cost,” said Hillary Ashton, Chief Product Officer at Teradata. “With these cloud-native updates to Vantage’s high-speed data fabric, we continue to give our customers the utmost choice and flexibility in how and when they choose to access their data, while also eliminating data movement and increasing performance – optimizing cost and delivering analytics that matter.”

In addition to providing customers with parallel access to data at scale, Teradata QueryGrid also gives companies the ability to dynamically access data in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and push processing down to where the data resides, thereby reducing data movement, decreasing costs, and reducing time to query. This is especially useful when accessing data in cloud environments where there is an egress fee for exporting out data.

Starburst Enterprise Presto Integration

To extend the company’s reach to the most requested technologies, Teradata has partnered with Starburst Data to integrate a new Presto connector that allows Teradata Vantage users to leverage Starburst Enterprise Presto as part of QueryGrid. This integration with Starburst Enterprise Presto allows Vantage customers to connect to a vast array of new data sources that enable connectivity in a modern cloud architecture, including:

  • MongoDB,
  • Amazon Redshift,
  • Databricks Delta Lake,
  • Apache Cassandra,
  • Google BigQuery,
  • and numerous other data sources and processing engines.

“Starburst is on a mission to enable better and faster decisions by providing a single point of access to all data, no matter where it lives,” said Justin Borgman, Chairman and CEO, Starburst. “By combining Starburst Enterprise Presto with QueryGrid, we are able to offer our joint customers unprecedented reach to high-performance analytics across heterogeneous technologies and deployment platforms.”

Teradata Vantage with QueryGrid is certified on all the major cloud platforms including Google Cloud, AWS and Azure, and now has native integration with key cloud-native technologies such as Google Cloud Dataproc, Azure HDInsight, and Amazon EMR. 

For Teradata customers maintaining an on-premises presence or working with hybrid cloud systems, Teradata has also announced an upgrade to its IntelliFlex platform featuring the latest second Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with 33% more cores than the previous generation. The latest release of the IntelliFlex platform provides customers with up to 30% performance improvement on typical data warehouse workloads and up to 40% on CPU intensive workloads, as well as a 50% increase in memory per node.

Availability

The latest release of Teradata QueryGrid is available globally, today.

The latest update to Teradata Intelliflex is available globally, today.

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Trump’s penultimate regulatory roll-back: no more emotional support peacocks on planes

December 6, 2020   Humor
 Trumps penultimate regulatory roll back: no more emotional support peacocks on planes

The Department of Transportation says it will no longer require airlines to accommodate emotional support animals other than trained service dogs.

Soon, you will no longer be able to bring your emotional-support peacock on an airplane.  U.S. tightens definition of service animals to only dogs. The masks are always a pain in the ass anyway. The ban on pot-bellied pigs won’t stop Trump from going to his rally in Valdosta GA on Saturday at 7pm ET.

x

Airlines argued that passengers abused the situation to bring a menagerie of animals on board including cats, turtles, pot-bellied pigs and, in one case, a peacock. https://t.co/o3D2jOgHL7

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) December 3, 2020

United Airlines turned away Brooklyn artist Ventiko and her big bird Dexter, after she tried to bring the service peacock onboard her flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Los Angeles.

Airlines have allowed some passengers with emotional or psychiatric problems to take therapy animals with them on board.

www.nj.com/…

x

A new Department of Transportation rule says airlines don’t have to treat emotional support animals as service animals and allows carriers to limit service animals to dogs only https://t.co/sYZOLQuxKA

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) December 2, 2020

x

Instead of getting yourself a passive emotional support animal, who’s there to comfort you after being distressed.

Instead get yourself an emotional support wolverine. The ESW is a proactive solution, finding who is doing you a distress, and mauling the shit out of ‘em. pic.twitter.com/ooSRoj8Z7W

— Doc Wolvy, Not in Tweet Gulog for Horny Crimes, MD (@Doc_Wolverine) December 2, 2020

 Trumps penultimate regulatory roll back: no more emotional support peacocks on planes

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Reimagining a more equitable sharing economy in the post-COVID-19 world

November 8, 2020   Big Data
 Reimagining a more equitable sharing economy in the post COVID 19 world

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The first saplings of the sharing economy grew from the ashes of the last financial crisis in 2007-2008. Looking back from the vantage point of 2020, it’s easy to forget the original ideals that many of the earliest proponents of the sharing economy held. The idea was that new models of cooperation, coupled with advances in smartphone technology, would enable communities to pool their collective resources, making consumption more social and sustainable. And we would all be winners; lenders could monetize their stuff while borrowers could save money by renting rather than owning.

Most early entrants, however, found they couldn’t generate critical mass to create sustainable peer-to-peer marketplaces, whether that was for power tools, musical instruments, or anything else. Instead, what emerged is a handful of all-powerful platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb that connect consumers to services, which are often delivered by “gig workers” in low-paid and highly precarious forms of employment. In turn, this has sparked countless conflicts between platform providers such as Uber and Airbnb and governments that are attempting to regulate their business models.

This current incarnation of the sharing economy, which has now penetrated so many aspects of our everyday lives, is arguably one of the biggest legacies of the last recession. But as we now enter the COVID-19-induced economic slowdown, it’s time to shape what we want the next chapter of this industry to look like, before conflicts worsen.

Many of these conflicts have been borne out of unintended consequences. These platforms were originally intended to be mediums of mutually beneficial exchanges between private individuals who occasionally monetize their spare time or dormant possessions. Therefore, there was little thought put into things such as workers’ rights or short-stay rental regulations.

But as platforms have become dominated by professional gig workers (in the case of Uber and DoorDash, for example) or by professional hosts (in the case of Airbnb), the negative consequences are clearly visible. Frequent news of striking gig workers and protesting local residents in cities around the world show us that existing models of participation in the sharing economy are no longer fit for purpose.

Preventing the overprofessionalization of platforms

A perfect case study in the unintended consequences of the sharing economy is Airbnb. When it launched in 2008, it was intended to be an easy way for people to monetize space they weren’t using, such as a spare room on occasion or their entire home while they were away. What we now have is a platform dominated by professional hosts, with entire sub-industries supporting it, from management agencies to shady let-to-let business practices and get-rich-quick courses run by “Airbnb business gurus.”

The impact of the professionalization of Airbnb hosting is well documented. Local residents in global cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles have had enough. From rowdy parties every night of the week to rent price inflation and the hollowing out of local services, Airbnb’s negative consequences are real, and residents across the world are feeling them. It should be no surprise, therefore, that legislation is now being passed in many of the most affected locations in order to curtail the use and spread of this platform.

But this is not to say that there is anything inherently bad about Airbnb’s business model. Rather, it was the way the platform evolved — away from live-in hosts letting out their spare rooms to professionals letting multiple properties — that have created these issues. Therefore, a “back to basics” approach with measures to prevent the oversaturation of “professionals” on such platforms would help to lessen many of these pitfalls. Such measures could be supported by regulation and decided democratically at the local level, as we’re now starting to see in some locations.

However, preventing the oversaturation of professionals and the negative consequences of this shouldn’t be solely reliant on government regulation. If entrepreneurs entering the sharing economy space are conscious of this from the start, they can build platforms that prevent over-saturation of professionals in the first place and the myriad legal battles that it spawns. Olio, a recently launched London-based startup that connects local residents and businesses so they can share surplus food rather than throwing it away, is a good example of this, as are vehicle-sharing platforms such as Turo and RVshare, which prioritize local private owners.

Supporting localized platforms and preventing monopolies

As is the case with much of the tech industry, a handful of sharing economy platforms like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Airbnb now dominate industries such as food delivery and holiday stays. Interestingly, however, there are some sectors of the sharing economy where we’re seeing the opposite of the usual model of consolidation and monopolization.

If we take ride-sharing as a case study, instead of smaller companies being consolidated by larger competitors, dozens of small homegrown platforms are launching at the city or regional level across a growing number of countries. In many cases, these small startups are directly challenging the incumbent Uber.

Governments could act to support, or even protect, such homegrown entrants in national markets. This may be anathema to many tech industry players, but all governments act to protect some of their strategic industries through targeted support or even intervention.

The same could be applied to the sharing economy in the form of grants, tax incentives, or regulatory alignment. Governments and city councils could attach conditions to such support, including tax residency requirements to help keep profits within national economies and agreements on gig worker rights and compensation.

Exploring new models of participation

The current worker participation models of many sharing economy platforms are characterized by precarity. While independent contractor status undoubtedly provides flexibility, gig workers have little to no sick pay, no health insurance, and none of the other benefits that full-time employees typically enjoy. In other words, all the risk is passed onto the worker.

The State of California took a bold step at the start of the year by passing a new law (AB-5) that was intended to provide employee status to gig workers. But platform providers such as Uber and DoorDash have refused to comply and have used their financial muscle to challenge the law in the courts. Some of the outputs from this battle have, however, provided some food for thought. Uber and Lyft are reportedly considering creating franchises across the state that would manage and operate fleets and employ drivers. This type of service fulfillment model would help build small- and medium-sized enterprises throughout platform supply chains while decentralizing power in the process. Other platform providers could explore such models at city, regional, or national levels.

Another interesting development to come out of this legal battle is Proposition 22. With Proposition 22, platform providers are proposing something akin to independent contractor status with benefits for gig workers in lieu of full employment status and rights. Although people on both sides are intensely debating whether this is a good deal for gig workers, the essence of what’s being proposed could become the theoretical basis for future labor negotiations: a combination of flexible working conditions and improved rights.

Ultimately, the next chapter of the sharing economy should be about creating solutions that benefit both sides of the transaction, while managing undesirable externalities. The convenience of near-instant ride hailing, food delivery, and short-term holiday rentals is hard to overstate, but the frustrations people experience from these services’ unimagined consequences should not be allowed to fester indefinitely.

The future success of the sharing economy will depend largely on mutual collaboration between platform providers, gig workers, local communities, and governments. Currently, this “collaboration” is characterized by conflict — an instinct to fight back instead of work together. A more productive approach, however, would involve a change of mindset from both sides. The sharing economy can’t be rolled back, but simple steps can make the transition into its future form better for everyone.


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Salesforce’s Simulation Cards spell out uses, risks, and bias to make AI models more transparent

October 20, 2020   Big Data

Salesforce recently open-sourced Foundation (formerly AI Economist), an AI research simulation for exploring tax policies. To accompany its release, the company this week published what it’s calling a Simulation Card, a file to document the use, risks, and sources of bias in published versions of the simulation.

Simulation Cards join ongoing efforts to bring transparency to historically black-box systems. Over the past year, Google launched Model Cards, which sprang from a Google AI whitepaper published in October 2018. Model Cards specify model architectures and provide insight into factors that help ensure optimal performance for given use cases. The idea of Model Cards emerged following Microsoft’s work on “datasheets for data sets,” or datasheets intended to foster trust and accountability through documenting datasets’ creation, composition, intended uses, maintenance, and other properties. Two years ago, IBM proposed its own form of model documentation in voluntary factsheets called “Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity” (DoC) to be completed and published by companies developing and providing AI.

The objective of Simulation Cards is similar to that of Model Cards and Data Sheets. However, Simulation Cards reflect the fact that simulations differ from trained models and datasets because they’re designed to create scenarios of interest, according to Salesforce. These scenarios can contain bias, which might be purposefully built-in or an unexpected side effect of the design choices made during creation. Because simulations create many datasets of various shapes and sizes, the potential for misuse is greater than that of a single fixed dataset that might contain bias.

 Salesforce’s Simulation Cards spell out uses, risks, and bias to make AI models more transparent

Above: The Simulation Card for Foundation.

Image Credit: Salesforce

The Simulation Card for Foundation is divided into several sections: Simulation Details, Basic Information, Intended Use, Factors, Metrics, Quantitative Analyses, Ethical Considerations, and Caveats and Recommendations. Simulation Details provides the date of the simulation and the name of the publishing organization, as well as any keywords, licenses, contact information, and relevant version numbers. The Basic Information and Intended Use sections cover top-level info about the simulation and the applications for it that the coauthors had in mind. Factors canvases the modeling assumptions the simulations make, while Metrics and Quantitative Analyses outline the metrics used to measure the results. Finally, Ethical Considerations and Caveats and Recommendations provide guidelines for (or warnings against) applying the outputs to real-world systems.

It remains to be seen what sort of third-party adoption Simulation Cards might gain, if any, but Salesforce itself says it’s committed to releasing cards alongside future simulations. “We encourage researchers and developers to publish similar Simulation Cards for software releases, to broadly promote transparency and the ethical use of simulation frameworks. AI simulations offer researchers the power to generate data and evaluate outcomes of virtual economies that capture a part of the real world,” Salesforce wrote in a blog post. “An unethical simulation poses an order-of-magnitude larger ethical risk. As a result, our commitment to transparency is all that much more critical.”


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Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

August 29, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

608x348xUser Adoption 1.jpg.pagespeed.ic.l5VXzzAkm  Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

User Adoption Monitor (Preferred App on Microsoft AppSource)is what you need to track, monitor and review user adoption of Dynamics 365 CRM. Be it the daily user login details or tracking user actions across CRM, User Adoption Monitor does the job seamlessly. And now with the release of three new features, it is on its way to be the must-have app for monitoring user actions within Dynamics 365 CRM.

Without further ado, let’s have a brief look into the newly released features of User Adoption Monitor.

  • Data Completeness
  • Aggregate Tracking
  • Target Tracking

Data Completeness

If you want to identify whether the respective entity records in Dynamics 365 CRM have all the attributes/necessary data that completes the record, then ‘Datacompleteness’ is the feature you are looking for. With ‘Datacompleteness’ you will have the provision to choose which of the fields from the records of selected entity need to be filled in to make sure that the record is complete. And in case if any of these defined fields are left blank, then the completeness of the record would be reflected as ‘Incomplete’ until all the specified fields have been duly filled. So now you will be able to easily ensure that all the necessary information about your customers is available within CRM.

625x268x1User Adoption Monitor.png.pagespeed.ic.mHqoEr ery Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

Aggregate Tracking

With ‘Aggregate Tracking’ feature, you will be able to track the aggregations of respective numeric fields of the entity on which the specific user action has been defined. To understand better, let’s take an example of ‘Opportunity-win’ action. Here, you can see that with aggregate tracking you can get the SUM of the Actual Revenue of all the Opportunities won by the users for a defined period of time. In this way, you can get the aggregate value (SUM or AVG) of Budget Amount, Est. Revenue, Freight Amount, etc.

625x268x2User Adoption Monitor.png.pagespeed.ic. GZ2CnigCt Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

Target Tracking

With the help of ‘Target Tracking’ in User Adoption Monitor, you can allot and keep track of targets assigned to users in Dynamics 365 CRM. Here, you can assign the users a total number of targets or total value of targets to be achieved for given period of time. These targets can be set against the count of the respective entity actions or against the aggregate value of fields with respect to an entity action performed by the user. For example, you can set a target of winning 10 opportunities a day for each user in your organisation and then keep a track of the same. At the end of the day you can compare the performance of each user based on the targets achieved by them.

Target based on Count

625x268x3User Adoption Monitor.png.pagespeed.ic.c20FNKkC 9 Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

Target based on Value

Similarly, you can set a target of winning Opportunities worth 50,000/- per day for each user and then compare how much each of them have achieved at the end of the day.

625x268x4User Adoption Monitor.png.pagespeed.ic.1BMdUz39aF Track Targets, Ensure Data Completeness and more – User Adoption Monitor a must for your Dynamics 365 CRM!

All these amazing new features has made User Adoption Monitor a more formidable monitoring app that will help you to keep track of various user actions effortlessly and without disturbing the everyday activities of your organization.

Get your first-hand experience of all these features by downloading and exploring User Adoption Monitor from our website or Microsoft AppSource.

For a walk through on our User Adoption Monitor email us at crm@inogic.com

Until then – Stay Safe, Stay Healthy and keep tracking!

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Consumers Expect More From Brands to Earn Loyalty

August 22, 2020   CRM News and Info

By Jack M. Germain

Aug 18, 2020 5:00 AM PT

New studies reveal how solidly personalization in marketing drives brand loyalty, but consumers feel brands fail to do enough to recognize them as individuals.

Formation, a company using artificial intelligence to drive loyalty programs for brands like Starbucks and United Airlines, released a report on Wednesday with data that shows that the more personalization tactics a brand uses, the more loyal a consumer is to that brand.

One of the main takeaways from the study is just how significant personalization in marketing has become. For instance, 81 percent of consumers are willing to share basic personal information in exchange for a more personalized experience.

The survey further revealed that 79 percent of the respondents said the brands with which they engage the most recognize them on a one-to-one level; and 73 percent said they are more likely to engage with a brand that offers a loyalty program versus one that does not.

The report by Formation, “Brand Loyalty 2020: The Need for Hyper-Individualization,” surveyed 2,000 consumers to find that even though consumers prefer brands with a loyalty program, many companies fail to provide such outlets. Even more significant is that brands are missing opportunities to engage customers with personalization that recognizes them on the one-to-one level that consumers increasingly now prefer.

Consumer loyalty has drastically increased in the last five years. But it has not reached boom status for every brand. Winning consumer loyalty is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the economic uncertainty brought on by COVID-19, according to Formation co-founder and CEO Christian Selchau-Hansen.

“The need for brands to deliver real value has become more dire as shoppers evaluate purchasing decisions against personal safety and tighter household budgets,” he said.

In this COVID-19 era, consumers are making fewer purchases. Brands that aim to engage customers beyond a single purchase need to better understand customers and must adapt offerings to align with changing customer behaviors and priorities in order to create and maintain a loyal customer base, added Robert Fagnani, vice president of Strategy at Formation.

“Regardless of the industry, brands are all competing to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and one-to-one personalization that goes beyond basic segmentation is the most effective way to do so,” he told CRM Buyer.

Consumers as Stakeholders

Another study, this one by Gongos, a consultative agency that works with Fortune 500 companies to make customer centricity happen, disclosed that consumers, now more than ever, see themselves as stakeholders in the businesses where they are valued as customers.

During the first half of this year many brands — whether through products or media messages — shifted gears toward addressing customers’ functional and emotional needs. But pandemic aside, today’s customers are calling for more than transactions, according to this survey of 2,700 people across the globe.

The Gongos survey findings include:

  • 81 percent of global consumers believe that businesses see customers as stakeholders, the same percentage that see employees as stakeholders, too.
  • 75 percent of U.S. consumers (68 percent globally) prefer that companies ask them directly for their feedback rather than gather information about them without their knowledge, e.g. transactional and social data.
  • 67 percent of U.S. consumers feel that participating in an invitation-based online community where they engage in discussions related to a category or company’s products and services would give them a greater sense of purpose.

“Our survey findings validate recent cues that were surfacing in the marketplace, namely corporations and consumers wanting to realize greater mutuality among each other. The problem is, neither are equipped to do so largely due to a long-standing belief that corporations look to metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value that serve to extract value from consumers,” Camille Nicita, Gongos’ president and CEO, told CRM Buyer.

Her company plan is to use these survey results to shift the paradigm within organizations to look to different ways to create value for the customer over their lifetime. This begins with treating them as value-added stakeholders to the business, and online customer communities open the door to a type of value exchange that more conventional customer interactions aren’t fashioned to forge, she said.

AI Replaces Old Strategies

Targeting customers by age, gender, and location is no longer a differentiator. So brands of all sizes must move beyond basic segmentation to establish meaningful customer relationships that build brand loyalty over time, explained Formation’s Fagnani.

Seventy-five percent of consumers said the marketing emails they open frequently contain their name, indicating this stage of personalization is now table stakes. Companies must go further to make consumers feel seen on an individual level, he said, adding that it takes analyzing large volumes of customer data to make one-to-one personalization happen.

“Investments in advanced digital technologies and proprietary data pay off. Brands must make the investment into AI and ML to really master effective individualization and earn greater long-term brand loyalty,” he said.

AI’s relevance in marketing will only increase over time, so getting a leg up on a competitor now can help build a loyal customer base for later, he noted.

Building Personalization with AI

In an era of brands touting endless AI capabilities, marketers need to understand exactly what AI is and is not, according to Fagnani. Many marketing platforms claim to use AI, but in reality AI can vary from a simple algorithm, search capability, or chatbot, to something more sophisticated and powerful.

Personalized offers, chatbots, content marketing and social advertising are all areas of marketing that can be enhanced through AI, he said. In addition to having an understanding of AI, it is equally important for marketers to have a clear set of use cases that will generate value for their business and customers.

“Identifying and mapping use cases to the solution sets of AI technologies helps prioritize the importance of specific features and needs, ultimately making purchase decisions more efficient,” Fagnani advised.

Loyalty Programs Must Be Outstanding

The majority of respondents (63 percent) only belong to between one and three loyalty programs. This shows marketers that a program must deliver exceptional experiences to make the cut.

Additionally, 77 percent of consumers feel brands could be doing more to earn their loyalty. The data, collected just prior to the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, has become more resonant in recent months, according to Formation survey analysis.

“The bar for creating consumer relevance has risen dramatically as tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify deliver increasingly personalized user experiences,” Selchau-Hansen said.

“Consumer expectations for individualized experiences are rising, and the pandemic is accelerating that. If brands want to foster loyalty from today’s consumer, they must deliver experiences and communications so tailored they feel as if they’ve been crafted for just that one person,” he added.

The Phases of Personalization

Marketers have numerous ways to approach personalization. But the best ways involve understanding the behaviors and psychographics of customers, according to Nick Swekosky, founder of Market Metrics. Even smaller organizations can implement personalization tactics in their marketing programs.

“Use automation to prescribe information or features to help increase awareness, engagement, or further actions. Evaluate customer problems, goals, and focuses over time in order to define intent. Based on responses, leverage easy automation like drip campaigns and webinars to provide a more personalized experience,” he told CRM Buyer.

Other approaches include implementing email drip campaigns with services like Mailchimp. Organizations can also implement webinars with solutions like Eventbrite and Zoom, he added.

Artificial intelligence can also play a role in improving loyalty programs. For instance, AI clustering can help identify common user characteristics relative to user actions. Better correlating user characteristics to actions will help to create automation like drip campaigns that suggest information for users to become more educated and operate more efficiently, explained Swekosky.

In addition, AI prediction can be used to better understand when users will take specific actions; and to help decide how, or when, to augment their service. This provides automated informational resources that could help customers make more informed decisions before they take action.

Tap Into Psychographics

Product marketers can take personalization efforts one step further using psychographics, suggested Aadith Moorthy, founder & CEO of Radial, which provides AI-driven personalization services.

Psychographics are the personalities, values, and lifestyles of individuals. They are the most fundamental predictors of customer behavior.

“E-commerce giants like Amazon and Walmart have already accomplished this at scale, and other companies are currently playing catch up. In fact, psychographics is considered the Holy Grail of marketing,” he told CRM Buyer.

Small- and medium-sized companies can find it difficult to have the data and resources to develop psychographics. This is one unique area where AI could play a huge role in generating these levels of details and to scale this across all customers, even for small companies.

Radial’s says that its “plug-and-play solution” for this is platform agnostic and can integrate with any CRM, without the need to bring in any data or engineer’s time.

The platform uses extensive deep learning generated data on the personalities of those who visit an e-commerce site. Radial then suggests the best products for them with AI. This leads to 20 percent plus average increases in sales and significantly reduced churn, according to Moorthy.

Personalization Tips

Personalization is critical to earn trust and loyalty. It should go well beyond just “Hi, first name” to be effective, Heather Wilkerson, vice president of marketing at Registria, told CRM Buyer.

She offered these keys to personalization success for a company of any size:

  • Invest in understanding the customer base and what is of value to those consumers to motivate them to provide the information a company needs to deliver a personalized experience. Motivators are loyalty program status, better service/care, exclusive offers.
  • Capture self-reported data by the customer including, product(s) owned, date purchased, and place of purchase (if not direct). Use those motivators above to encourage customers to first act.
  • Provide opt-ins to specific channels to truly serve a personalized customer experience.

“From there, it is using the combination of the self-reported data, channels, and value drivers and making it frictionless to engage in a two-way conversation that delivers valuable information (status, progress to tiers, exclusive promos) that build trust over time,” added Wilkerson.
end enn Consumers Expect More From Brands to Earn Loyalty


Jack%20M.%20Germain Consumers Expect More From Brands to Earn Loyalty
Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. Email Jack.

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Microsoft Tech Update: New Features & More in August 2020

August 20, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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Researchers find people are more receptive to social robots during the pandemic

August 13, 2020   Big Data

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In a preprint study published on Arxiv.org, University of Waterloo researchers find the pandemic has affected people’s perception of social robots and that feelings of loneliness can drive the purchase of these robots. It’s the coauthors’ belief the shift resulted in a higher level of attention to the consequences of isolation, which in turn emphasized the benefits of having a companion robot.

Social isolation isn’t uncommon among older adults (especially those with disabilities), and it can affect both health and quality of life. In point of fact, lack of social support can lead to loneliness, which is associated with depression, anxiety, and increases in cardiovascular risk. Pandemics increase social isolation; shelter-in-place mandates, quarantine orders, and business closures prevent loved ones from seeing each other. And while social robots like Romibo and Moxi can help allay loneliness, they can only succeed if society has a positive attitude toward them.

In an attempt to gauge the public’s perception of social robots during the pandemic, the researchers designed an online questionnaire that asked subjects to report their loneliness, stress levels, adherence to lockdown rules, and the overall effect of the pandemic on their lives, as well as their attitudes toward social robots (specifically whether their perception had changed as a result of the pandemic and the likelihood they’d buy a social robot). Drawing on studies that suggest a relationship between loneliness and the “big 5” personality traits — neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness — the researchers also had respondents, who were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, complete a brief personality assessment.

 Researchers find people are more receptive to social robots during the pandemic

Though the number of subjects was relatively limited (102 people from Canada), the researchers say it was statistically significant enough to draw several conclusions, like that experiencing a pandemic-related change in lifestyle led to a change in perception about the benefits of robots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they also found that changes in emotional stability (as measured by the personality test) were a strong predictor of perception changes, implying those with higher emotional stability were more likely to consider purchasing social robots. Lastly, they found that respondents who experienced loneliness were likely to consider purchasing a robot even if they showed little interest before.

The researchers make clear that the results of the survey don’t support replacing human contact with social robots. Rather, they show robots might play an important role in situations where direct human contact is prohibited (e.g., during pandemics) or impossible (e.g., for socially isolated adults). “While companion robots are shown to be effective in reducing loneliness, concerns such as using companion robots may lead to neglect from family members and reduce human interactions have negatively affected society’s attitude towards the companion robots, especially among the older adults,” the researchers wrote. “Our results provided evidence about a change in perception.”

The study’s results agree with those from a Pompeu Fabra University report earlier this year, which identified 66 different kinds of “social” robots that have been piloted in hospitals, health centers, airports, office buildings, and other public and private spaces in response to the pandemic. The coauthors of that report noted that social robots have the potential to reduce the workload and ensure the safety of care workers.

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D365 Customer Insights for Asset Mgmt: More Opportunities

July 31, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights for Asset Management: Better Data Insights Lead to More (and Better) Opportunities

For asset management firms, succeeding with only basic understanding of clients, advisors and consultants is a thing of the past. To be a successful asset manager, you need to know more than just basic demographics to initiate knowledgeable, proactive decision making when it comes to opportunities. But, how exactly do you do that? Thanks to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can take and combine copious amounts of available data and put it to work so you don’t miss out on opportunities or clients.

Gather, Analyze and Gain Important Data Insights with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

If you aren’t familiar with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, we recommend reading our blog post from January 2020 that introduces Customer Insights and six reasons companies should leverage the most important features of this powerful tool.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps to you to gather and import all of your data—from any source—into one location, analyzes that data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and delivers insights far beyond what is capable by humans (even experienced humans with tribal knowledge). Companies can then take these valuable insights and apply them to sales, marketing, activities and service initiates to personalize engagement.

But, how exactly do asset management firms leverage Customer Insights?

Asset Management Firms Identify Big Tickets with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, gone are the days of limited information about big tickets and wholesalers relying solely on colleagues with extensive tribal knowledge.

To ensure all opportunities and vulnerabilities are being addressed, intermediaries need to target certain wholesalers. Big tickets are an important focus of asset management firms, and Customer Insights provides the tools needed to determine:

  1. The big ticket’s source—even down to the advisor.
  2. If the big ticket is a SELL or a BUY
  3. If that specific trade has been influenced by the wholesaler

Determining these factors is done in various ways including relationship evaluations, examining recent activities with advisors in a given office, and more. Once asset managers have this information, they can choose the next best action. In the case of a BUY, you would show gratitude for their business and go on to investigate potential complimentary strategies with other clients. For a SELL, however, you would indicate a change in strategy or risk of losing wallet share.

This is where Dynamics 365 Customer Insights really shines by merging all of your firm’s data across every source—even your current CRM system—by linking the data sources, and by applying public info to enhance your data. Customer Insights does the work so you can drill down into data, gain the insights you need and make an informed decision on your next course of action. Advisors and offices can view the span of rich data, including transactions over time, wallet share and product types. This powerful tool can even pull in new data–such as life or public events—based on financial accounts or holdings that could affect a given account or holding.

You can even keep your current CRM system and information reporting/display tools with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Talk about a win!

Don’t Miss Opportunities with Customer Insights

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you don’t need to guess about what to do with your data; you can easily identify who you need to speak with to prevent missed opportunities or lost clients. And, losing someone with tribal knowledge is no longer a necessary fear.

Contact AKA today to learn more about their Customer Insights for Asset Management firms. Ready to see this powerful tool in action? Get started with a Proof of Concept engagement


ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!


Article by: Tom Berger | 212-502-3900

With 20+ years of field experience, Tom Berger is Vice President of Financial Services for AKA Enterprise Solutions.

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