CX- Automation, how recent is this phenomenon?

Contrary to popular perception, CX automation is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, consumer mass deployment of the discipline dates back at least two decades. Record scrutiny and archival research should clear the air on which industry: Telecom or Banking was the first, in the Indian market to go the automation route. Pieces of empirical evidence seem to suggest that it was telecommunication that pioneered the automation of consumer-facing processes. "Self-help" was the term that telecom donned to speak about all its cx automation initiatives. It was groundbreaking, massive in scale and so simple to use that it caught on like a kite takes to the wind. Mind you, these were being done in the pre-consumer internet era. Text Messages and USSD strings were the carriers of these pathbreaking innovations. From simple queries like balance enquiry to rather complex workflows like SIM replacements were fully automated by the corporations and very well accepted by the customers. Banking hasn't been far behind too: Who can argue against the impact that ATMs have had on mankind's relationship with money.

I must call out though, that how these wonderful CX automation initiatives of the days gone by were different from what we understand of the term today. It is the intent, infrastructure support and proliferation of the internet that has separated the expression of CX automation of the present day from what it used to be in the past. It has acquired a new identity, a new name. Early CX automation undertakings were purely motivated by 'cost saving'. Yes, it was marketed as 'customer empowerment' but everyone working in both telecom and banking in the early days knew that it wasn't the case.

The term "Self-help", in the present day, doesn't invoke the same kind of emotions. "CX automation" is in vogue now and rightfully so. There is a world of difference in the technology landscape, computing capabilities, and general acceptance of the 'digital way of life" among end-users.

CX automation is a multi-billion industry today, we have to thank SaaS for it. The spectacular success that Freshworks, Zendesk and Zoho got has renewed the interest of capital in products that promise to automate customer-facing processes across a variety of industries. Advancements in cognitive technology, conversational Artificial Intelligence, and desktop automation have completely changed the scene. The ecosystem is fully ready to cut over to the new: 750 million connected smartphones beaming in India alone, the internet load for a day is cheaper than a decent cup of coffee (of course at telecom's peril) and there is growing interest in the industry to go fully automated. Capital, like it, always does is honouring the mood of the market. As we know from our economics lessons: capital and growth follow each other in a circle.

This change will cause massive displacement of low/semi-skilled professionals. The problem is that less than 5% of customer experience professionals today, truly understand the ways in which the new beast is to be tamed. That I am afraid is going to push the customer services industry (BPOs) to relive what banking when through in early 1980-90 ties, when banking embraced computers and they had to send nearly 70% of their workforce home (early retirement) because they just couldn't keep up with the machine.

There is still time to learn and adapt - the question is, will the BPO industry act in time? Your guess is as good as mine.

5 step change framework for BPOs and product Ideas!

In the last article, I argued how the winds within the wings of traditional phone-based BPOs are being stolen by cheap, easy, and widely available automation alternatives. I also propounded that weakening prospects of the BPO industry do not necessarily mean a reduction in the overall scope of outsourcing as a business decision. There is a bit of a dichotomy between the two parts of this statement, which at one glance could appear disorienting and that is ok. If you read the 2nd part of the last article carefully (I will link it down below) the confusion will disappear. The more prominent question which the previous article did not answer fully is that if BPOs have to become a platform company to survive what sort of platform company should they really become? It is a legitimate question and that is the inspiration behind this one. It is in order to mention here that overwhelming 80%+ feedback emails that I received from my smart readers were seeking clarity on this very question. So here we go.

Before we get into the specifics of it, I think we should spend a minute thinking about why is ‘change’ important for business, and then when the business does elect to change how is it that the organization should attempt it? Answering the first part of this question is rather straightforward, the needs of an evolving society change over time and to cater to that organization in the business of meeting those needs must change too. Now, on to the tricky part of the question, what is it that the organizations that decide to change try to do when they pivot? Organizations sacrifice products for saving business. Remember the goal of a for-profit organization is to make money and to not make money exclusively from doing 'a thing'.

Now with that out of the way, let’s focus on the element that often startles those who attempt to embark on a change. The strangeness of the new, the absence of familiarity, lack of knowledge in the new arena that they consider pivoting into. Right out of the gate let me concede that the fear is legitimate, 100% so. Imagine that if you woke up in the middle of the night in a deserted desert with icy cold sand under your feet instead of your bedroom and on the warm bed on which you slipped into peaceful slumber earlier that night? The first few minutes would fit the exact definition of hell, will it not? You would then normalize your new situation and think about how did you get there and what are the options in front of you to get back to where you actually slept? You would at that moment be scared, unhappy, uncertain, nervous, and irritated. Would you not be at the sea completely?

Can anyone count that turbulence against you?

Imagine an entrepreneur who has been making XYZ amount of money from a set business, tried and tested product line is being asked by someone to change it to something else because they think that is the future. It is a tough bargain, but then one that must be made because what is today will most certainly not remain so tomorrow. A case for change will have to be continually made and pushed at the right forums, because, as big a force is need for change, the urge to remain the same is also not a weak trap. Torn between the demand of tomorrow and habits of yesterday, the decision-makers feel exhausted, clueless, and sometimes a bit disenchanted too.

I can't claim to have discovered the formula that works in turning key people around, every time. I have failed a fair amount of times myself too, but it is in the times that I did win, I find both my motivation and purpose. So my dear readers, if you are the one pushing for the change, I wish you luck and urge you to try out your own strategy.

I better stick to the part of the puzzle that I am most comfortable with, that is knowing how to carve out the change. It is important to note here that the change that we are referring to here is the change of device and not so much the substance of what is being executed. That is in essence it will still be reaching to a customer to either sell or serve or remind them of the both or either. It would be easier for the brand to sell what it has already sold, it is this core belief that often prohibits the founders from changing. So, as a change managers, we should start from there.

I present to you the framework!

5 step framework for BPOs.

Let's understand how is the current stack of clients/customers stack up. Data probing will be necessary. Here are the questions that you will need to ask and answer.

1. Figure out your area of strength.

• Which industry?
• What line of work?
• Which medium?
• What nature?
• Is there a specific demographic?
• Not just for existing clients but past customers too.
  • Why did the customers who left you did so?

Plot these details on the table.

A quick analysis of these details should reveal to you that which is that technology feature that can fully automate the work that you are now doing in a manual manner. Pick that product and then assess.

1. Would you like to create the product bottoms up?
2. Or you have the wherewith-all to acquire an organization that might already have the solution ready.
   1. If acquisition looks difficult, try merger possibilities.

2. Get critical stakeholders on board with the idea of ‘transformation’.

• Board
• Investors
• Key employees.

It is important to keep critical people in the organization informed of the direction in which the organization is wanting to pivot into. As it is this set of people who are going to make it work. This conversation is best not kept unidirectional, consensus building is needed. Bring the team on board and then get on with the plan.

3. Finding the resources (money and other things).

• Budget.
• See how you’re placed.
• Plan for the shortfall if any.

Change is easier said than done. Resource mining beforehand is critical to success.

4. Getting the team ready.

• Restructuring the organization.
• Hiring the skill sets that would be needed to build/run/manage the solution.

This is perhaps the most important part of the puzzle. Old world conventional leaders do not want things to change because they know it is too late for them to change and they also know that if things change they will become irrelevant. In preparing the team, the leader needs to understand both sides of the story: why is change vital and what is the cost of not changing.

5. Make a new business goal.

• Make a new goal statement of the company and then socialize it.
• Plan
• Act

Both your mission and vision statements might need to reflect the change in plan. Make it happen, socialize it - take it to the last employee. You need the whole of the organization to rally behind the change.

These five steps pulled right should carry you through, without much trouble.

For those of you who are not wanting to get on with the first step right away and wish to think through a few ideas for building platforms, here are a few.

Platform/Product Ideas for BPOs.

1. CRM Solution for managing customer service end to end.

• Dialler.
• Workforce management system.
• Knowledge management.
• Training management system.
• Performance management Module.
• Quality management system. 
• Data and Reporting modules.

2. Creating a solution for the industry where most of your contacts come from.

• Video KYC in BFSI.
• Digital onboarding.
• Social Media command center

3. Systems designed to reducing churn.

• Survey tool.
• Linking usage with trigger points.
• Devising strategies for increased longevity of the customer.

4. Conversation engine.

• BOT.
• RPA.
• Desktop Automation.

5. Vendor management system.

• Client onboarding
• Client sign up
• Life cycle management
  • Complaint and compliment modules.
  • Billing and Invoicing.
  • Change management.
  • Forecasting and supply details.

No matter what you do, you must not remain the same, because those who do not change perish.

On that note I shall end this, take care and good luck.

Link to the last article 

Outsourcing and BPO; the past and the future!

Remote work and urban planning!

(Note: The changes that we speak of in this article is expected to happen in the course of the next 10 years!)

Workplace of the future (a part of which is already visible) is no longer going to be a 'physical space' but a 'network' that enables the staff to connect with the resources needed to carry out the affairs of the business, in a seamless and secure manner. Even before the heat from the Pandemic started burning us out, the bottlenecks that excessively centralised and vehemently urbanised operations force upon the ecological balance of the cities had begun to appear counter-productive. The health risk from the wretched virus has in a way fast-tracked much-needed change in the organisation of the modern economic hubs.

A survey found these startling facts:

• The commute for urban workers is getting 10% longer every year, 2/3rd of the respondents said that it was the worst part of their workday.
• Cost of living in cities was thinning saving capabilities of the working middle class, leaving them in a vulnerable position, with less than 30% having enough in the bank to run domestic affairs for a quarter without fresh influx.
• 70% of all things that cause Global warming originated from the cities. 

Modern cities, as we know them, were shaped by the Industrial Revolution; locations near ports became important distribution centres of goods, as a result of which accumulation of both people and properties followed. Back in the day, being physically present was the only way to make commerce happen and thus congestion in metropolitan centres was both natural and a conceded consequence. Thankfully, the advancements made in modern times have liberated us from those limitations; 'in-person supervision' is not the only tool available to humankind, today.

The Internet has already happened! 

Will anthropologists find considering the 'invention of the Internet’ comparable to the ‘discovery of fire’, outrageous? They may and I won’t dislike them for it nor does my assertion push their opinion any further from the fact than, it is. After all, they have studied life before ‘fire’ with whatever pieces of evidence that are still present, their shelves are full of books uncovering life after fire. The vantage point from which my contemporaries and I see the world, we find the impact of the world wide web just as staggering.  The conundrum of the internet is fascinating though, it brings people together, video call with someone sitting on the other side of the planet is an excellent example of it and it also tears people apart, the unsavoury impact of social media on human relationship and society is a piece of fine evidence. No tool, however, is inherently good or bad. It is the intention of the user that makes the outcome come out as noble or otherwise. For instance, gun on its own doesn’t kill anyone; those who point and pull the trigger do.

The Internet has democratised information, removed many a barrier and brought civilization to the advantage of functioning without physical contact with comparable and in many cases even better outcomes. Imagining a world tottering under a Pandemic without the internet would really be an exercise of picturing the devil. When the virus locked us all up in the confines of our homes, we turned to this very tool in our arsenal to accomplish everything that needed to be done: from schools to senates; everything shifted its operation ‘online’ (entirely in some sections and in parts in others). A world without the internet will impact more than just the running of business today, as it is now the lifeblood of human existence.

Ubiquitous ‘Work from home’ has changed more than our relationship with work. It is substantively altering run of the economy, urban planning, ecological balance and human mobility (both migration to and reverse migration from centres). A little over a year has already been lost to the virus, thankfully, we have viable vaccines now, but inoculation of 7.5 billion people spread across an entire planet is not an easy task. The most aggressive estimates suggest that it is not going to happen in less than 5 years, at any rate. The window of struggle is so long that that measures implemented as temporary modifications will become a part of our lives by the time we see the menace off, following the sheer rule of practice. 

Cities have undeniably suffered more than the rural areas from the mega virus breakout. The volume of economic activities that are conducted in these urban centre cause interest groups to invest in infrastructure to sustain the commerce: high delivery attracts higher resources and the accumulation keeps getting thicker. Heightened economic activities attract talent and thus workforce migrations happen. Cities provide better services to its dwellers, from education to health and sanitation - everything is a bit better, a bit nicer; and thus becomes a magnet to those who seek better standards of living. A virus that found its carrier in humans hit these metropolitan centres hard, congested spaces and high population density provided the perfect breeding ground for the virus. Growing scare and overflowing hospitals drew people in masses to leave for a safer place. Different segment of the population had different reasons for moving out of the city. Here a few.

• Migrant labourers: We saw millions track treacherous roads on foot, ranging anywhere between 100 and 1000 km, back home as the imposition of lockdown cast shadow of doubt over their paycheque.
• White-collar workers: Those who could work from home, preferred to be at their native places in Tier 2, 3 cities and villages with their families, instead of continuing at more expensive rented places in the city of their work.  Traffic woes and other difficulties that came out of congestion did little to dissuade people from abandoning the towns. 
• Urban Native Dwellers: With schools getting digital too, parents had little trouble in shifting bases. They welcomed the once in a lifetime opportunity to live in a greener, more affordable area, devoid of every suffocation that large city imposed upon them. All other compromises that were to be made in absence of modern amenities were happily embraced as the price of convenience and quiet of their new base location.
• Business: Leaders began to see how unimportant and wasteful are the office spaces of the city. They understood that they do not need to be present in the plush corporate parks anymore. The possibility of making substantial cost savings, by allowing workers to work in a distributed model, was greeted with an unabashed cheer.

Where do these changes leave our beloved cities? Will they siege to exist? The answer to that question is not a simple one. This proposition has many layers. A city is built not in a day, it comes about brick by brick, with centuries of investment, careful planning and infrastructure augmentation; not all facilities of which are portable. For instance, a super speciality hospital can’t be dismantled and thrown into pieces in smaller cities, at the drop of a hat. Government establishment, the core of it, are all in the cities, which means from litigation to other needs which can only be fulfilled by the state will be required to be performed in the city. What then happens to the future of the cities? To understand it, let us imagine that the entire population of all cities is that of 100 people. Let us assume that 30% can ride on the Internet (Cat 1) to get their business rolling from outside the cities and therefore will easily move. Roughly another 30% (Cat 2) of the population survives from the services that it provides to Cat 1. This shift will cause upward mobility for small % of people from Cat 2, as a reduction in manpower will increase the cost of manpower. What do the rest do? How will they sustain with their entire market migrating outside the bound of the cities? As a result, another about 20% will find the cities unviable.

With nearly 50% of the city gone, its ability to attract investment will also go down, one would assume in a larger proportion than the fall in the demand. The thing to note here is that disintegration is not going to be uniform, in the sense that the entire population will not move from city A to village B. We would see smaller clusters sprinkled across the country. These spread out earners will begin spending in their new localities and with that demand and supply equilibrium of the new places will get impacted, tipped for growth.  Mini-cities will start coming up in suburban and rural parts of the country. Open spaces in the city, the spaces vacated by 50% of its erstwhile dwellers will slowly began to repair itself, healing of sorts with begin. 

Studies show that 10% to 15% shift in demand in the real estate market is enough to cause revolutionary change, and in this case, we are speaking about a minimum of 30% of movement from city centres to the suburban and the rural areas; major changes are bound to come.

Some of which could be:

• Polly Centric cities
  • 15 minutes commute cities
• Distributed city models.
• The rise in the demand for co-working spaces as mini-city begins to rise. Corporates will much prefer disintegrating large offices in favour of small co-working spaces in the suburban areas.

Such a remarkable change will also have an impact on the social set up and living arrangement of those who would participate in this change. Cosmopolitan mini-city will become a thing.

We should talk about two of the important phenomenons.

• Lack of separation between work and life: Commute works as an active separation between work and home. For many, it provides for the much needed pondering time. A healing chamber of sorts, a time in which working population, adjusts the disorientations cause both at work and at home.
• Social and emotional separation: There is a range of emotion that we face at work, different from the offering of the home, therefore, response systems have also been developed in us differently. For instance, an employee hearing the music in front of his co-workers is not the same as he getting to face an uncomfortable situation with his family in the company. People essentially live different lives between their work and family - a merger of the two could cause an emotional imbalance in many and mental disbalance in some cases.

'Work from home' has taken that cushion away from people, now, there is no way for them to physically separate themselves from what is being said or done by their counterparts at work and life partners at home. But all is not gloomy and sad, because this system of survival has evolved through years and generations of practise, trial and error, hopefully soon, the human race will master the art of thriving in this new set up too. If not in this generation, at least the one after it will come out to be better prepared and perhaps by then complimenting infrastructure (both soft and hard), policies (both public and private) and procedures and ways of life alongside the technology would have gotten much better.

The future is certain to be different from our present and I am confident it will be better too. 

With that, I end this.. Bye-bye!

Bets on the Future!

As of 20th June 2020, reported and recognised COVID19 figures by the GOI, are 4,11,773 infections, 13,281 fatalities. To put things in perspective, we're adding on an average over 13K cases, every day, for past few days, we're 3rd largest in daily caseload increase, 4th largest in the overall volume of cases in the world and hold the dubious 8th rank on overall mortality. All of this when India's ranking on testing is 147th among 192 countries, to give you some perspective, the tiny nation of Nepal is testing 2.7 times more than us on a per million population basis, as per John Hopkins university study. Many experts (Professor Jha, Harvard Medical school) believe that the actual number of cases in India must be anywhere between 4 to 6 crores.

The entire planet is reeling under this unprecedented crisis.

We as a country, however, are not so much in the same boat with the rest of the world as in the same storm, as far as the COVID19 risk is concerned, because our public health infrastructure is not among the best in the world! Two people hardly agree on the same thing in the current dangerously polarised times let alone nations, but a unicellular pathogen has effortlessly brought about consensus among people divided by nationalities, ethnicities, race, political affiliation and religious views, by and large. The world has dedicated its entire collective cognitive bandwidth towards observing and studying ways to get better of the virus or to learn ways to survive with it. I am gravitating towards conceding to the possibilities of a shared future with the virus. Finest minds in the world have been examining the pathogen closely and yet, a comprehensive study exhaustively covering ways in which the transmission happens has not come out. Between WHO announcement that ‘human to human’ transmission is not a thing to declaring humans as the sole vector, from 'mask is not necessary' to 'mask saves lives' from surfaces do not spread to they do to again they do not. Debate on whether the virus is aerosol or not has also not been settled, thus far. In conclusion, the human race still does not know much about the virus. Those of us who have avoided the outside world completely thus far are safe. We are hedging all of our future hopes on just this flimsy fact.

At this point, you must wonder, what is the point of it all? 

The world has been dealing with this menace for nearly 7 months now and it does not even know if we are in the beginning, middle or the end of the destruction cycle. Does that not say a lot about, how certain our world view has been? Lockdown made a great case for itself, political leadership across the world sold it on premium and ordinary citizens who do not have a way of knowing better lauded it. By the beginning of May 2020, the shine started wearing off the panacea of administrative isolation- lockdown, as the number of cases did not show any sign of slowing down, both at a global and the national level. Administrative restrictions may not have hurt the virus as much as it promised to but it surely nearly decimated economies around the world. I borrow from Mr Bajaj, who said in an interview to Rahul Kanwal (Right-wing journalist who works hard to appear neutral), "that we flattened the wrong curve". He was referring to the flatlining of the GDP. The sharp decline in revenue collection of the Government and the fear of resulting fiscal deficit shook it back into senses and it quietly introduced ‘unlock 1.0’. Revenue starved businesses in a heartbeat reopened, ignoring the fact that the risk of infection had gone substantially up, in the hope to see things resume, volumes return. Recovery, predictively, has been mixed, mainly on account of high unemployment causing severe lack of demand - but some business is better than no business. Hospitality, F&B, tourism and travel etc, still haven’t seen any respite and the outlook at least for next 8 to 10 months does not look promising for them, either. 

Geopolitics and societal structures are undergoing massive transformation, we do not know yet, for good or for the worse. But the change is visible. We can’t, however, say the same for the businesses around us. Do not get me wrong, yes ‘work from home’ has become the new excel macro. Big and small alike have lapped it with ease now, even the ones who were not in favour of it before, because it promises business continuity and cost-saving, among other things. Distributed and digitalised work in sectors that do not require congregation or special equipment, like let’s say in manufacturing - is gaining steam. Knowledge workers, who I also call ‘keyboard warriors’ have all acclimatised themselves to working in shorts from the corner of their homes. It is all good, if not for the health and mental well being of the workers then at least for the environment. Vehicular traffic and related carbon emissions have gone down and as a result, all of us are breathing better quality air- that is a clear win!

But apart from the superficialities, has the core business model shifted to anything different?

By and large, the answer to that question is a NO. Zomato choosing to also deliver grocery in the lockdown or call centres shifting to phone-based dialers hardly qualify, at max, it can be called mild manoeuvring. Has the rate of technology adoption been accelerated? When you look at the larger picture, the answer is no. 'Working from home' or calling one another on zoom all day, is not tech adoption, it is just a change of scenery. The tech backbone and the architecture for 90% of the organisations remain absolutely unchanged: 'same processes, same application and largely the same turnaround times'. In fact, if anything mega tech projects have been put on hold, some indefinitely for operating cash crunch that most businesses are having to face up to, these days. Serious degradation of value in the real estate sector is being noticed and that when coupled with -ve 4% GDP growth outlook, I suspect things will get worse before they get better. Where does that leave us?

The jury is out on the number of organisations that will actually survive to see the other side of the crisis, reports on the closure of 30% of MSMEs which contribute to about 37% of the GDP and 40% of Indian exports have already shut shop. Service organisations have seen anything between 30% to 50% loss of business. Buying capacity of the population has been severely dented with record unemployment about 42% when organised and unorganised sectors are clubbed. Those still employed in a paying job are earning, anything between 10% to 50% less on account of wage cuts. Which means there is lesser money in the market making the rounds. 

A wise man once said, "business is not a pond, it is a river". Resources flow from one end of the stream to the other, along the way those who dip in it collect some water for their consumption (both current and future needs), both by means of employment and investment. When upstream funnel size gets reduced, the downstream impact becomes pervasive. 

Running a business is hard!

Number 1 priority of any organisation is to keep afloat; so when value evaporates, costs have to be adjusted in proportion. Not all cost cuttings are done equally though, with varying degree of success, industries across the board have managed to get it right. Managing outflow of cash in the know of the quantum of inflow does not require much of anything. But steps that come after it are of critical importance, their complexities are immense. Mostly on account of how little that we know about the future that we should prepare for. Despite the operating cash issues and the slump in the demand investments in the future will have to be made, not pledging will mean forgoing the possibilities of future prosperity. 

What to bet on however is unclear. I might be naval-gazing here but, the economy of knowledge is the basket in which I would keep all my eggs, even if I could take just one shot at it.

Physical infrastructure: In the medium term the value of infra and real estate will see degradation but it will eventually pick up again in the long term. The rate of population growth is the reason why I say this. Irrespective of what people do, if we survive as a race, we will need space and physical infrastructure. Therefore, investing in it now for 'cash-surplus' corporations is not a bad option, especially because they stand to reap the benefits of acquiring the properties at price discounted by the recessionary spiral, the economy is unwillingly living through. One should, however, be prepared to remain calm in the prolonged period of hibernation induced by slow demand, the capital might appear to suffocate. But if you can hold on to your nerve, returns are going to be more than handsome, in a few years from now. Let’s say in about 4 to 5 years.

Manufacturing is another segment where we are about to witness a sea change. Industry 4.0 is going to be about connectivity and communication, a barrage of censors providing inputs to smart algorithms to facilitate real-time decision-making, all without any considerable human involvement. Powered by data and automation, digitalization is poised to transform every step of the manufacturing process, from supply chain and enterprise to the shop floor and end-users. Smart manufacturing will vastly improve throughput, uptime, and performance while reducing overhead, operating, and capital costs. Emerging tech like Industrial IoT, FOG computing, edge computing and advanced robotics will form the bedrock of change. Investments made in these technological platforms are bound to grow well. 

Logical infra: Solution augmentation happens to process needs of the market and the market is a microcosm of the society, a continued spell of the pandemic is bound to re-write fundamentals of the social contract that have existed for the last 4 centuries. Humans live in flocks too (we are intelligent sheep). We are a social animal, we access what we need in groups. Our needs and desires follow the principle of batches. One man gets wheels, all follow - 'Monkey see... Monkey do'. (We share our DNA with more than one species, let's keep it for another day)

Before, we conclude that the logical infra is a horse that we’d like to put our bet on, it is essential to take a cursory look at the changing landscape around us. 

We're a poor country, our per capita income is just about 2.5K USD. From this small pool, most of the expenditure happens on community building and survival, individual needs in most cases remain primitive and not too distant from the bare essentials, for a large part of the population. But when you contrast it with demographic, you’ll also notice that a vast majority of this country is at an age, which is considered a gold mind for impulse buying. When we see it in light of poor financial literacy in the country you’d understand that, if an ordinary Indian youth was left with last 100 dollars he is more likely to spend it on trends, then saving it for the rainy day. From that behaviour emerges 'aspiration' of the economy - From cloths to electronic to travel (Simplifying the behaviour to make this argument readable and concise)

Let me give you an example: 

87% of all tablet users own a computer, there is not one thing/operation that the tablet can do but a computer can’t. In fact, there are a variety of things that a tablet can’t handle, not nearly as efficiently as a computer can and yet people who already own a computer buy a tablet too, sometimes more than one. (I'm included in it)

Aspiration for the ‘new’ is a strong economic stimulus among the young people which is why all the young (Avg age of the citizens) countries are of special interest to the large consumer goods corporations. Electronics in India and China rock, for the same reason (Though China is 5 times the size of India's GDP).

Now that we have addressed the aspiration part of the demand. Let’s analyse how the pervasive internet is shaping social behaviours. The world that saw the internet as an alternative for information, before COVID19, is now convinced that the web is the primary mode of exchange, even in the third world societies, like ours. Real-time and reliable Instant messengers, quick and easy digital payment methods, convenience and price benefits of e-commerce retail, had educated people on how the alternative is the new mainstream, subtly, in last few years, but imposed social distancing brought that understanding to the fore. Deep penetration of smartphones in the company of wireless and cheap internet network has liberated consumers from the exclusive relationship that they had with physical retail stores.

Stores are on their way of becoming the new warehouse and retail stores are about to permanently become an application.

Google search for information has long replaced libraries for a lot of people, location tracking, the ability to compare prices from different suppliers gives the buyer the false (everything on the internet is curated, it does not exist organically) impression of being in charge. Consumers like when they think they are making the choices. The Internet has another distinct property: it is open 24*7.

From popularity, usefulness and adoption of the internet as the primary method of exchange and given special COVID19 circumstances below business opportunities emerge.

1. Tech Platform: From Advertising to lead generation to, informing the customer about the product and services, to getting on with the actual sign up to purchase to billing to delivery to post-sale query/complaint handling to return and refund; everything can be managed digitally. Not just that all backend processes, like demand estimation, we have touched upon manufacturing earlier in the article, supply chain to human resource management to finance and accounting - all of it can also be digitised. Pick whichever part of the customer journey that you are comfortable with and build a tech platform for it. The next trillion dollars in the Indian economy is going to come from platforms, as per the research conducted by the Boston consulting group.

2. Advanced data modelling: Digital wandering leaves data trail, even those expeditions that honour consumer data privacy, do enough for someone to catalogue a replica of your persona: your buying ability, your impulses, your likes and dislikes, your consumption rate, your refill propensity, down to the sec in which you are likely to make a decision. There is data on who you speak with, in what tone and what manner, what is it that you speak about and what is it you are wanting to convey. You may think of yourself as a private person but nothing about you is private anymore in the world of the internet.

Data set is used to create both descriptive and as well as predictive models. Principles of data science, behavioural economics, behavioural psychology, coupled with the capability of AI and machine learning are used in conjunction with market trends, capital and goods movement to exact future demands and way to fulfil those are appropriated too. Even if your model is 50% accurate, you are talking about getting it right once in 2 tries, that is way way better than sitting and hoping for a customer to decide in your favour. So if you have the stomach for data, get on with it and form a data product.

COVID19 induced human tragedy and capital erosion is disastrous and heartbreaking. But the only way to not lose to it completely is by preparing for the next frontier. History tells us that whenever a change disruptive and extensive enough gets forced on humans by nature. Humans adjust by eliminating or automating the items at the bottom of the pyramid, the most basic items are attacked first. Before World War II there use to be a job profile called, “Knocker Upper” job of this person was to knock on the door of the Europeans to wake them up in the morning. Alarm clock drove them out of jobs. Similarly, all the basic and unintelligent things that are today performed by humans will siege to exist, i.e - most over the counter retail interactions, simple bookkeeping, telephone-based reminders to customers to renew and recharge and pay are the kinds of job that will just disappear overnight.

"Are you investing today for your future security", is the question that deserves to have all your attention.

On that note, see you on the other side!

Co-existing with COVID19!



 

कारवाँ गुज़र गया, गुबार देखते रहे (Gopaldas, ’Neeraj’)

Yes the Virus is here, yes it is highly contagious and yes it is deadly!

So what do we do?

Fight, Freeze, or Flee?

I’m afraid to inform you ‘Fleeing’ is not an option. You gotta either confront the virus or hibernate into oblivion, perhaps for as long as you can count.

Q #1 - For how long should we let a microscopic pathogen dictate terms of our lives, determine the size of our aspiration, and deteriorate our collective determination? 

Q #2 - Why can’t we treat #COVID19 as one of the many other life-threatening challenges that we have come to live with? 

Q #3- Why should we submissively surrender?

(Before we go any further; I must mention in no uncertain terms that at NO time, should we ignore the warning or the guidelines issued by the competent Government authorities, pertaining but not limited to containment or treatment of the infected. Precaution, for now, is the cure, be smart, and comply.)

These questions are not coming from a place of ignorance or bravado. I am not an epidemiologist, or a virologist/immunologist or a healthcare professional with expertise in infectious disease, nor have I run or supervised public health response in a pandemic, ever. I’m one of you, the ordinary thinking citizen, who is learning a little about the virulence of our heartless invader from the newspaper, medical journal, research papers, and conversation with experts - every day! I am someone who decided to self-quarantine, in the last week of Feb this year (word of thanks and appreciation for my current employer who allowed me to do so, happily). So not in the line of fire just yet, but I do see, how lives of billions around the world are being altered, some more irreversibly then the others. The impact of the pandemic is ringing in all areas of our existence. Our enemy is using one of our key strengths and differentiators from other species: ‘Social connect’ against us, in plain sight. 

But, before we dive deep into to sludge of despair, allow me the liberty of bringing a few thoughts into your attention.

Q #1- Are we not better prepared to deal with anything of this magnitude now than any time in the entire history of humankind?

Q #2- Is it not a huge positive that we have tools like the ‘internet and the computer’ to run our lives despite restrictions that the virus harshly may impose on us?

Q #3- Isn’t medical science at its most advanced stage now than in the past?

Answer to all of the above is a resounding “YES” and therefore I say; if at all one of our fellow human beings could NOT have avoided eating BAT for dinner, then there wouldn’t have been a better time to do so than now. And, let me also put it out for your consumption that we are not required to be televangelical about the situation. False hope or needless motivation is not something that I’m trying to put forward here. I’m trying to place in our collective attention an alternative question to invite thoughts.

So, think of it as a grand brainstorming that I intend to do with all my regular and returning 10K readers.

(Pardon me for my inability to answer all of your emails but on this one, I’ll try to get to every one of your emails. When you write to me please have #Ask in your subject line, it will help me sort the questions)

Let’s wargame: What if the virus was to stay and never extinct? What if COVID19 turns out to be another cancer that humans do not know how to cure? (yes, pathology of both the ailments are different, but consider the only eventuality of both the conditions for this argument sake, thanks)

It is undeniably a scary proposition but as they say in the IAS academy (The Lal Bahadur Shastri National academy of Administration) when you are hit by a disaster plan for the worse, the absolute disastrous consequence that it can graduate to, and then solve for it. The idea is that size of the difficulty should always remain smaller than the spread of your preparation. And, so we are going by this ghastly hypothesis of the virus becoming a co-habitant of our planet. Let’s put time aside to think about the challenge exhaustively, from top to the bottom. The complete spectrum: from social, economic, psychological, national, cultural, religious, political to also those relating to foreign relations and domestic law and order. Please do not be superficial in your thought experiment or give in to the temptation of being narrow or being aggressively focused on self-interest, you’ve got to think deeply about it. All forecasters and economists are bringing in models that can send anyone in dizzy, let alone, those who survive on incremental gains from the capital (either of wealth or time and skill) that they employ to earn sustenance. No point denying that it is an unprecedented event and also a rare one, in which we find a great deal of convergence of views from noted thought leaders.

Now, let’s turn to the knowledge pool of history to find a few large scale disasters that humans have had to endure undesirably? Let’s say 

1. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

2. The great economic depression of 1930.

3. The global meltdown of 2008. 

4. Throw in the mix, the likes of HIV, Ebola, MERS, and previous SARS outbreaks, too.

Why do I pick public health emergencies and economic crisis for study? Well, because it makes for a good headline to say that we are choosing ‘life over livelihood’ but the harsh reality of our times is that without steady economic activities sustaining the cost of life is nearly impossible.

Pause at this stage, because studying these events will take you about 10 days, that is if you dedicate 3-5 hours to it every day. When you’re done with it come back and continue with the rest of the article.

Here is how the cast looked like in all of these.

• Upon developing an understanding of the crisis, estimations were made.

• Fear of losing the ‘regular’ loomed large.

• The new normal emerged. 

• The old ways got forgotten and the new normal became the norm, the usual.

This virus is not whipping the human race from the face of this planet, that only an asteroid will do, whenever it does. So let us jump to step 3 because 1 and 2 have been completed in the last 5 months or so since we discovered the unwanted guest, the Corona Virus.

Finding the ‘new normal’

As sub-step 1, let’s accept the virus and respect it for what it is. 

Scientists around the world are working round the clock to understand the vulnerabilities of the virus and ways in which we can attempt to neutralize it. Till they succeed we know that ‘social distancing’ is the way to go, along with other protective and precautionary measures like the triple-layer face mask and sanitization, etc, you get the idea. Would it have not been worse if we knew no way around it? We know now that as long as we do not come in direct contact with the pestilence we are good to go. So with that intel can we not reimagine our world? Yes, we can! Yes, it is not going to be an easy assignment because we have been building infrastructure optimized for efficiencies and space and this new arrangement is in fierce conflict with both of it.

But, there is a way around it. 

There is no easy answer but it must be found anyway, because it matters!

Imagine if we were to spread the demand and supply to fit the linear scale of time accommodating the social distancing norm? Simply put, if you spread what you used to produce in 9 hours to 24 - you’d end up achieving previous levels of output without exposing yourself to irresponsible risks, of course at the cost of efficiency but is it not better than having zero output, or an output reduced greatly by the imposition of social distancing norms?

Let me give you a service scenario from the contact center industry.

Precondition

• Imagine you had 100,000 customers to support in a 24*7 support window, but the bulk of your support requests came between 7 AM to 8 PM. 

• You had a workforce of 30 people to support the load of the requests.

Pre COVID19

• On the known inflow distribution you plot available staff hours. It was simple and straight forward, the physical infra was also built for it.

COVID19 Challenge

• You’re required to maintain a certain distance between two people and are also required to avoid the clustering of humans in any setup. So what do you do? 

Approach

You can now schedule not just your support agents but also customers to maintain the same level of support. That is spread the customers evenly across the 24 hours too.

A. Divide your customer base into three categories, preferably the elderly in the first 8-hour block of the day, others in the other two. 

• Educate customers about the rationals of this distribution and make them aware of their slots.

   B. Divide your workforce in three-shift, so in a space built to support 30 (actually you only build for 80% of the strength), distributed in the bunches, each of size 10 agents are accommodated. Social distancing is honored.

All three sets of customers will get equal support and the service provider also gets to fit the staff within the same infra without compromising on the need for social distancing.

Ok, before you jump rightfully to claim that all industries and setups are not linear. For example in the food industry, support volumes follow eating cycles and can not be staggered evenly throughout the day. And I agree with you. The broader point that I’m trying to argue here is that we will need to ‘think’ of newer ways of dealing with the situation within the space that restrictions leave for us and yet create what we must, without letting the virus either kill us or our economic progress.

On the other side of the same example: 

For all things administrative and managerial, there is a need for us to understand that, if we invest our energies on replicating ‘old practices’ as is in the new set up; we will fail miserably. This challenge should force us to question everything that we did earlier to figure out if they must be continued in the future too and must they be done, what is a newer way of doing it. Perhaps, a digital way of executing it must be explored.

Business Travel is a classic example: People used to practically live inside suitcases, is it not? Ask them, are they traveling now, and why not? The answer is ‘because they simply can’t they do not’. And that is the very principle that needs to be applied religiously and homogeneously. What will be a better time to adopt technology? All of us have been paying for the hardware, network, and tools for a long time. It is time we start using them too as our sole way of conducting our affairs, both personal and professional.

Let me give you the SOP: “Question everything that you do”

Imagine a scenario, where your job requires you to keep a track of telephonic conversation between two sets of people. 

Question:

1. Why should the conversation be telephonic? 

2. Can it not be moved to a digital medium? Zoom or any other platform that facilitates internet based exchange? 

3. Can you not tie the conversation to an inexpensive dialler?

Of course, you can. One way or the other.

This ultra-simple scenario may not do justice to the complexity of your situation; but remember I’m not trying to solve your specific issue, here, but simply and solely trying to orient you to question your ways of conducting yourself. Because all answers will emerge from it like they always have in the past.

Let us not permit the virus to decimate our creative thinking and problem-solving ability, we have a fertile brain that is perfectly capable of devising the solution. Let’s give it a chance. Lest you forget, we have evolved into our present form from a single cell organism, in the last 4.3 billion years. There is always a way out, as long as you’re determined to find one. 

Digital transformation is no longer, the one more thing that leaders and organizations used to do to gain superiority over their competition, it is now a necessity, a question of survival - so get on with it.

I refuse to remain afraid of the virus and I implore you to shun fear too. 

Let’s rebuilt our lives again, together.

I’ve published various articles in the past expressing my views on digital transformation: you may want to check them, on the website. Linking two of them here, which I find most relevant. 

Title : TRANSFORM DIGITALLY, NOW!

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/11/transform-digitally-now/

Title : BEFORE INNOVATION .

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/09/before-innovation/

To end this I’d like to leave you with a song that Late Mega Star Rajesh Khanna danced to on the silver screen when in the background it was being sung by the immortal Kishore Da.

मौत आनी है

आएगी एक दिन

जान जानी है

जाएगी एक दिन

ऐसी बातों से क्या घबराना

यहाँ कल क्या हो किसने जाना

Until we meet again!