“Today many organizations are struggling with huge volumes of data as a significant amount of it remains unused. However, by leveraging the right technologies and solutions organizations can build a data-driven business by using data-driven decision-making,” says Anjna Bhati, Director Data Analytics and AI, BluePi Consulting, in an interview with CIO AXIS.
CIO AXIS: Share a brief on BluePi Consulting and its service offerings.
Anjna Bhati: Founded in 2012, in Gurgaon by industry leaders, Pronam Chatterjee and Kaushik Khanna, BluePi Consulting Pvt. Ltd. partners with organizations to help the latter achieve higher levels of data maturity. The organization has successfully presented itself as one of the “Game changers” in the industry, with its data-driven, cloud-based industry solutions. It is a Premier Consulting Partner with AWS and has strategic partnerships with Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudera, and GCP. BluePi helps customers with their Data-driven Business Transformation journeys through the delivery of End-to-End specialized IT services and solutions. This includes Big Data, AI-enabled Data Analytics, Machine Learning, App modernization and Development, Cloud Migrations and Web analytics platforms. It serves several established organizations across India in the BFSI and Retail sectors.
BluePi recently launched its operations in Sydney, Australia, the first country outside of India. It appointed Gaurav Sharma as the CEO to oversee operations in the region, both Australia and New Zealand. Gaurav has over two decades of experience in Business Leadership roles for global IT giants and has won multiple awards across organizations for his excellent performance.
BluePi’s solutions in the retail space, include, Offline – Demand Planning, Inventory Optimization, Product Lifecycle Management, Master Data Management, Customer Data Platform, QSR – PoS Analytics, Supply Chain Optimization, Demand Forecasting, Wastage Reduction, and Online – Customer Data Platform
Its BFSI sector solutions are for Banks – Toll Acquirer Automation Systems, Churn Analytics, Delinquency Prediction, Unified Data Platform, Insurance Companies – Claim Propensity, Customer Risk profiling, and NBFCs – Credit Risk Profiling, Operational Analytics.
CIO AXIS: Data Analytics is leveraged extensively by the BFSI sector to advance the capabilities of the organizations here. How is it used to expand the customer base for the businesses in the sector?
Anjna Bhati: The customers of Financial Institutions are today more digital than ever before, fueled by their several digital needs. Data Analytics and BI are helping these institutions to cater to these needs and are integral to the BFSI industry. The technology is leveraged for analyzing the sales performance, based on what products are in demand among customers, to confirm if customers use a physical branch or online for their purchases and transactions. One can get a complete picture of customer transaction patterns and know which product is generating more interest among the target group. It can be used to reach out to prospects and in converting them leading to an increase in the customer database. Potential customers can be identified for different product portfolios. Banks can also leverage the technology to focus on the most profitable customers who do enough business to make a difference. Analytics can help in predicting customer lifetime value while supporting in reducing customer churn and winning new customers.
CIO AXIS: Elaborate on the technological solutions that can be leveraged for data-driven decision-making and creating better customer experiences.
Anjna Bhati: All customers increasingly expect the brand to understand their needs and that interaction with the brand will provide them with a sense of joy and fulfillment leading them to make a purchase and repeat buying. Today many organizations are struggling with huge volumes of data as a significant amount of it remains unused.
However, by leveraging the right technologies and solutions organizations can build a data-driven business by using data-driven decision-making. Data Analytics can help understand how customers behave online leading to powerful insights. Customer Data Platforms enable the collection of data about the customers from their visit to multiple sites across platforms prior to making a purchase. This information can be used in marketing campaigns. Data warehouses, where data gathered from multiple sources is cataloged and integrated to deliver valuable data points for the organization delivers high value. Business Intelligence Solutions support data-driven decision-making and forecasting.
By gaining a complete picture of each customer, the target market can be understood well. This drives better prediction of market patterns, reduces spoilage, improves the profit margin, and ensures the organization stays ahead of the curve.
A McKinsey research report establishes that data-driven enterprises are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/five-facts-how-customer-analytics-boosts-corporate-performance
CIO AXIS: What are the challenges of data platforms and how can data be used to build a model for agility that drives competitive advantage?
Anjna Bhati: The customer data platform centralizes customer data from all sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service, and all customer experience initiatives. However, there are some challenges with customer data platforms (CDPs). They are sometimes not flexible as they are generally built on rigid data models. Analysts may have to re-architect the data to fit the model, which is a time-consuming process. Those CDPs designed with smaller datasets will have difficulties scaling when the customer base of the organization grows. Sometimes businesses have data management issues with data silos, data latency, state data, and others and even with the CDP, these problems remain. The data will be owned by the CDP provider and may not be suitable for businesses that have sensitive data and want to have control over it.
Since the onset of the pandemic, many businesses have begun to understand this need for data agility. Migrating data to the cloud is very crucial, where new possibilities with the data can be unlocked due to the support of other new-age technologies with cloud adoption. Data is the new gold and has to be protected by tightening the security aspect. The insights from data have to be quickly incorporated into the product to see results. Disaster Recovery measures have to be put in place. It is important to unify the organization’s data. Data agility becomes very critical when there is a need for data at a speed where decision-making has to be done quickly and frequently.
CIO AXIS: Why is the data journey crucial for businesses in the building of a data platform?
Anjna Bhati: The path to any organization’s future success lies in effectively gathering, managing, and analyzing data to gain real insights that support smart decision-making. The process of generating and storing data from both internal and external sources is done on the cloud due to the many benefits. Data preparation and modeling and creating dashboards can enable users to discover insights. These insights are then embedded into the products and services in real time. This process is leveraged in building a customer data platform for creating more personalized marketing campaigns.
CIO AXIS: What are the components of Data Governance and how does it help in implementing change management?
Anjna Bhati: A Data Governance framework that ensures data is consistently available, usable, trustworthy, and secured, is effective. Key components of the Data Governance program include the objectives, people, policies and processes, structure, technology, data protection, and key performance indicators. Data Governance around the health of the data is ongoing and requires good planning. This has to be brought to action with enterprise-wide adoption for data-driven decision-making that leads to the significant change in the company culture and processes. The successful implementation of a data strategy is done through the data change management process that includes, preparing for the change, having a clear vision, initiating change, and monitoring the progress. It has to be long-term and a stable process, addressing resistance and ensuring success.
CIO AXIS: Please share the future growth plans of your organization.
Anjna Bhati: BluePi has been on a steady growth trend since inception. Our philosophy is to focus on building our team and ensuring quality delivery. This takes care of growth on its own. However in the last 2 years we have seen a spurt of growth, which will propel us to around 200% YoY growth by the end of year. Also, it looks like the momentum would carry us to another stupendous year next year as well. The biggest challenge we need to solve is to keep supply in sync with demand, amidst the ongoing talent wars.