[dropcap size=”2″]AIM[/dropcap]Analytics India Magazine: What are some of the main tenets (philosophies, goals, attributes) of analytics approach and policies at your organization?
[dropcap size=”2″]MG[/dropcap]Madhumita Ghosh: In highly competitive and ever changing market scenario, when business needs to do jugglery with too many attributes, certainly information based decision making is required to improve business outcome. So ‘curiosity & means of improving business outcome’ is our starting point with establishing the linear as well as nonlinear relationship between attributes.
Our focus is more on understanding customer behavior and psyche. Minacs Analytics has now embarked on a journey to create actionable insights with its solutions for the next generation customers with our CRM logs and interactions integrated with algorithmic processing and automation, and ‘Omni’-channel technologies.
AIM: Can you brief about your role at Minacs?
MG: We being a leading outsourcing business solutions partner to global corporations in the manufacturing, retail, telecom, technology, media & entertainment, banking, insurance, healthcare, and public sectors worldwide delivering customer experience, marketing and back office solutions to power enhanced business results for clients.
Hence our goal always is to provide better experience to our customer’s customers. Role of mine therefore is
- To determine data driven information based improvement areas
- To build predictive scenarios with best possible course of actionable prescriptions
We built customized solutions by stitching analytical models with our other existing business process solutions as per client’s business needs and value enhancement.
In analytics solutions, we provide actionable insightful monitoring dashboard which is descriptive in nature, develop and deploy predictive and prescriptive analytical model towards improved business outcome for various business houses.
AIM: When did your organization adopt analytics and what has been the benefits till date?
MG: Analytics in Micas is not a new adoption. For over three decades, Minacs has been using data and database marketing to deliver high-ROI, personalized messages that target customers based on multiple criteria to present them with the most relevant offers.
As I mentioned earlier, as the variability and competitiveness has increased over the time, we at Minacs also felt the need to provide Value added services which can enhance our customer’s desired goal. BIG DATA analytics provides big opportunities for business houses for growth as a way to transform customer’s experience’ along with IT & Technology enablement. The key fact is that almost every single major decision to drive revenue, to control costs, or to mitigate risks can be instilled with information blending and analytics where the near-end applications are in marketing, customer experience, sales leads and on risk management.
We are continuously winning our client’s trust and became dependable business solution provider with our advanced Analytics based longer-term consultative improvement advice in tandem with Analytics blended process improvement, continuous monitoring and providing real-time alerts and recommendations to our client contact centers.
AIM: What are the key differentiators in your analytical solutions?
MG: In-depth focus on customer’s behavioral and attitudinal attributes deduced from transaction and interaction, Deep domain understanding and Continuous process improvement triggers are the three top priorities while mining the information.
We are dealing with millions of customer interaction per day. Our key differentiator is to understand customer’s pulse and logical approach to the actions which is purely data-driven insight. We deduce various attributes of customers from CRM log and interaction, blend with other profile and transactional data. In our predictive and other advanced models, we use more behavioral and attitudinal attributes.
AIM: Please brief us about the size of your analytics group and what is hierarchal alignment, both depth and breadth.
MG: The team members are being selected basis the core needs of Analyst, ‘Data geek’, ‘always inquisitive’, ‘outcome hungry’ and ‘wear 3 hats viz. data modeller, customer & process owner’. Minacs has accomplished professionals in technology and outsourcing, process excellence. There is a strong team consisting of database administrators, data modeller, data architects, statisticians and domain experts, which is currently responsible for driving delivery. The team is a good mix of experts in various processing and visualization tools.
Alongside, we are in the journey of building a strong core Analytics center of excellence to serve the whole organization with analytical precision.
AIM: What are the planned next steps/ road ahead for analytics in your organizations?
MG: In this era of big data, we need to be at front league to provide constant business value from accumulated data. Data analytics market with emerging ‘IoT’ and ‘machine to machine’ footprints is therefore poised for exponential growth in coming years and we are gearing with our solutions to make the presence felt in the global market.
AIM: What are some of the key challenges that you are facing in this area?
MG: Being from service provider side, the fundamental challenge I found in various organisations is the ownership & the accountability of driving analytics initiatives in the organization. There is a coordination gap between Business Head/CMO, CTO and CIO on taking the lead and initiatives to institutionalise analytics in their organization. On one side, Business heads/CMO being the end user of analytics, on the other side dependency of technology and Information architecture is on CTO & CIO.
Along with Data silos, the other challenges do exist in terms of quality of data and variety of data sources and custodians. It will be extremely important to leverage social media data and other external data in the environment.
AIM: What kind of knowledge worker do you recruit and what is the selection methodology? What skill sets do you look at while recruiting in analytics?
MG: Good aptitude, quantitative background viz. Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, OR etc., data architects and visualization proficiency with business understanding is the other areas. Now a day’s students with engineering background are keen to come into this space.
We follow a stringent procedure of selection test, practical assessment with tools, business acumen, interpersonal communication; however we put more weight on ‘attitude of learning’.
AIM: How do you see Analytics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important contemporary trends that you see emerging in the Analytics space across the globe?
MG: Analytics market is growing very fast along with IT enabled services and technology advancements. In today’s space all are selling analytics services viz. the business consulting organisations, the IT service providers, Tools & Technology houses, KPOs, BPMs and the boutique analytics firms. This at times creates challenges in front of the buyer space to decide to whom to align with. At the end it is difficult for the business houses to establish a right and scalable solution for the organization. As the new era is becoming more digital in nature, hence the area of Digital Analytics, Spectral Analysis, Natural language Processing etc. are taking bigger shape with wider application. The application of ML (machine learning), Robotics and AI (Artificial Intelligence) would take a leap in next few years.
As a practitioner, I find a shortage of right talent and it will continue to be unless proper attempt is not there. The Analytics institutions are more aligned with tools and theoretical approaches compared to real life applications.
AIM: How did you start your career in Analytics? How has the journey been so far?
MG: My career journey is versatile in nature over 17 years. It started with an international funding agency as social researcher followed by consumer and media researcher in large Advertising firm LOWE Lintas. Post the research era, it oriented towards Analytics with IMS, Kale-Accelya, and Aegis. Always being with service providers, I had got the opportunity to work with varied industries and domains and to learn best practices across global business houses. So far grounds up Analytics practice set up, develop & deploy complex models, and creating analytics solution roadmap is in my alley. Post Aegis, the entrepreneur journey started as founding team member & Sr. Vice President at Ananto Analytics, a boutique firm which is integrated with Minacs in 2014 and I am at the capacity of Global Head – Analytics in Minacs. Needless to say that the ‘Analytics journey’ is a total adventure with full of challenges, new discovery, learnings and fun. I am also associated with analytics education in India and have been active faculty/advisor to premier B- schools in this space.
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[spoiler title=”Biography of Madhumita Ghosh” style=”fancy” icon=”plus-circle”]
Madhumita is a qualified and accomplished SME in the area of Analytics with over 17 years of experience with Hands-on data scientist, analytics evangelist and leader with core expertise in aligning the fact driven decision process as a business enabling function. Her passionate expertise and multiple experiences in building analytical capabilities and CoE roadmap from scratch in telecom, banking, finance, insurance, Travel & Hospitality and consulting organizations in various geographies. Madhumita is also associated with analytics education in India and have been active faculty/advisor to premier B- schools in this space.
Madhumita’s qualification is in quantitative areas. She is Masters in Statistics (T M Bhagalpur University, Bihar); B.Sc in Mathematics hons. & Statistics (Jamshedpur Women’s Collage, Jharkhand). She also holds Post Graduate Diploma in Operations Research from Operation Research Society of India, Kolkata and Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Application from IGNOU (ISM-Dhanbad chapter).
As Global Head of Analytics in Minacs, Madhumita is responsible for Analytics solution architecture, framework & roadmap creation, and delivery for Global client base. On behalf of Minacs, her predictive solution recognized as ‘Analytics Excellence’ at NASSCOM report and recognized for “Innovative application of Analytics for Business Solution’ 2015.[/spoiler]
