A Data-Driven Business Culture for India: The 2030 Roadmap Is Now Available

Data in the post-pandemic world is similar to what oil was in the 18th century, an immensely-untapped valuable asset that can propel the growth of any intelligent enterprise across the business ecosystem.

The enormous volume of data produced, collected, stored, and analysed if utilized efficiently can thrust a new data-driven business culture backed by data science. The pandemic has led to an unprecedented acceleration of digitalization, and organizations are now looking forward to the democratization of AI, and the convergence of AI with business intelligence (BI).  

In a recently concluded roundtable organised by BW Businessworld with some of the world’s leading C-suite leaders associated with the data-driven business industry, a myriad range of topics were discussed, including the importance of networking, the steps taken to keep the customers at the centre, the role of data and insights, and identifying new markets to pursue.

Your network is your net worth:
“Data is the oil that is fuelling our businesses. Possessing data in its crude form is not of any use at all.” Abhai Singh, India Sales Head & Scaled Customer Business Lead – APAC at LinkedIn, commented, “We should be able to extract intelligence from data, and make it actionable on a daily basis,”

As New York Times bestselling author Tim Sanders has rightly said, “Your network is your net-worth.” Online service providing company LinkedIn has given much emphasis to it.

Abhai Singh explained, “At LinkedIn, we think of the network as net-worth because your network can make a huge difference when you are engaging with your clients, and also how your customers look at you,”

Singh mentioned, “In today’s world, the client’s buying journey has drastically changed as they have tons of information with them online and from multiple other sources, which was not the case in the past,”

He underlined, “Trust will definitely be the deciding factor, whether you get the deal or not. However, as per research conducted by LinkedIn 70% of the decision is already taken before your sellers get the first meeting. Therefore, the buying journey of a client begins much earlier, even before the first engagement even takes place,”

Always keep the customer at the centre:  
Nilesh Patel, CEO at Leadsquared quoted Mahatma Gandhi’s words: The customer is the most important visitor to our establishment, he is not dependent on us; we depend on him.    

Patel said, “This is a business fundamental that one should never forget. The customer should always be at the centre of the business or else we will lose them,”

SaaS companies have to keep renewing their business every quarter, month, and year to stay relevant and updated. He commented, “The value that the customers perceive should be more than what it is. In SaaS, delivering top-notch software is of key importance, as is making sure that it runs smoothly and solves customers’ problems,”

Patel also added that they have to teach their clients such that they can run the products to its optimal capacity. He explained, “We have to help the customer learn and train their teams in better utilizing the software; this also increases the perception of value which they get from us,”

Vaibhav Jain, CEO at Hubilo stated that their company’s strategy with respect to the clients has shifted dramatically in the past couple of years.

Jain said, “Earlier, we were a small company, and we involved our customers directly to receive their feedback. We even termed our product development cycle as customer development cycle as whatever features were needed by them, we built accordingly,”

Now, the company has reached a stage where they are more proactive than reactive.  

Jain highlighted, “For 2022, we have planned that all our teams, including finance, sales, marketing and human resource are connected with the customers, this will ensure the fact that everyone is listening to the customers,”

“And, we keep a seat empty for the customers so that they are also present,” added Jain.

Samir Vyas, India Country Head General Manager at Agilent Technologies said, “Several of our customers use our products and solutions to make critical decisions, and we ensure that there is a mechanism in place to create a database that captures the customer's journey from initial needs assessment to successful delivery and after sales execution.”

Vyas mentioned that conducting surveys is of prime importance to understand the unique challenges faced by the customers and to keep up with their future aspirations goals.

He commented, “Recently, we did a global survey involving 615 650 labs across the world, in which we connected with the different segments of the laboratory, and build gathered insights all the way coming from research to product manufacturing,”

The survey results showcased some interesting statistics which helped the company with its investment plans.

Vyas explained, “85 per cent of respondents across the globe said that they are looking for more accurate and precise measurements to make their decisions successful and deliver a greater degree of specificity, as a result, we decided to invest into technology that is more robust, reliable and produces sustainable results,”

“Keeping the customer in the centre helps especially when there is a huge portfolio and operational base to ensure that you fulfil the emerging needs of the customer,” he added.

Data is like crude oil until refined: 
Vishal Parekh, Head – South Asia & Southeast Asia at Thomson Reuters, stated that while his focus is divided amongst both existing customers and acquiring new customers, given the aggressive growth plans of the company in the region, there is a lot of focus on new customers.

Parekh said, “When it comes to existing customers, our retention rate is north of 90 per cent, the challenge is in acquiring new customers,”

He highlighted the fact that raw data is of no use until it is converted into insights. Parekh commented, “Data is like crude oil, till the time it is not refined it cannot be used anywhere. The problem is that we have an abundance of data, but we do not know how to channelize it efficiently to generate insights,”

Parekh underlined that platforms such as LinkedIn can be leveraged to generate insights.

He said, “Some of the best-in-class organizations provide a playbook for the sales team – a playbook which contains details of target accounts, their potential requirements and the solutions to be pitched.”

Parekh highlighted the need to have a focused approach in identifying the right targets instead of a carpet-bombing approach. He said, “We want to transition by using data and analytical tools to get smarter and approach the right customers even before the first call is made,”

The importance of an active feedback loop:
Saurabh Saxena, COO at InterviewBit & Scaler, said they have a very active feedback collection loop.

Saxena said, “Everybody who is going out of the system also feeds into what they would like to learn next; that has led to the creation of new programs. In the past year, we created an array of programs based on the feedback of our students and potential students,”

“There is always a funnel which is collecting data, and that data helps us to understand which markets we should further tap into,” he added.

Saxena also harped on the importance of the prioritisation of resources. He underlined, “Prioritisation is important, which problem should we tackle first, and where do we see making the biggest impact or difference,”

The future role of data and insights:

Vinod Kumar, CEO at Subex focused on the importance of digitalization in today’s world. Kumar said, “All of us are aware of the digitalization which is happening in every sector, and how successful one is in utilizing data will determine their success,”  

Kumar broadly rounded up three aspects to keep in mind while leveraging data – the democratization of tools and AI/ML which can be used to derive insights from leverage data, trust on AI models and insights generated from them, and the governance aspect of data.  

"In today's date, aside from a few large enterprises, insight generation is limited due to a resource gap or bandwidth limitations of the data science team, which is preventing many organizations from leveraging the data adequately data stifling the growth of many organizations," Kumar explained.

Secondly, Kumar underlined the need to have digital trust in data insights.  

He said, “While taking decisions or scaling up the business, there is a need to establish trust in data insights, and what guards you have in place to ensure that the data is not biased - currently the trust in sharing data has also taken a backseat, the need of the hour is to develop models and frameworks through which we can establish trust in data and insights generated from it,”  

The governance and privacy aspect of data is also important in today’s date. Kumar pointed out, “We have been collecting a lot of data whether we require it or not and this can become a major liability with the rollout of strict data protection regulations in various geographies. Therefore the management and governance of data become very important. As there is no liability which is coming there, the management of data becomes important here,”

Annapurna Vishwanathan, CIO at Cummins India suggested that data consists of three major aspects – collection, process and consumption.  

Vishwanathan pointed out, “In the past decade, the world has been running after only the collection of data, we conduct censuses, make applications, store cookies, but at the end of the day the question remains why are we doing this,”

However, in the future things are going to be different, as the focus will shift to simplified consumption of data. She commented, “We don’t even need AI/ML for data which we collect, it can be done using simple logic. People make decisions based on gut feelings, which can be easily automated and it will result in reduced cycle-time,”  

“The value addition aspect of data is going to move to the consumption part because if we get that right, we are truly using that oil (data), otherwise it is just sitting in our tanks but we are not adding any value to it,”

Sachin Duggal, Chief Wizard and Co-Founder at Builder.ai said, “We have grown exponentially - from 100 nodes and 50,000 relationships to over 600 nodes and two million relationships (edges), and every-time we interact with the customer, the data reinforces the graph thus reaping benefits of reinforced learning,”

Duggal mentioned how they launched a system last year which helped in adding to the graph. He said, “Whenever someone speaks to our customer-facing teams, the call is not only recorded but is also processed & broken down into artefacts ingested by the platform. This helps For instance, in recognizing when a customer is talking about order management or payments, the features which they spoke are added to the project; the idea is to bring all the unorganized data into a graph and gain collective insights,”  

“Now the data in the graph is being used when the salesperson talks to the customer next time, as soon as a customer says something, the AI processes it and suggests a question regarding the topic so that we reduce the human variance form the customer interactions and get to a better end result for the customer,” he added.

The panellist concluded the roundtable discussion by reaching the general agreement that there are an enormous number of possibilities in data-driven business culture, the need to keep the customer at the centre and build insights from raw data.