Multi-Channel Frequency Capping: Challenges and Solutions
Frequency capping refers to the maximum number of times an ad is scheduled to be shown to a user over a specific period of time. This will be variously set depending on media channels, platforms, and operating systems. How many times should an ad be displayed to a user? What is the optimum frequency that brings the best results? There can’t be a universal answer. The answer depends on many variables. Some amount of testing, measuring and strategizing are needed to find the optimum for each case. There are people who believe that too much of bombarding with an ad will create distaste and immunity in the audience. Keeping away from too much intrusiveness is advisable as users hate aggressive stalking. This calls for stricter frequency caps. There are others who believe that brand recall will be great when the ad is served more frequently. They argue for liberal frequency capping. One simple consensus could be that ads for brand building can be served many times more (liberal frequency capping), and ads that expect user response should be served modestly (stricter frequency capping). The type of ad, a variety of ad creatives available, and the buying model are three major factors that impact ad-serving frequency. Type: Traditional display ads like banners are not normally too intrusive. They sit somewhere, and it is easy for the user to ignore them. But innovative ad types like interstitials, pop-ups and pop-unders (screen-takeover ads) disrupt smooth user experience. Therefore, liberal capping is okay for traditional ad types, but capping should be stricter for the more intrusive types. Variety: If an advertiser has only a few creatives for display, the same ad will pop up frequently and repel the viewer. If there is a good number of interesting creatives, they keep rotating. Stricter capping is advised if creatives are fewer and liberal capping if there is sufficient variety. Buying model: Ad impressions may be bought for CPM, CPC or CPA. In the CPM mode (cost per mille—cost per thousand impressions), if the ad is displayed to the same user too many times, the allowed quota will soon be over; but the message will reach only a few people. In CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action) modes, billing happens only when the user performs an action on the ad. Moral: Stricter capping is needed for CPM mode; the other modes take care of themselves. Frequency capping has always been debatable. With earnest efforts, things can still go wrong in many cases. For example, when an ad is being served through multiple ad networks, since they do not share the cookie IDs of the users, there are chances of frequency capping violations. A breaking development in modern-day campaign management solutions is the emergence of real-time bidding (RTB). RTB is a conclusive solution to the challenges of frequency capping. It provides advertisers the agility to serve the right impression to the right user at the right time—the three key variables that make frequency capping necessary. RTB gives control over the fourth important variable—the price. Thus, it creates a win-win situation for advertisers, ad platforms and users. RTB is here to stay, and frequency capping woes will go away for good. We’ll discuss more on RTB in the coming weeks.
Mobile Healthcare: Transforming the healthcare delivery
Gone are the days where a doctor digs into the pile of a patient’s case history files, reads through it and writes the prescription on a piece of paper and hangs it on the patient’s bed. Most of the paperwork in the healthcare industry today is replaced by handheld devices or computers. The advent of mobile devices and multiple apps that facilitate easy operations and reduces the workload on healthcare professionals has brought in a transformational change in the healthcare industry. Healthcare is an industry that has been impacted largely by the introduction of new mobile medical devices. June 2012 Manhattan Research/Physician Channel Adoption Study found that doctors’ ownership and use of mobile devices is pervasive, with 87% using a smartphone or tablet device in their workplace, compared to 99% who use a computer1.Surveys have shown that around 80% of physicians use an iPhone while most of the remainder opt for Android smartphones. Major drivers for the quick adoption of mobile devices by healthcare professionals include: Voice, text and video communication capabilities. Easy storage, archival and updating of medical records. Quick availability of informational resources such as textbooks, notes, guides, research findings and videos. Software applications that aid diagnosis and treatments. Health care professionals use mobile applications for multiple purposes. One such purpose is healthcare record maintenance. Every patient while in hospital generates huge amounts of data in various forms such as lab results, prescriptions, X- ray reports and scanning images. Storing the data in multiple formats, updating it regularly and easy retrieval is a challenge. Multiple apps are available today on apple and android platforms helping doctors take informed decisions faster. Also, some companies have developed specialized apps for remote viewing of image scans. Mobile devices and health apps assist in a broad way for remote patient health monitoring of individuals with chronic health disorders. A mobile app can help monitor the entire bed of the patient based on the vital sign indicators. The alarm is raised based on the severity of the condition. Mobile GPS systems are used to track the chronically ill, elderly patients and those with a mental disorder who show a tendency of forgetting the place they belong to. Beyond the functions mentioned above, mobile devices are contributing in educational and training fronts as well. Students and healthcare professionals are increasingly relying on mobile devices for textbooks, research articles, journals, and medical podcasts and training sessions. It’s also frequently used by professionals to double-check the processes and procedures involved in diagnosis and treatment. This reduces the time by cutting off the unnecessary test procedures and mitigates the risk of taking wrong diagnostic decisions. Healthcare professionals also use mobile devices to keep themselves regularly updated about the happenings in the healthcare industry and ensure learning happens on the go. Healthcare wearables also have evolved over the years. The Global Wearable Healthcare Market was worth $3.3 billion in 2015 and estimated to be growing at a 17.7% CAGR, to cross $7.8 billion by 20202. One such innovative wearable developed recently for knee pain relief comes with Bluetooth technology and compatible on iOS and Android operating system. The electrode placed inside the brace gives pain relief for over 40 hours after the battery is charged. The proliferation of mobile devices in the healthcare industry and its quick adoption by healthcare professionals has made mobility ubiquitous. Both practitioners and patients have gained their benefits. Despite having constraints such as internet connectivity and GPS reliability for seamless information exchange, mobility has come a long way in changing the dynamics of the healthcare industry and has contributed largely to its advancement. iPads and other drugs. Medical Marketing & Media: The Interactive Guide, 2013 Global wearable medical device market growth trends and forecasts 2015-2020, prnewswire.com, 2015
WoD (Warranty on Demand) Series – Configuring Payment Rules
WoD (Warranty on Demand) – is a cloud based warranty management system developed by Tavant Technologies to automate and optimize warranty process of global organizations. WoD’s comprehensive list of functions can make it one of the best warranty management system to resolve the warranty related problems of different organizations The high configurability of the system allows users to easily build business rules to adapt to the corresponding OEM’s warranty processes. One such key process is Claim Payment and the logic toward arriving at the payment amount. The service network structure varies from organization to organization. Contracts between OEMs and their servicing dealers may also vary which will result in their labor being different. Regulations may vary from country to country resulting in added surcharges and taxes. The complexity starts when OEMs want to calculate the claim payment using these small adjustments and their inability to adjust. WoD has the capability of resolving complex scenarios of different organizations efficiently. In WoD, users can create customized logic to calculate their claim payment using multiple rules. Here, the claim payment is divided into three segments so that configurations can be done for every scenario effectively. The three segments are: OEMs can create and configure all cost categories that is required at the time of calculating claim payment. These cost categories will determine the values that a dealer can enter while filing a claim. Examples of cost categories are: labor cost, travel cost, parking cost and meals cost. OEMs may configure multiple cost categories in the system but every claim may not require all cost categories to calculate payment – so, an OEM can specify the cost categories that the system will account for calculating payments. Pre-defined cost categories are linked with policies and based on the rules created, system will calculate the claim payment by selecting a policy for a particular claim. Modifying the payment information is generally linked to the cost categories selected for calculation of claim payment. This is a set of rules that an OEM may create if they want to change the payout for a particular dealer and/or machine/part claim. These attributes make it possible to override a claim payment previously calculated with basic payment rules. As WoD brings the agility of Salesforce.com with it, organizations will find it extremely easy to use as it can be accessed from anywhere due to its cloud functionality. If we consider warranty management in a global scale – the scope is changing rapidly and the main aim of building WoD is to focus on understanding the future of warranty management. WoD is already loaded up with all new releases provided by Salesforce till date and periodic feature upgrades from our experts make it a dynamic system for resolving warranty management issues.
User Identification in Programmatic Advertising and Other Challenges
Without a ‘proxy’ to accurately identify individuals, programmatic marketing is simply unmanageable. While cookies have been the proxy for identification, it’s time to ask about the future. Programmatic experts are yet to figure out a way, but if cookies are dying out, programmatic will surely face a threat. The cookie seems to have been doing a great job. Reports from Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found total digital revenue reaching $12.4 billion in the last quarter of 2014. Programmatic is basically a combination of different kinds of technologies that buy, place, and optimize advertising automatically, and hence enables highly profitable ad campaigns. As the job of programmatic is to identify the right viewer and make that viewer see the ad, the first thing required is a real viewer. Unfortunately, some rogues in the web world are capable of misleading even the smartest software programs. Challenges like viewability and fraud are constantly troubling the world of programmatic. Most advertisers shy away from programmatic buying because of the looming presence of reputation concerns and fraud. As of May 2015, the leading hurdles in using programmatic ad buying in UK and USA were statistically evaluated from a survey: Leading Challenges in Programmatic Buying, 2015 (UK and USA) – % of survey participants More than half the traffic on websites is essentially bot traffic. It has been estimated that more than $6.3 billion damage will be experienced because of bots. Hence, out of an estimated $43.8 billion, if more than $6 billion is fraudulent activity (fake clicks through a set of automated software programs), it is a huge loss for advertisers. Huge organizations with complete set ups operate with botnet malwares to extract millions of dollars. For folks in programmatic, ad impression viewability continues to remain a huge challenge around online display ads. In order for an ad to qualify as viewable, a minimum 50% of its pixels should appear on desktop screens for at least one second. For video ads, 50% pixels should be viewable for at least 2 seconds. These challenges may be confronted by micromanaging customized platforms. Advertisers need to use technology that maximizes outcomes. It’s not enough to seek impressions or aim at a single behavior pattern for producing the desired results. It is necessary to depend on technology that executes the numerous conditions correctly for ad-space selection. By using such a platform, advertisers with different needs can improve their ROIs in clear-cut ways.
Maximizing Benefit from Programmatic Creative
Programmatic advertising is based on artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms. Hence, hindrance to creativity is a matter of concern. Having said that programmatic advertising presents an opportunity to effectively utilize creatives by structuring the creative as a template. It means one can configure the different sections of an asset based on different audience segments. However, to develop creatives, brands must keep them compatible with their ad-tech platforms. Coordinated effort from both media and creative agencies, can help maximize the profits programmatic offers. Fig: Primary goals for optimizing programmatic creative (Source: http://www.slideshare.net/celtra/the-rise-of-creative-in-a-programmatic-world) It is not just direct response First thing that comes to mind when thinking about programmatic is direct response. But, programmatic is no longer limited to that. Initially, inventories were restricted to indicating how many prospect-to-consumer conversions happened. However, that is hardly close to the potential of programmatic. It can develop a brand’s relationship with customers over a certain length of time. In a way, programmatic influences the kind of creatives brands must develop going by the response trends. Publishers may demand a new product demonstration or a descriptive video, something absolutely different from what worked previously. Digital media has made interaction highly personalized across various devices. You need to be extremely careful about how you move your consumers into the buying process, but brainstorming for an ad when you are close to selling is unlikely to work. Create assets that are flexible to work with in automated platforms With programmatic, your scope to decide which ad to show your prospect stretches till the nick of time. However, you need a flexible and agile inventory for that. For creative agencies, the turnaround time (TAT) is very stringent and they have to be extremely agile. If your TAT says 72 hours, it should be exactly that. Lack of advance planning makes the entire journey bumpy. As an agency, you can settle with your clients on different creative options like format, copy, color, etc. Your programmatic creative team can then change the combinations regularly. Programmatic creative is trying to monitor every second of customer response when publishers show an ad. It gives a clearer picture of brand engagement for a product. This helps in transforming the ads into more effective assets, based on detailed study.
Visual Workflow: Record Create
Application development no longer means learning to write code. Application development has reached new standards as there is a growing demand for business administrators to play the IT administrators role. Salesforce.com has also acknowledged this change and shows with a lot of development methods without coding. There is a new feature called visual workflow that provides point a click configuration for multi-step business rules. Visual Workflow, built using Force.com’s Cloud Flow Designer, allows a user to create a flow for the complete business process without writing code. It can be a series of screens to enter the values for the process or an auto-launched one which runs or performs the functionality automatically. Salesforce has various options to create or update records –in both standard and customized way. We will see how to create a record using flow: When a Cloud Flow Designer is opened, we can find different tabs available. The Canvas and Explorer tab display the elements that exist in the flow. The Palette tab displays the available element types that you can add to the flow by dragging them onto the canvas. Every flow element has three settings in common: name, unique name, and description. These elements help in various functionalities From that we will understand the elements used to create a record in Salesforce. For every single piece of data captured or displayed, need a variable to be set up in the flow, and set the Input/Output type of the variable as “Input only” or “Input/Output” or private. This defines the accessibility of the values. It is always recommended to follow a naming convention to identify easily which is meant for what. Let’s say I have to create a case from account object. For this, we have to create a flow to perform the create functionality, then call the flow from the page and then finally a button to initiate the process. Below are the elements used in our case: Screen: This element is used as the UI element to show the fields and enter values for the same. Record Create: This element is used to create Salesforce record(s) using the field values that is individually set. For more details on rest of the elements click here Steps: Create >> Setup >> Create >> Workflow & Approvals >> Flows >> New Flow Add screen element for input values for the case record to be created, in this scenario I have added two text fields to input the values for status and origin. 2. Next step is to create the case record by assigning the values from the screen elements and the input variable and map against the standard fields of the case in the ‘Records Create’ element. 3. Make the screen as the start element and connect the two elements. 4. Activate the flow Now the flow is ready for the record creation. All we want is a triggering point to invoke the record creation from the standard page of the account record. A custom page with standard controller as Account will be created with the below tag to connect the flow that we just created <flow: interview name=”FlowName”> Pass the current account ID to the flow to connect the case to be created with the current account. <apex:param name=”varAccountId” value=”{!Account.Id}“/> Now the page is ready to launch the flow. Let’s create a custom button for calling the page just created and place the button on the page layout of the account object.
Optimize Customer Satisfaction Using Analytics!
As per the Alteryx analytics, 69% organizations use customer analytics to support core sales and marketing. 63% use analytics toward enhancing customer satisfaction and 46% use it to increase customer loyalty. Today’s business success is mostly dependent on how customers are perceiving a product on offer along with the flexibility in making the product available to customers. It starts with products being viewed on display to how it met the customer’s expectations regarding its usability and services offered for it. Companies are working toward optimizing using ultra-cautious measures. A satisfied customer is the one who makes repeated purchases from a brand and also refers it to others, resulting in positive publicity. A satisfied customer is like an advocate who publicises the strong points of a brand to the world. As per Bath Empire survey 2014, 41% customers’ purchase products as they think the prices are great and 26% go for quality and choice. Analytics also show that 27% customers fall within the age of 45 to 54 years and 24% fall between 35 to 44 years. Earlier, when there were no tools or metrics used to measure the satisfaction, the companies were unable to get the ideal reports on what to produce or on how to optimize the operations and most importantly ‘What customers want?’ They could get the answers only when a customer switched brands. According to Tony Hsieh, “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” A lot of terms like customer retention, customer loyalty and customer delight has been coined, and reports are gaining more focus. Companies are investing heavily in getting analytics reports with insights on factors affecting end-customer satisfaction like the attentive / knowledgeable staff, respect for the customers, easily accessible, delivery service, post-sale service, return policy; pricing; as guidance to forecast future business requirements. These details, when expressed with the help of pictorial representation, provides meaningful insights into how an end-customer perceives a product and service of a company. The image below depicts the different types of satisfaction levels that can be identified using analytics to understand the customer’s behaviour toward an individual product or brand. E-commerce companies leverage analytics to track details of customers who add products to the cart but do not checkout. It also provides details like real-time view of the number of customers accessing a website, the type of customers and their geographic location. The focus of the analytical study is to gain insights like bounce rate, exit pages, In-page analytics, Site search; navigation summary. Now-a-days, with the increasing requirement for better and improved analytics report, lot of companies are coming up with different methods using which different analytical reports can be fetched to determine future course of actions. The methods of measurement are: As per the Qualtrics, below mentioned are some of the parameters used to measure customer satisfaction. (Source: Qualtrics Blog)
How to Leverage Programmatic Platforms for Better Marketing Results?
Data capabilities affect almost every field in the global economy these days. Data and insights are the inevitable elements driving competition. There’s a huge amount of transactional data being churned out, and trillions of bytes are available about customers, operations, and suppliers. Innumerable network sensors get attached to different physical devices like mobile phones, and other digital and mechanical equipment. It helps understand, create, and also communicate in the online world. Advertising companies get to serve their ads and establish digital interaction with millions of browsers. In the process, they generate huge amounts of data worth studying for optimizing campaigns resulting in higher user engagement. The data is also helpful to drive programmatic platforms and they deliver marketing results more accurately than the marketers. Different interactive platforms like social media websites have huge user base which is generating big data. With multimedia growing, content is found playing a major role in the rapid growth of data. In this highly digitized world, people are involved in browsing, communicating, searching, distributing, and thereby, creating huge data trails. Every customer today expects and demands direct, relevant, and authentic communication. Marketers may have their restrictions, but they now have the capacity of creating experiences based on user’s preferences. However, if the content served is fragmented, irrelevant or invasive, it might drive customers away, negatively impacting their engagement with the publisher or the brand. Improved accuracy in data analysis algorithms can help prevent that. Hence, most marketers are striving to improve their ad targeting through programmatic solutions which allows them to take decision in real time based on numerous data parameters. Surveys have revealed that nearly all marketers find data to be extremely vital in efforts of customer experience and advertising. According to one survey conducted by the Winterberry Group and GlobalDMA, these figures are worth observing. Fig 1: Areas where data is used (in %) Fig 2: Top priorities in data marketing Fig 3: Popular channels used for consumer engagement With huge amount of data explosion worldwide in all companies in all sectors, no wonder the advertising industry is strongly addicted to data.
Streamline Your Supplier Recovery Process
Many industries have been able to overcome their challenges by using the recent developments in data technology. It has helped organizations by providing them access to real-time data and streamlining most of their communication channels. Warranty service is one of the significant areas to have improved due to such developments. Manufacturers now depend on the cloud, real-time data, extensive databases, and interactive technologies. Customers expect quick turnarounds and zero hassle when they need a vehicle part replaced through warranty. Manufacturers earlier felt unprepared to meet such expectations because recovering the cost without occasional misses was difficult. Missed opportunities in supplier recovery result from sluggish processes. Although protocols and contracts between suppliers and manufacturers exist, customer often feel neglected due to disputes. This difficulty can be resolved with an IT implementation that puts the manufacturers in an interactive mode with their suppliers. To support such a system, accurate verification and rules-based algorithms are necessary. Sourcing history is an important data set in warranty technology used by manufacturers. Machine and vehicle parts can be assigned unique codes and mapped to specific suppliers for accurate identification when the need arises. Although this process can be automated, the system can be complemented with an interactive dispute management system. It will help the two parties resolve exceptions in real time. As soon as a warranty claim is raised, the verification process can take into consideration if a supplier needs to be charged or penalized for low quality products according to the contract. This is possible if a complaint is recognized and mapped to its root cause analysis. With an automation system designed to perform checks, manufacturers can reduce their supplier recovery turnarounds to days, or even a single day, in spite of accurate and rigorous verifications. Even now, many manufactures are riddled with tedious methods of supplier identification and managing inventory risk. They can be the biggest hurdles to delivering prompt warranty service, especially with the kind of consistency that will help the brand value. Manufacturers need to avoid the rigmarole of supplier recovery and also avoid delays and disputes so that turnarounds are under control and superior warranty service results from streamlined supplier recovery management. Technology plays a key role in making a difference. Warranty management systems are required to facilitate manufacturers with adequate data so that they can identify failure and standards violation patterns and never incur a loss due to their suppliers. To avoid blurry interpretations of contracts, a rules-based, interactive cloud system can help resolve issues quickly when warranty claims are being processed.
Waiting for Complaints to Correct your Manufacturing Process? Foresee and Prevent Them Now
In recent years, software intelligence has lifted the burden off manufacturers by reducing the number of warranty claims they receive. Intelligent software also recovers costs from suppliers accurately and protects you from fraudulent claims. All the data stacked across your systems can be analyzed with advanced intelligence and you can get your departments to collaborate seamlessly. But legacy systems were inept at doing that. Data collation goes beyond warranty-claims data. A thorough visualization of the complete ecosystem of numerous suppliers, assembly systems, processes, sales and service chains, and their interrelationships is important. An advanced system can hunt down the root causes of claims and unravel the intricacies: What products or parts fail more often, if more claims come from any specific geographical area, are there seasonal patterns, is any particular parts supplier responsible for more failures, is the supplier-recovery process timely and efficient… Practically, every bit of data in the supply-production-quality-warranty chain needs to be analyzed. Every bit of data can be seen from all possible angles using software. This extends to a daunting variety of data sources—supply chain, bill of materials, product life cycle records, dealer-distributor-service networks, CRM records, call center records… the list can just go on. Predictive warranty intelligence systems analyze these data and help you do at least three key things with tremendous business impact: Forecast potential issues early enough to prevent them from causing heavy losses Prioritize issues according to magnitude and urgency for the system Identify factors that cause recurring failures so that you can focus on eliminating them By nailing the problems, you will be able to reduce the financial burden coming from warranty claims, continuously improve product quality, and build up customer satisfaction. The correctly implemented warranty intelligence system should let you get real-time information on warranty KPIs (key performance indicators) in easily understandable graphs, charts and other visuals. All of that comes with a few clicks on a very intuitive graphical user interface. In such a system, dashboards can be integrated with complete qualitative and quantitative information on critical performance metrics with respect to suppliers, factory processes, product lines, models, dealer, service centers, customers, geographies, etc. This provides a robust and informative reporting framework that covers: Warranty expense Claims turnaround time Processing efficiency Parts return efficiency Supplier recovery rate Supplier quality Cost drivers analysis Reliability analysis Reserves The money you lose on warranty is nothing compared to the goodwill and opportunity you lose by not using warranty intelligence solutions. Warranty intelligence can help you find and eliminate root causes of situations pertaining to warranty claims. That helps to improve manufacturing practices and unprofitable supply contracts by identifying repeat claims. Warranty costs and time spent on processing claims can be reduced in the long run. Powerful analytics can convert raw data into actionable insights and aid data segmentation. Early-warning systems are implemented to track error patterns, and thereby generate inputs to improve product quality and reliability. Proactive measures for improved product quality, higher reliability, and reduced downtime enhance customer satisfaction and retention. Data-driven IT implementation improves the accuracy of reserves forecasting with accurate historical warranty data and trends. This helps you plan the cash flow easily. All in all, the latest systems can transform your organization into a new profile with a higher level of customer esteem.