“Technology is becoming a big enabler of our decision making”

Atul Batra, CTO, Manthan and Manoj Agarwal, Chief Transformation Officer, Future Group spoke to VARINDIA on how they are investing heavily in Data Analytics and how AWS is helping them -

Can you talk about how you use customer analytics to make your business stronger?

We view our relationship with our customers as unique, individual, one-to-one relationships. we don’t just broadly bucket them into groups. We capture customer transaction data through our various loyalty programs. Our customers shop across various formats of Future group. Whether it is Big Bazaar, Ezone or Central, all customer interactions or buying behaviour is captured by Manthan’s customer analytics platform such as their shopping behaviour across various formats, their total spend, frequency of visits, mode of engagement, purchase behaviour, promotions they are responding to, price ranges, events they are engaging in and so on.

How do you do that?

We do this using Manthan’s cloud-based customer analytics platform. Manthan ingests this data and allows us to use this data in meaningful ways. It enables us to get a single view of the customer and helps us analyze our customers better. Manthan’s retail solution is available out of the box and it is easy to get started. The solution is hosted on AWS.

How is Manthan helping the Future Group with its application?

Manthan is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner; we have products that are offered on the cloud that Future group is using. We are running on AWS. Like Manoj Agarwal, Chief Transformation Officer, Future Group said, they use marketing analytics to understand their customers, predict their behaviour and therefore drive marketing strategy. Second is around personalization and targeting. So, they are using a lot of intelligence to drive all their campaigns, promotions, marketing messages in a real- time manner using advanced analytics and algorithms. Manthan has two applications that are powered on top of AWS infrastructure.

How do you integrate all the data, both unstructured and structured data to bring the business value?

Basically, the application setup is such that it can ingest all kinds of structured and unstructured data e.g. transaction data, loyalty system data, CRM data, call centre data, unstructured data which can sense visitor patterns on the website, social information and footfalls inside the store. All this data comes into the Manthan application which is running on AWS and then we can analyze the data. You, as a shopper would have a unique profile, so we can target you as a ‘segment of one’ based on all the data and analytics running in the Manthan application.

How do you target and analyse the customer?

Hypothetically, let me explain how you can get tracked. One is your phone, which is being tracked all the time. You logon to Google, you’re tracked. All the apps which you are using or when your Bluetooth is on, GPS is on or when you search anything, you and your phone can easily be tracked. Your coordinates, your longitude, latitude everything is tracked. It is location based tracking and it knows when you are passing by, for example - if you want a blue color shirt from Peter England, the tracker in your phone might sell this data to Peter England. It is not like Peter England is tracking you. It is the algorithm sense systems that are doing it.

How technology helps in growing your business?

Technology is an enabler of decision making, and it facilitates decision making. Decision making is becoming more and more complex and when you are in a hyper growth environment, so many variables are changing. What decisions you take or the framework within which you took those decisions are also changing. So, the system is guiding you on decision making. If your customers were behaving in the same way for the last 50 years, it would be very easy and you wouldn’t need analytics to serve them. But if the customer is changing every day, like last time he wanted pink, this time he wants black, such complex customer behaviour makes it very difficult to come to a consensus. We need an intelligent system that helps drive better decisions.

How does the technology eco-system work?

It’s team work. It’s a partnership between Future group, Manthan and AWS. Future group is constantly pushing the envelope in terms of business use cases, impact, analytics or making an impact on the business, profitability, margins or all of that. So, Manthan takes those use cases and passes it on to AWS in terms of new innovations we need from a cloud infrastructure and services perspective".

Lastly, can you share some details about your customer base?

Manthan has over 250 customers globally. I would say Future Group is an extremely important customer in terms of innovation. They are pushing the envelope in terms of data and analytics, artificial intelligence or in terms of cloud at a very-very large scale.