Understanding the need of Data Quality

The most common perception is that low quality data is the result of existing and inadequate CRM, BI or integration applications. But surprisingly data quality is an issue that none of these applications can manage.

The performance of ERP, CRM, SCM or legacy systems in an enterprise demands that while data flows in and out of an operational data store, data warehouse or an integration data asset, its quality should remain untouched. The performance of other applications is dependent on the quality of data that it’s given to work on. So it is essential that data quality should act as a firewall for data coming from various sources. Only once the data gets clearance from the data quality norms, it should be sent to for data integration. From there it flows to the data warehouse where it can be accessed by different applications requesting it.

Join Infogain at Oracle Retail CrossTalk 2010

Infogain is a Silver Sponsor of Oracle Crosstalk 2010 and has in depth experience in providing store solutions. We would be interested to meet you at the conference to share more details about our retail solutions and their fit with your specific needs.

Event Highlights
At the event you can be part of sessions to gain insights on industry best practices that are easy to leverage and cover a variety of offerings to suit your specific interests and requirements. Through the sessions, you will learn how to:
• Re-design your customer experience
• Re-invigorate strategies for operational excellence
• Re-imagine growth in your business
• Re-create your business-driven retail strategy

Learn more about Infogain's Retail Services.
Learn more about the Oracle Crosstalk 2010.
Click here to request an invitation to this exclusive, invitation-only event.

Regards,
Infogain Corporation
www.infogain.com

Trends going forward

"Insurers across the globe are being confronted with the growing need to offer more services to agents and consumers through mobile devices and demand will intensify during the next five years," says leading analyst firm Gartner Research in a recent report on industry trends. Mobile phones can work as mini-computers and are flexible and familiar for the end user which is in contrast to other devices like desktops, laptops etc where adoption had been not so smooth.

While some critics might debate the future of the mobile phone within our industry, consumers and producers around the world are already using mobile technologies to access informational and transactional services which were hitherto restricted to the back end systems.

Infogain has expertise in delivering mobility solutions for the Insurance industry. Please review our solutions page for more information.

Adherence to government standards

Infogain’s mSure application lets your policy holders file instant claims from the accident zone. Initiating the process immediately from the accident zone gives the customer the assurance that you are there for them, leading to higher overall satisfaction and customer retention rates. Using Infogain’s mSure application, policyholders receive alerts on premiums due and are able to pay premiums on the spot.

mSure Features

The mSure Accelerator offers policyholders many core services from the convenience of their mobile phones:

mSupport: ensures immediate support to the policyholder at the scene of an accident
mClaim: enables the policyholder to initiate claims
mQuote: equips the policyholder with real-time access to a real-time quote for auto insurance
mPay: enables the policyholder to pay outstanding premium

What do you get?

• Faster time-to-market for a complete mobility solution
• Seamless integration with backend systems
• Adherence to government standards
• Provides accessibility to your customers in real-time
• Better cross-sell and up-sell capability
• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Reduced costs
• Increased ARPU (average revenue per user)

Delivering Retail Loyalty

— from customer experience to bottom line profits

The retail sector have expressed a strong interest in:
• Delivering a differentiated customer experience
• Leveraging new mobile technologies both from a B2B and B2C perspective
• Developing loyalty programs to leverage commercial opportunities brought about by customer relationships and data insight
• Low entry cost and rapid ROI from customer centric marketing.

In order to respond to these needs we have partnered with ICLP one of the world’s leading specialist loyalty agencies—and Oracle Corporation, the world’s number one enterprise software vendor. Infogain delivers the glue as a specialist in mobile and retail store systems. Infogain, ICLP and Oracle have combined our expertise in Mobility, Software and Loyalty in order to meet our clients’ need for a lower cost, fully integrated yet modular solution.

Striking the Balance

The challenge is to strike the optimal balance between the need to deliver high service levels on existing mission critical applications while investing in new strategic initiatives—all within the ever-scrutinized IT budget. In the absence of a well-structured program, retail organizations face the following challenges:

• High cost to maintain their store solutions, corporate applications and support infrastructure
• Inefficient store and corporate operations
• Reduced quality of service to retail customers, vendors, and partners
• Reduced agility to solve IT issues that impact business decisions
• Reduced capability to scale in support of ongoing business growth
• Reduced ability to respond effectively and quickly to statutory requirements and retail related regulatory changes
• Inability to manage diverse IT initiatives with limited skilled resources.

Infogain offers a framework-based Application Management Solution for Retail, which helps to define and manage an integrated set of core processes .

Streamlining Claims Services

It is well known that retaining existing customers is always more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. The claims experience is pivotal to customer retention. The claims strategy has three fundamental pillars: claims efficiency, claims effectiveness and customer service. With legacy infrastructure where various systems are distributed heterogeneously and working in silos, it is hard for insurers to provide customer claims efficiently and in short time. Customers are always eager to know the status of claims as soon as possible. With systems which are not synchronized quickly, it is almost impossible for the insurer to provide an accurate status of claims to the customer.

The Dualshore Model

Infogain's dual-shore delivery model ensures more returns over the long term.
“During discussions with customers,our thrust is not on cost,but on value. The company places senior people,generally domain experts, on site;these experts interact with customers to understand their pain points on a regular basis.The forked approach has a multiplier effect.And while it is easy to discount this as mere talk, the president says that the company has data to prove the efficiency of the model.

In fact, measuring the RoI for customers is one of the key deliverable of Infogain. This is done in two ways: measuring efficiency in terms of mapping the time, money, and manpower devoted to a project while the project is with Infogain and also while it is not. Infogain’s RoI measurement also considers effectiveness, by mapping
the level of customer satisfaction.Its India delivery center has solid experience with significant engineering programs, a seasoned engineering staff, and established
processes, says Chandhok. Current productivity levels are determined at the outset of each program, and they target achievement of higher levels within a six months period. Infogain's guarantee is a 30 percent increase in productivity with equal or better product quality.

Data Management in the Web 2.0 Era

With the growing penetration of electronic networks, the management and architecture of structured and unstructured data is becoming challenging and is affecting the way data is stored and processed. In many of today’s Web 2.0 businesses such as Google, FaceBook, Twitter and others, it’s not unheard of to process terabytes and even petabytes of data each day. The architectural challenge of humungous masses of data along with real-time or near real-time access to it has led to a broad reaching movement to find alternatives to the relational data management systems prevalent in enterprise business applications. Read more ..

What Lies Ahead?

Big names in the industry are using NOSQL implementations today. Some primary examples are BigTable from Google, Cassandra from Facebook and Dynamo from Amazon. In fact, many of the Web 2.0 leaders have moved away from their MySQL implementations in favor of NOSQL systems, primarily for speed and scalability. Twitter and Digg have recently made such announcements. These applications are write-intensive, have real-time access requirements and must be able to dynamically scale to meet the needs of a worldwide user base processing potentially hundreds of millions of records each day. Read more...

Building Customer Intelligence _Step_two

Intelligent analysis of aggregated customer data is Customer Insight. It enables identification of relationships between individual customers and product / service profitability. With the growing complexity and value added personalized service demands across all customer facing touch points there is a need to quickly attain the capability of ‘Intelligent Customer Insight’. Customer insight enables OLAP & Data Mining Analytics, measuring Customer Value and visibility to all historic customer activity enterprise-wide.
One of the most critical functions performed by Customer Insight is Customer Analytics. It includes data mining, segmentation and building a customer analytics architecture. With customer analytics, an enterprise can enhance cross selling and up selling market opportunities. It is the technique to analyze customer behavior and knowing them better for a more focused market campaigns suited to different customer segments. From the ‘single view’ customer data repository, different segments are created on the basis of customer value to the enterprise. With the various tools, relationship between individual product/service and customer can be directly mapped to profitability. Segmentation is mainly the end of data mining.