Telco, media and Digital experts
I’m creating a restructuring framework for managers after an acquisition. I’d like to brainstorm some actionable risk management steps that I should include on it. Can you share some?
Hi Rainer. My first impression after reading your question was to take care on peoples’ involving. To restruct something means to me to involve the people of the company to create underständing but also ideas to be better in the future. You don’t need to ask the management, but to ask the ordinary workers. Why? They have proper ideas, certainly, to improve the company. To work against them will not create consistent steps for the future. So far…Regards Reiner
Hi Rainer, my first thoughts are in line with what Reiner writes. Active communications and involvement of stakeholders. First of all to create a common feel for need for change. Secondly, you need to identify critical resources and get their buy in (incentives are not unusual). Who should stay (not leave the firm) by all means? Last but not least: make the change-window as short as possible, the more time it costs, the messier the results get!
Hi Rainer , I am in line with the thought of Erik to assess critical resources however my submission is create panel for interviewing each employee and explore the potential among them. You may decide to place them as per company expectations along with their monetary benefits.
The responsibilities of the role:
- Manage recovery of existing investments, pricing, business cases for investments in new cables, demand and needs forecasting, capacity management, billing and settlement
- Manage all commercial activities related to existing client's investments in submarine cables
- Manage all commercial activities related to the investments in new subsea cable initiatives
- Manage the cable consortia partners and lobby within the cable consortia
- Ensure that the project plans for new subsea investments are carried according to the plans
- Ensure processes and governance relating to commercial sub-sea cable activities are effective
- Assist in financial aspect of recommendations towards implementing strategic changes to subsea cable assets plans
- Provide ad hoc performance reports, performance scorecard targets and plans related to submarine cable projects, capacity and business
- Participate in subsea cable commercial sub-committees
The responsibilities of the role:
Customer retention and churn rate reduction are two critical aspects of successful businesses. It is more costly to build a long-term business relationship with a new customer than to cultivate the loyalty of an existing customer. And according to Accenture, businesses lose $1.6 trillion per year when customers move away from them.
Many retailers have put customer loyalty programs in place to tackle these two important aspects of the business. Are they successful? Some are and some aren't. It depends on many aspects. Interested in those that have worked, I looked into some examples of highly rated customer loyalty programs by some of the most prominent retailers.
It's been years since Starbucks innovated with a mobile app that also acts as a reward program for their customers. Not only are they taking customer experience to a new level, but the popular coffee brand is giving perks to their customers and repping the benefits for it.
Starbucks recently announced a 10% growth and record revenue and it is not a coincidence that their loyalty program has grown to 15% more members since the year 2017. Currently, Starbucks Rewards has 15+ million members.
Another super well-known loyalty program that is standing out in retail and e-commerce is Sephora's Beauty Insider.
Surpassing 10 million members, they are winning at customer experience by capitalizing in personalization. Yes, as part of their Beauty Insider program, customers receive personalized product recommendations as well as accumulate points per the amount of money they spend and have various tiers or statuses that they can aspire to.
Expected to report sales of $968.80 million for the current fiscal quarter (according to Zacks), Urban Outfitters is another on the line of success and growth - and their loyalty program may be weighing in on this accomplishment.
Aside from collecting rewards from purchases, their innovative loyalty program allows members to earn points even by sharing on social media or attending some of their events. It also includes the opportunity to get signed merchandise from celebrities and special discounts.
Probably not. It will depend on the type of program, the customer base, and the benefits that come from it. However, these 3 success stories do provide some inspiration and ideas for other businesses that want to take their customer experience (and their revenue) to the next level.
Customer Loyalty programs such as the ones mentioned in this post have proven to increase customer retention and happiness. It is another strategy to research and implement when trying to extend the lifetime value of customers.
“Can machines think?” –that’s how Turing began his famous article on Computing Machinery and Intelligence in 1950. For Turing, this was a tough question that should be reformulated to something like “Can machines understand and generate natural language, making them indistinguishable from humans in a conversation?”. For Turing, artificial intelligence and natural language go hand to hand.
We understand natural language as the language humans use to communicate with each other, both written and spoken. Society and technology have advanced a good deal since Turing's article back in the 1950 ’s and computers have progressed incredibly and impacted many fields. Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) being two of them. Back in the day, it seemed almost movie-like that a machine could understand the natural language but, even when they are still very far from perfection, computers have reached a level that allows applying NLP in several situations.
As Natural Language Processing is still being researched and tested, the future applications and challenges are coming to light. Let's review some of them.
Computer interfaces: If we get machines to “speak” our language, the first and most obvious application is to communicate with computers using this language. Probably the most famous example is Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. Siri was launched as an app in 2010, and in November 2011, it became an integral part of the iPhone 4S. Currently, an improved version of Siri runs in all Apple devices. We're also seeing the popularity of Amazon's Alexa into this application. These interfaces are able to understand our language, translate it to text, sift through their data and follow actions. A great first step to the future of the Internet of Things (which is the next topic!).
Internet of Things (IoT): The power of speech recognition enables smart devices to translate our commands and make IoT products feasible. Machine translation of Natural Language allows us to turn the light on, watch our security cameras and control our room temperature.
Text translation: The beginnings of NLP are closely related to text translations. As early as in the 1940’s, there was already a machine capable of translating a few sentences from Russian to English. More than 70 years later, there are still many problems with automatic text translations, due to the complexity of natural languages. However, nowadays there are several apps and online programs available that translate from and to almost every language with increasing accuracy.
Chatbots: Chatbots are software applications that can simulate a conversation with a person using a messaging app and it is one of the most advanced forms of interaction between humans and machines. They apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) and are able to answer questions and even solve issues. It is being used for customer service in many businesses.
Web crawlers & search engines: Web crawlers are scripts that automatically browse the Internet looking for data. Search engines such as Google, use these bots to find new and updated pages, index them, and show them to their users in order of relevance. Back in the day, the first search engines used to look only for the keywords that appeared in each page, today, they employ better NLP systems allowing them to get more accurate results. Search is now available based not in how many times a word repeats in a given page and other similar metrics, but also trying to understand what’s the context and the relevance of that text.
Data analysis: Only a small amount of all the data is available in structured formats, i.e. databases or spreadsheets. Most of the data we generate each day are text, words and natural language. This means that analytic systems that can't understand natural language will miss the biggest part of what they should be analyzed –which is as much as 80%. With the introduction of NLP in big data processing, the possibilities for improved analysis are increased.
Many of these applications are some we've already experienced in our regular life and it's pretty incredible still for some of us how we can use our voice to control so many things.
However, there still some downfalls or roadblocks in these advancements. The possibility for AI to help machines process natural language comes with challenges, some of which include context irregularities, ambiguity, voice inflection and the inability of recognizing non-verbal queues.
As technology continues to evolve, the future of NLP will probably move towards jumping the current barriers and taking big leaps in better understanding human communication in general. We'll have to watch closely at what applications will come.
The responsibilities of the role:
Crypto jacking is the practice of somebody else using your computer resources to mine crypto currency. There used to be a time when this only worked if your system was hacked but the bad news is that your browser can be hijacked and used and so you don’t realise that there are very nefarious things happening as you browse around the internet and your browser might be getting used to mine a crypto -currency for somebody else. Monero is the most common currency that can be mined using crypto jacking. There are ‘crypto jacking blockers’ that can be used as an browser extension - NO COIN is a popular solution that has a pretty comprehensive list of blacklists required to be effective and works on the popular browsers like Chrome. We would like to think that the browser security will be improved to automatically protect against cryptojacking. There are great rewards for criminals to hack and leverage other peoples processing power ( and let them pay the energy bills ! ) etc to use for mining currency and so all business need to be sure they use the best cyber protection techniques to protect their business - this is not just an IT issue any more - you need the whole business to be trained and cyber aware to ensure that the vulnerabilities are secure company wide and not just with IT !!
Cryptojacking is the unauthorized use of a computer, tablet, mobile phone, or connected home device by cybercriminals to mine for cryptocurrency.
As with any other malware infection, there are some signs you may be able to notice on your own.
Symptoms of cryptojacking:
High processor usage on your device.
Sluggish or unusually slow response times.
Overheating of your device.
There are lot of security software for free you can use for your safety.
Hi Irfan,
you may also have heard about Coinhive which is a browser-based cryptominer. I would recommend the following article which gives good perspective and facts on the subject: https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/browser-mining-cryptocurrency
Not only browsers but also routers may be infected. Some massive crypto-jacking campaigns have been reported on a significant number of MicroTik routers for instance, in Brasil, India, etc.
Magda 
