Importance of data in digital transformation

With the growing trend toward digital transformation, the importance of data has increased significantly.

Talking about the importance of data in digital transformation, Ipininder Singh, Head, Digital Transformation, Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Ltd, said there is the information – intelligence – empathy model.

He added: "At Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Ltd, when we talk about a digital transformation journey using data, we focus on three layers – information, intelligence and empathy. At the information layer we have initiatives to consolidate our disparate sources by implementing data lake and data warehouse. Our endeavor is to draw a 360-degree view of our key stakeholders, be it out dealers, sub dealers or our employees.

"At the intelligence layer, we are building an entire AI ML platform to throw predictive and prescriptive analytics. For example, how do we help our sales reps meet their numbers. When we talk about empathy, we want to give personality or a human touch to our algorithms. How do we have our customers communicate to our algorithms in their vernacular languages and draw insights."

Regarding the approach for the customer journey, he emphasized that digital transformation is not about digitizing a channel, but building an omni-channel experience for our customers.

"Instead of just automating individual touchpoints, we are taking the customer journey approach. We acknowledge that every interaction that our dealers or consumers have with our organization are moments of truth for us and we want to give them a stellar experience. Thus, we are making data visible across functions. For example, serviceability is the key customer ask for our industry. We worked across core systems of sales, ERP, plants and logistics to build a unified data view and thus spot and drive areas of improvement."

Speaking about Dalmia Cement (Bharat)'s Market of One, he noted that the customers, even those in the B2B space, are being used to a customer experience being offered by Amazon and Netflix. They are demanding the same level of personalization, simplicity, intuitiveness and speed from us.

"Apart from competing on core products and services with our competition, we are also competing against these customer experiences. We are thus focussing on our analytic engines to create that personalized experience for our customers. So, developing suggestive order algorithms for our dealers and developing personalized schemes for individual dealers is true north that we are working on."