SigmaWay Blog

Private banking in Asia-Pacific is a dynamic and evolving market with regional variations in regulations and requirements. As wealth management continues to grow with more opportunities in the mass affluent market, private banks will need to rely on technology to handle the increased volume. In addition, private banks are also dedicating more resources and budget on technology solutions to support and ensure compliance with regulation changes. While there is potential for the convergence of private banking and asset management, it is still important that the technology platform can deliver a personalised client experience as wealth management is still predominantly a relationship-based business, especially so in Asia-Pacific.

Together with panellists from Bank Julius Baer and Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, investment management solution provider Charles River has drawn some key conclusions about the industry in the Asia-Pacific region during Private Banking Asia 2014 event, held on March 19th and 20th in Singapore. To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140410005052/en/Charles-River-Discusses-Increasing-Role-Technology-Wealth#.U0dzt1VgXgw

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software which helps to monitor your customer relationship before and after the sale of your products and/or services is on the rise and it is expected to grow steadily over the next few years. Thanks to Internet of Technology (IoT), its emerging trends can make way of some serious innovations and investments in CRM space in a very short time. To stay ahead in the winning race, it is vital that you should focus on it.

There are some reasons to do so. At present, CRM zeroes in on employees’ efforts facilitation to help the customers. But in the next few years, a shift in the paradigm will take place roping in advanced analytics. With this, you can be able to predict customer happiness and behavior. Then you will be able to use Big Data to use the numbers that can help you to respond to customers’ wants and needs and in some cases even before the customers are aware that they need your service!

So, are you ready to hop on the new trend? Read more on the new trend here: http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/the-internet-of-things-will-revolutioniz .

Social, video and marketing - these three words have different meanings. But if we club them together then they create a very powerful message which will engage customers and improve their on-line experience. Social video marketing has the power to reach a wide range of consumers. A video carries the exact brand image though just posting a video is not enough to engage consumers. It is important to create conversations in order to engage consumers. In a recent article, Dr. Melody King, vice-president of sales and marketing, Treepodia, speaks about how to start marketing your product via social media. For more details please visit: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/24860/social-video-marketing-create-conversations-and-build-customer-loyalty

OpenSSL is a popular cryptographic library used to digitally scramble sensitive data as it passes to and from computer servers so that only the service provider and the intended recipients can make sense of it. If an organisation employs OpenSSL, users see a padlock icon in their web browser - although this can also be triggered by rival products. Google Security and Codenomicon - a Finnish security company - revealed on Monday that a flaw had existed in OpenSSL for more than two years that could be used to expose the secret keys that identify service providers employing the code. They said that if attackers made copies of these keys they could steal the names and passwords of people using the services, as well as take copies of their data and set up spoof sites that would appear legitimate because they used the stolen credentials. This vulnerability allows anyone on the internet to read the memory of the system protected by the bug-affected code. In this way, they can get the keys needed to decode and read the data, according security researchers at the Finnish firm Codenomicon who discovered it. The bug is independently discovered recently by Codenomicon and Google Security researcher Neel Mehta. The official name for the vulnerability is CVE-2014-0160.

To read more, visit:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/heartbleed-web-security-bug-what-you-need-to-know-1.2603988

Making your customers happy over calls is an arduous task, but it is the most important thing you should look over. A survey done by Five9, a call center software provider, shows that to get their service seventy percent of U.S. adults use phone as their first choice to contact a company. But, if they receive bad support eighty five percent of the aggrieved customers resort to take inverse actions. Of them, forty nine percent do the worst thing – they prefer to stop dealing with the company. Not only that, if the customers are within the age group of 18 to 34 years, they do not hesitate to create adverse publicity about the company in the social network. Now surely, you do not want your call center business to be tarnished in this way.

So, what are the ways you should follow to ensure that your customers do not have a harrowing experience? Transera, a customer engagement software provider gives you some tips on how to prepare for customer service disasters before they actually take place. Read more at: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6164-call-center-tips.html .

What is Six Sigma? 'Sigma' is a statistical term for measuring how far a product differs from perfection. 'Six Sigma' means six standard deviations between mean and nearest specific limit. The main goal for applying Six Sigma is to reach as close to zero defect as possible. Six Sigma can be approached on three levels: Metrics, Methodology, Philosophy

Read more at http://www.surveymethods.com/glossary/article_six_sigma_seg_l.aspx

Big data is playing a key role in healthcare and several health institutes are seeking a solution that could bring the very latest drug interaction data right to patients’ bedside. Data analytics helps to analyze massive data volumes and conduct multiple drug studies, test and apply brand-new algorithms to quickly identify drug risk warning signals.

To read cases on how data analytics enhance healthcare follow http://bigdataanalyticsnews.com/10-big-data-analytics-use-cases-healthcare/

Human Capital Management help companies  to organize their human resource and improve employee productivity. Human capital management tries best to utilize the knowledge and skills of an employee. Human capital management drivers act as an important tool for effective human resource management.  Human capital management drivers fall into five major categories, which are: leadership practices, employee engagement, knowledge accessibility, workforce optimization, learning capacity.

Read more to know about Human capital management drivers: http://managementstudyguide.com/human-capital-management-drivers.htm

Taiwan is in a seismically active zone as it is situated on the earthquake prone Pacific ring of Fire. The cracks in the lightweight partition walls cause customer dissatisfaction as repairing cost is higher. To increase customer satisfaction, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is applying Six Sigma in construction technology. Application of C&A (Cause and Effect) and FMEA (Failure Modes and Effect Analysis) is being used to determine the reason of cracks. To know more on this please go through the following link.

http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/(ASCE)ME.1943-5479.0000155

According to a recent EY (formerly Ernst & Young) survey, very few Indian companies use ‘forensic data analytics’. Seventy-two per cent of the 500-odd companies surveyed believe Big Data has the potential to mitigate frauds. However, only seven per cent are aware of specific Big Data technologies and only two per cent are using such technologies. There are 2 basic reasons behind the sceptical mindset among Indian companies about using big data to detect frauds. First is shortage of big data skilled workers & second is their reluctance to invest in these technologies.

To know more, visit the following link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/smartbuy/why-we-arent-using-data-analytics-to-detect-fraud/article5897189.ece

An article by Jaylee Miguel, lead community manager of Emoderation, talks about different new features of twitter like timeline changes, mobile updates etc. Now the key question is how brands can use Twitter's new features to their advantage? To answer this, she mentioned that brands can use the video sharing tool to communicate with competition winners in a creative way, thus raising awareness of new campaigns by tagging others. But she also spoke about how free tagging feature can create spam.

To know more about follow http://socialmediatoday.com/jaylee-miguel/2341916/how-brands-can-make-most-out-twitters-new-features

You may think that a call center business is pretty simple. But, as customers are changing their interaction behaviors, modernization of call centers is an imperative point of today’s business. Customer retention is an important parameter here and you must aim to reduce it to as minimum as possible because a slight reduction in it can benefit you by reducing your cost to a considerable extent. While looking at your call center business, you must aim for its effectiveness and must ensure that it is productive. But, the question is how should you go for it?

Mary Velan, author at Business 2 Community gives you some tips to revamp your call center customer experience from scratch. Read them here: http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/4-tips-modernize-call-center-customer-experience-start-finish-0840687#!DylE3 .

Outsourcing has turned up as the most competent business strategy for getting non-core business functions taken care of by experts. India has captured the position of unchallenged outsourcing hub of the world. Some of the reasons behind the increasing demand are:

1. Low cost solution

2. More profits for businesses

3. Availability of talented resources

4. Favourable government policies

To gather more insight on each of the reasons visit http://www.callcentersindia.com/displaynews.php?idnews=319_Why_Outsourcing_Call_Centers_To_India_Is_In_Demand

The main principle of Lean Six Sigma is to reduce waste and defects, thereby improving your process performance. But, just implementing it may not help you to bear the fruit. In the first step, you have to think ‘What will be the financial implications if I apply Lean Six Sigma on this process?’ Your company’s bottom line is the ultimate thing that speaks. So, it should be in such a way that when you apply the principles of Lean Six Sigma on the right processes, it will help you to optimize the costs associated with it and generate maximum return out of your investments.

Chris Rees, Director of Operations for SigmaPro and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, talks about how to go about for tuning your process that is financially beneficial. Read it here: http://www.business2community.com/strategy/linking-process-financial-performance-0834974#!Dswbh

A pilot project using predictive analytics and applied natural language processing identified 8,500 patients of Carilion Clinic who are at risk of congestive heart failure. Discrete data points, such as weight and medications, can be found in structured EMR (electronic medical record) fields. Unstructured data includes physicians' notes that are typed or read into a patient's EMR or discharge papers.  The natural language processing technology searched for key words or phrases within the unstructured data as well as in structured data. In all, 20 million documents were analyzed. Because approximately half of all patients who develop heart failure die within five years, according to the “Centre for Disease Control and Prevention”, early identification is essential. About 3,500 of the 8,500 patients Carilion identified as at-risk would not have been found if the project had analyzed only the structured data, according to Steve Morgan, MD and chief medical information officer at Carilion Clinic.

To know more, please visit famous author & reporter Maggie O'Neill’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.baselinemag.com/analytics-big-data/analytics-ids-patients-at-risk-for-heart-failure.html/

In the circuit-based telephony world, watching the status of a few thousand network nodes was a satisfactory answer to assuring network health. But today, the number of alarm points to monitor has scaled to the millions. No operator has the money to constantly monitor the performance issues of individual smart phone users. It is time for operators to get real and invest more in proactive analytics than in reactive alarms. What’s more, the gap between network planning and assurance has to be shortened. Why? Because the cause of today’s customer-experience problem is yesterday’s lack of good data for capacity planning.

During a recent conversation with columnist Dan Baker, big data architect Kelvin Hall, reveals about his firsthand experiences of the problems faced by network operations and big opportunities that await them through a greater mastery of analytics techniques. To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.billingworld.com/blogs/baker/2014/04/from-alarms-to-analytics-the-paradigm-shift-in-se.aspx

The world’s music habits were once relatively private. Record companies were aware about which radio station played their songs and where their CDs were popular, but that information painted an incomplete picture at best in reality. Who knew what music people were sharing on tapes and CDs burnt in the privacy of their own bedrooms? The sales figure notifies companies about the number of records or CDs sold, but no information can be tracked after that. With the time, the music industry is changing, thinking is changing, market is changing. The explosion of data from sources like torrents, music streaming sites and social media platforms has offered the music industry a huge opportunity to track sales, monitor post selling behaviour, understand their fans and spot upcoming artists like never before. Music analytics is now worth an estimated £ 1.8 billion per year. While internet is taking power away from record labels, it is also giving them the ability to predict future hits. Universal Music UK’s director of digital, Paul Smernicki, thinks that ultimately the music industry will always be focused on content, no matter what analytical tools are available. According to him,“It’s important to remember that it's just a set of tools to help inform us. The data doesn't make the decisions, that's an un-replicable part of what we do.” But with robots replacing humans in every sphere of work, who knows how long it will be before music- the most successful talent scout in the industry is defined by an algorithm!

To read more, visit: 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/music-analytics-is-helping-the-music-industry-see-into-the-future

Most banks nowadays implement Analytics intensively to gain insights from their customers’ data. By generating reports with the help of queries and analytical tools, questions are answered for better decision makings. But still formulating and testing the hypotheses, tuning the model and tweaking the data structures are being done manually. Though much of the work is done by computers, the main part, which is thinking requires human intervention.

But, all these are set to change with the help of Cognitive Computing and Analytics. So, what is cognitive computing? Cognitive computing is the ability to master natural language processing and draw deductions that are not typically possible.

To provide impetus to the growth of its products and services, Global financial services firm DBS Bank has redefined its financial operations with the power of Cognitive Computing and Analytics and they are bearing fruits from it. Read more at http://www.baselinemag.com/analytics-big-data/bank-turns-to-cognitive-computing-and-analytics.html  on how they are doing so.

Electronic Health Records are critical to succeed in healthcare service, but they are not enough.From a healthcare provider’s perspective, after spending a lot of money and time on EHR, reluctance to evaluate other solutions for population health management or “accountable care” can be understood. So, healthcare providers are choosing to wait for their EHR to evolve in order to address new demands associated with taking on and managing risk. But according to industry analysts this can be a long wait as wide range of functions are going far beyond what EHRs were built to do. Here analytics tools and solutions come to the rescue. Performing analytics using clinical and claims data, organizations can gain deep insight into patients, population, and performance, predict outcomes and rapidly identify the actions needed for improvement. This insight can be gained through a wide range of analytics solutions that deliver retrospective views of activity, ongoing surveillance of current activity, predictive modelling of future activity, as well as root-cause analysis.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://ehrintelligence.com/2014/04/09/why-moving-beyond-the-ehr-is-needed-for-population-health/