As a sales agent, Sam had gotten used to waiting. It was one of the attributes of his job, to wait and win. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t the most productive way to go about his tasks, but Sam had resigned to it. Until recently. What typically happens is when prospective customers visit his company’s website or discuss the company’s products with a chatbot, a customer relationship management tool gathers their details. The CRM then evaluates the prospects and assigns them scores indicating the like

If you consider changing retail trends a sport, you can be sure Parcelhub’s got a ringside view as an important member of the support staff. The UK-based company provides delivery management solutions and is part of the Whistl Group, which handles nearly four billion items annually on behalf of more than 2,000 retailers, brands and wholesalers. But as Covid restrictions enveloped businesses across the country, Parcelhub began noticing distinct changes in the retail sector. “We were doing Chris

with the rest of the management team must begin on how the organization can institutionalize key BCP aspects into their regular business operations. For one, business continuity planning cannot be just the IT team’s responsibility. It has to be an enterprise-wide responsibility. All employees need to be aware of and prepared for their company’s plans for emergency situations. A company may have access to the best tools, but if its employees are not familiar with how to use those tools,

good enough. That’s akin to what employees do to protect their home computers, and leads to a false sense of security. Endpoint security requires companies to think about how robustly they can secure the common assets their employees have access to. Even if a company has checks and balances for its machines unless it can shield against threats from the myriad shared networks employees access, such as at cafes and airports, it will not have a secure posture. Enterprise mobility manageme

Gaurav Shah perhaps knows India’s farmers more intimately than most experts on agriculture. Not only because his job requires it. Or because he’s a farmer’s son. Or because he was a farmer himself. His abundant familiarity with growers stemmed from an accident that happened some 12 years ago. His father had been in it. Gaurav’s family decided to return to their village from Pune city following that accident and the consequent loss to their transport business. For the teenager stepping into a cr

Building a software or product feature can be challenging in the best of times, even with defined workflows involving an army of developers. Now, with the pandemic compelling companies to make rapid advancements in software development and automation, project management can seem daunting. Imagine having to develop a machine learning product or feature in the midst of a lockdown. If distributed teams are to remain a prominent workplace feature, and offices are to be reimagined, companies need to

The tiny colony of Kilpauk in southern India is a cluster of hospitals, clinics, medical laboratories and diagnostic centers. And yet, when Ganesh Chithambalam went to a health center there to consult with a doctor for his bedridden father he found the halls deserted. It was mid-March and the new coronavirus disease was starting to spread deeper in India. Healthcare professionals, among the most vulnerable to Covid-19, were beginning to panic. Back home, Ganesh, co-founder of AI-based advertisi

[The #Rebound series focuses on various aspects of business that need to be reimagined for a post-Covid world.] Of the various transformations that companies would need to undergo in the post-Covid era, a digital overhaul of business would rank at the top. Digital transformation strategies would need to cater to the drastically changed expectations of employees, customers and other stakeholders. To understand what that would entail, we reached out to Prasad Ramakrishnan, the Chief Information O

Tar One is convinced about his mission as he exits the Google office in Bangalore one last time: build a platform for users to meet new people online… and rate one another after. It’s his great idea to ensure people behave nice. Yet, anyone who’s watched the Black Mirror episode Nosedive would know how terrifying that can be. It has people rating each other after every in-person interaction. The ratings dictate their social standing, their friends, where they live, where they work, and what pri

If you are a James, John, or Robert, you have among the most common names in the United States, making up a demographic larger than the populations of New Hampshire, Hawaii and Idaho combined. If you are a James Smith, you have the most common first and last names in the United States. And you are a nightmare. Names such as James, Mary and David clog databases everywhere, contributing to a $2.5-3 trillion a year problem. That’s for US companies alone. Along with Bob for Robert, Liz for Elizabet