{"id":5778,"date":"2019-08-23T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T05:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=5778"},"modified":"2022-03-09T15:50:39","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T10:20:39","slug":"are-digital-natives-losing-their-data-chops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/23\/are-digital-natives-losing-their-data-chops\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the popular narrative, new age companies leverage data in virtually every facet of their business (as against traditional companies that run on intuition).<\/p>\n

To a large extent, this belief is right.<\/p>\n

Many digital natives owe their spectacular rise in the last decade or two to their prowess with data and analytics. A big part of Amazon’s success has been attributed to its recommendation engine, which involves massive amount of number crunching.<\/p>\n

But my recent encounters with new-age companies has upended this narrative. I’m now wondering if data bungles are caused by technology issues rather than by attitude problems as hitherto believed.<\/p>\n

#1. GOOGLE<\/strong><\/p>\n

I got an offer for $150 AdWords credit from Google.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I clicked the SIGN UP HERE button and entered the given coupon code on the following page. I got an error message saying this offer is only valid for new AdWords customers.<\/p>\n

I have no problem with offers that are not available to existing customers.<\/p>\n

But I do get annoyed that Google, which knows fully well that I’m an existing AdWords customer for 10+ years, made this offer to me in the first place.<\/p>\n

Configuring a targeted offer engine to exclude existing customers is not rocket science – it’s not even AI! I know this much on the back of my company’s experience of working together with the leading provider of a Customer Engagement Management<\/a> platform.<\/p>\n

#2. AMAZON<\/strong><\/p>\n

I kept getting telephone calls and emails from Amazon to join its Amazon Business<\/strong>\u00a0program.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thing is, I signed up for Amazon Business over a year ago!<\/p>\n

I initially thought the email was a phishing attempt by a fraudster.<\/p>\n

But, a few days later, I got the same message via LinkedIn InMail.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So it’s not a fraudster but another example of bungling of data by a new age company.<\/p>\n

#3. OLA<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve been using Ola Rentals<\/em>\u00a0for years. For the uninitiated, this product lets riders rent cabs for full day packages within the city.<\/p>\n

I bailed out\u00a0of an Ola Rentals<\/em> booking one day last month. The next day, I went ahead with the booking.<\/p>\n

I got the following note from India’s largest cab aggregator two days later.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While Ola recognized that I abandoned a rental booking on a particular day, it missed the following data points:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I made a rental booking the next day, so I couldn’t have been “unsure about booking a Rentals”<\/li>\n
  2. I’ve used Ola Rentals<\/em>\u00a0several times in the past, so it was silly on the part of Ola to explain the basic features of this product to me.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The only sensible part of this communication was the 10% discount offer for an Ola Rentals<\/em> booking. But, since I’d already completed the rental trip before I got the targeted offer, it was useless to me.<\/p>\n

    #4. PAYTM<\/strong><\/p>\n

    I got a “long time no see” email from PayTM lamenting that I’d not used the app for a long time. It offered a cashback if I made a payment with the app in the next three days. It came one day after I’d made my largest ever PayTM payment!<\/p>\n

    #5. GOOGLE<\/strong><\/p>\n

    A day after my Chrome browser got auto-updated, Google displayed the following screen.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    I promptly\u00a0clicked the blue button and took the “WHAT’S NEW” tour.<\/p>\n

    Despite that, Google showed me this screen nearly 20 times.<\/p>\n

    #6. QUORA<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Quora informed me that one Angela Schultz had upvoted my answer to a certain question.<\/p>\n

    In the same email, Quora reported that my answer had received 0 upvotes!<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    \n

    I could go on and on with more examples but I’m sure you get my drift.<\/p>\n

    I have no inside track into why these new-age companies committed these data faux paus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    But, if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s because they use many microservices to deliver the end-to-end process and these microservices are not synchronized with the same data.<\/p>\n

    Specifically,<\/p>\n