How Paytm Uses Tech to Manage 200 Million Users

Key points:

- Paytm processed 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018
- The firm employs 200 product managers and over 700 engineers
- Its data science lab in Toronto, Canada, develops key tech tools
- App analytics and machine learning are used to retain users and for up-selling

Mobile wallets--mobile apps used to pay for recharges, groceries and other daily items--may have come of age in an increasingly digital India, but much goes behind-the-scenes to keep them working well and users hooked.

Paytm, which has 200 million monthly active users and processed close to 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018, is a case in point. It competes with MobiKwik, FreeCharge, PhonePe and several others in this space.

Discussing the tech strategy at the company in a recent interview, Deepak Abbot (pictured), senior vice president of One97 Communications Ltd, which owns and operates Paytm, said, “Though a payments firm, we are a technology company at the core and everyone here, including Vijay, is a hardcore techie--he even calls mid-level engineers sometimes to discuss architecture design.” (Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the chief executive of Paytm.)

Abbot said that most in top positions at the company either have technology background or are “quite comfortable” with tech. “Culturally, we have a tech mindset. That is another reason we have been able to build a very complex product in a flexible way.”

Sharing insights into what goes on ‘under the hood’ as they say in tech, Abbot said that quick decision-making and a product-centric approach drive software development. “In our meetings, once an idea is crystallized, Vijay is very clear about what product to build. As a result, the product managers are also clear how to get it done. And when the engineers are given very specific details, they are able to quickly build it,” he revealed.

The simplicity of the Paytm app belies its complex architecture and the number of people that work on it. For instance, Abbot said that there are as many as 200 product managers and 700-800 engineers working on different aspects of the app.

But how does Paytm define a product? “At Paytm, a product is defined as anything a consumer—be it is an end consumer, a merchant or a marketplace seller--interacts with,” said Abbot. For example, recharge is a product in itself. Paytm’s implementation of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), again, is a product (UPI is an easy, instantaneous payment system built by the National Payments Corporation of India or the NPCI). “And then you build use-cases on top of UPI such as P2P, P2M and B2B payments. Wallet--the most used product of Paytm--is another,” said Abbot. (P2P, P2M and B2B stand for person-to-person, person-to-merchant and business-to-business respectively.)

The idea of keeping all these products within the same Paytm app, according to him, is that users should move from one product to another seamlessly—something that requires “a highly scalable product” to be built.

Integration of multiple products within the same app also helps Paytm cross-sell more easily to customers, who may first use one product before being “nudged towards” others, said Abbot.

Talking about stickiness of the app and up-selling to users, he said, “We have observed that if a customer has only used Paytm for recharge, then the retention rate for such a user is 40% after three months. But if we can upgrade him to send money to others, they become power users of Paytm and the retention improves dramatically to 70%.”

Industry experts forecast bright days ahead for mobile wallets. The number of mobile wallet users is expected to grow from the current 200-250 million to around 500 million in the next couple of years, according to Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate and an independent director at Nazara Technologies. While he believes that “the next big thing” will be “interoperability” among different wallets, he noted that it is a tough space to operate in and some consolidation is “bound to happen” in the coming years. “My guess is that the top two or three companies will have 80% of the market,” he concluded.

------Paytm Labs: Managing customer lifecycles-----

To make the most of app analytics that capture user behaviour, Paytm’s data science lab, Paytm Labs, in Toronto, Canada, works on developing multiple software tools. One such key tool is CLM or Customer Lifecycle Management.

According to Deepak Abbot, senior vice president of the company who is based at Paytm’s headquarters at Noida near Delhi, what CLM does is “catch every ‘signal’ from the app”. Explaining how it works, he said, “If you use the app for UPI, it segments you as a UPI user; if you do a recharge, it marks you as a recharge user. It also upgrades you automatically based on your behaviour or purchase history. So, for instance, if you make an electricity bill payment or a post-paid bill payment, it upgrades you to a post-paid user.” There is a lot of granularity built into the CLM tool to classify and reward different levels of users at different times.

The tool puts users in different segments and generates actionable triggers accordingly. “For example, if a premium user who earlier made a money transfer of Rs 5,000 has not used the app for a month, he will be shown a cashback offer or an ad on Facebook,” said Abbot. Similarly, alerts are shown for soon-to-expire mobile recharges and other bills. “The CLM tool uses such alerts and offers to get those customers back into the app. And if they are already in the app, it will customise the view for them by showing up frequently used icons upfront and hiding others,” he explained.

The entire user data in the Paytm app goes into a “data lake”, and the team in Canada uses it to formulate the rules of the risk engine and other software. The data lake, Abbot explained further, is a repository of multiple sources of data, including phone usage data, hardware data and address book; then there is transactional data plus the behavioural data (where the users navigate inside the app, how much time they spend shopping, etc). All this data is used through machine learning (ML) algorithms so that the alerts and promotions can be automated and personalized.

The Toronto team comprises 70 data scientists and engineers and, besides the CLM tool, has developed the company’s risk and customer score engines. “We just plug those products here (in India) and start using them,” said Abbot.

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(Note: An edited version of the above post first appeared on www.livemint.com - where I used to work until recently. The interaction with Deepak Abbot took place during my Mint tenure.)

Digital, AI tools easing up legal work for companies

Image: Pixabay.com

When Vaishali Lotlikar joined Wanbury Ltd’s legal department sometime in 2014, little did she know that locating a particular contract or assembling a legal brief would involve sifting through piles of documents, and wastage of precious hours and money in the process. “There was a lot of employee churn in the legal and marketing departments. Nobody really knew where the contracts were kept and what was there in each for the company to keep an eye on,” she recalls.

To streamline operations, Lotlikar and her team gathered all the contracts, digitized the same and put them into a document management system after tagging them for keywords, so that they could be easily searched when accessed from the firm’s servers by authorized personnel. The tool was purchased from PracticeLeague Legaltech Pvt. Ltd, a specialized provider of software and cloud-based solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments.

“I had used their technology at Glenmark and USV,” says Lotlikar, adding that the familiarity helped her get up to speed. “Today, if our international business head wants to know the particulars of a contract, I can get those details within minutes on my laptop—irrespective of the city I’m in.”

This is simply a case in point. As the volume of compliance and other legal requirements increases for companies across industries, technology tools that can ease the legal burden are in great demand. Khaitan and Co., for instance, has been experimenting with technology for quite some time now, according to its chief operating officer Nilanjan Ghose. “We were the first among law firms in India to use software for accounting. Around 2007, we started working with PracticeLeague to develop our own time and billing solution, which is core to our operations.” Over time, he says, the billing solution morphed into what is now known in legal circles as practice management software (PMS). He likens it to an enterprise resource planning software used for operational management by a majority of companies.

For Khaitan and Co., PMS helps in all kinds of processes, including accounting, billing, collections, administration and human resource functions. The company is now integrating new modules into it—an attendance module, for instance.

Digital tools are also helping law firms expand in size or scope. “Many of our clients acknowledge that it is because of technology that they could grow from a 50-60 person law firm to one employing 500-600,” says Parimal Chanchani, founder and director of PracticeLeague. And while there are several technology providers operating in the legal space—LexisNexis, LegalSoft, Thomson Reuters (ProLaw), Jurisnet and dozens of others—Chanchani says “nearly 60% of the corporate law departments and over 40 top law firms in India” use its software.

“You cannot manage a compliance workflow through Excel sheets; everything is now getting automated,” says Chanchani. “What we have is a complete, cloud-based solution sitting on Microsoft servers (Azure cloud). Customers can simply start using any module by just plugging into the platform.”

Role of artificial intelligence (AI)
PracticeLeague has also begun embedding AI into its software. For this, it has opted for Watson—an AI tool developed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Praveen Kulkarni, who heads technology design and delivery at PracticeLeague, says Watson is implemented if a client wants to analyse a contract sent to it by, say, one of its suppliers.

For instance, if a firm wants to become the supplier of a pharma company, it will be required to submit several documents. Based on these submissions, the pharma company will send it back several documents to sign such as a non-disclosure agreement or a supplier registration agreement. If done manually, a person from the legal department would need to pick up the relevant content (from the submitted documents) and “draft and redraft the agreement that would take several hours”. With PracticeLeague’s Document Assembly, a Web link is sent to the supplier. “Once the required documents are uploaded through the link, the tool starts asking questions such as the category of supplier, payment terms, etc. After these questions are answered, a ready contract is automatically prepared through the system for the legal department to review and approve,” says Kulkarni.

However, if the pharma company wants an analysis or summary of the multiple documents it receives from suppliers themselves--the documents are exchanged by both parties for signing--then PracticeLeague uses Watson. What Watson does, explains Kulkarni, is “extract certain portions” of the agreement—for instance, contract type, liabilities or jurisdiction, or a termination clause. “So instead of manually picking up these details, they appear on the screen in front of the person reviewing them,” he adds.

But what if the system fails to understand any particular detail? For such situations, PracticeLeague has built an interface through which the reviewer can feed additional information back into the system so that the same can be picked up correctly by Watson the next time. “AI gets better with more and more data fed into it,” says Kulkarni.

Wanbury and Khaitan and Co. are yet to start using the AI tool, but acknowledge the role AI can play in further improving efficiencies for them. “While I have not used the AI tool, I believe it can automate repetitive tasks performed by legal professionals and also suggest the possible options to be taken in a legal case,” says Lotlikar of Wanbury. Nevertheless, she adds that while all of that can be done in the legal field, “strategies thought of by human beings are also important and cannot be fed into a system”.

“AI can help us in faster turnaround times for cases and in due diligence on contracts,” concurs Ghose of Khaitan and Co., but adds that human intervention and checking will also be required. “For example, certain words could be misspelt and thus be unreadable by the machine, or certain clauses could be interpreted differently. So you need somebody to go through the clauses manually,” he adds.

Other law firms using AI include Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas which signed up with Canada-based Kira Systems for the latter’s AI technology in January 2017. On its part, PracticeLeague is now working with Google and Amazon to integrate their AI technology into its solution and, after that, plans to work with Microsoft as well.

(Note: The above article first appeared on Livemint.com.)

Telcos Undergoing Transformative Changes Due to Surging Data Demand

On 2 September 2009, The New York Times published an article headlined ‘Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T’.

Calling the new iPhone 3GS a “data guzzler”, it went on to describe how the device choked up bandwidth on the telecom operator’s network, resulting in “dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds”.

This is just one among several such instances of how telcos worldwide have been struggling to keep up with the burgeoning demand for data services. And much as they are trying, the demand surges keep happening in one or other part of the world (India being an apt case in point at the moment).

Telcos are fighting this battle on two counts. On the one hand, they have been upgrading their mobile networks from 2G to 2.5G to 3G to 4G. And, on the other, they have been deploying various information technology (IT) tools to operate more efficiently, reduce customer churn (customers migrating to other telcos) and to serve customers better.

The woes of telcos are not difficult to discern. From providing plain old voice telephone services up until the 1980s, operators now have to also provide text messaging, multimedia messaging, video on demand, gaming, music and several other value-added services on a mind-boggling variety of handsets.

In fact, the demand for data services is far outstripping that for voice services and causing major structural changes to the business models of telcos.

According to a report by Cisco Systems Inc., mobile data traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% between 2015 and 2020, crossing 30 exabytes per month by 2020 (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes or GB as it is popularly known. It is said that 5 exabytes of storage space will be taken up by all the words ever spoken by mankind).

One of the key factors in that data growth is the global popularity of smartphones to access the Internet, watch videos, consume news and other content, connect on social media or even plug into work-related applications such as email, analytics tools and customer relations software.

While much of the investments telcos are making goes into acquiring spectrum and upgrading their existing 2/2.5G networks to 3G and 4G, they are also investing significant amounts in their back-end systems that help them run those networks, including network-monitoring tools, billing software, customer experience management (CEM) solutions, etc. According to estimates by Analysys Mason, a research firm, CSPs will spend over $100 billion per year on software and related services by 2020.

In this context, India is one of the emerging market hotbeds where intense competition is playing out in the telecom market, especially for the relatively more lucrative and faster growing data segment. The latest salvo was fired in September by Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the latest entrant in the country’s crowded mobile communication space. The company claims to have signed up 16 million subscribers in the very first month of the launch, touted to be the fastest such milestone anywhere in the world.

Among other things, one of the biggest competitive edges Jio has, as far as technology is concerned, is that its network is fully based on Internet protocol (IP), the same one using which all computing devices—from tiny smartphones to large web servers in data centres—connect to the Internet. Having an all-IP network allows a telco to use the same underlying infrastructure for voice as well as data and be more agile in terms of market offerings—which is why even voice can be considered just another app on Jio’s network.

Other telcos, in contrast, have a mix of IP networks and the traditional circuit-switched networks in the circles they operate in (India is divided into 22 telecom circles or geographically segregated service areas). From the vantage point of an all-IP telco, their operations would be more complicated and clunky.

That is not to say that telcos with a mixed network set-up are going to scrap their past investments in 2G and 3G technologies: instead, they will compete by optimising their multiple networks and invest in IT tools that allow them to be more efficient and agile.

According to Ekow Nelson, region head, IT and cloud, Ericsson India Pvt. Ltd, “Some of the telcos are looking for a radical transformation of their business in order to look like a digital enterprise. This is a complete transformation of their relationship with their suppliers and customers. Others are looking towards more incremental changes. There is a whole range of different approaches that the operators have and, of course, some of it is driven by where they see themselves (in the foreseeable future).”

“Part of the transformation comes from understanding that this is really about changing the way you approach and interact with your customers and changing the way you organize yourself,” says Nelson, referring to the digital transformation challenges for IT decision-makers at telecom operators.

For example, according to him, if a telco’s distribution channel is through shops and retailers, that is not digital. “A lot of young people buy services online and they want help online. So if you want to become a digital player, then most of your own operating model will have to shift: you need to build online capabilities that allow your customers to interact and operate with you in a way that is very different from walking into a shop.”

He believes that just as the music industry moved from buying and renting CDs to online audio streaming, so is the telecom sector shifting from buying recharge coupons to self-service portals and apps—that is, a digital distribution model. In the case of India, however, a hybrid model that optimises both physical and digital sales for different geographies and customer profiles looks more likely.

Given that roughly one-third (31.3%) of India’s population, according to the Census of India 2011, is in the age group of 18 to 35—a generation cohort more digital-savvy than the rest—telcos that build a greater connect with them can reap significant business benefits. And one tried-and-tested way to do that is to app-ify most of their offerings and throw as many customised pricing plans at them as IT agility allows them to.

An indication of the importance of an app-driven approach is the recent marketing campaign of Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s largest telco with an India subscriber base of over 250 million. The ad shows how quickly the new and integrated MyAirtel app can be downloaded onto a smartphone.

Earlier, there were several apps for music, movies, money, news, etc. but the new app comes as an integrated bundle (Reliance Jio’s MyJio app, which launched before Airtel’s new app, works in a similar fashion).

According to Animesh Sahay, senior country director of sales (enterprise and telecom business), CA Technologies India Pvt. Ltd, a provider of enterprise software and services, “For telcos, it is becoming increasingly important as to how they can wrap the entire app in a fashion that they are able to record the customer experience. Today, if a customer has a bad experience with an app, they might give it a try twice or thrice, but after that they are just going to junk it.”

So it becomes very important to know what the customers are experiencing on the app and to get their feedback and tie it back to app development, he says.

A telco can install an app tool to have a view of exactly what the customer is doing, exactly where he had an issue, what the screen looked like when a particular transaction was happening on the app, etc.

In short, the tool allows the telco to replay the same series of steps the customer took and find out what went wrong and where.

Another thing operators need to do, according to Sahay, is to move away from the old, waterfall model of application development to agile development methods by embracing what is called DevOps. DevOps is the combination of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), referring to how the IT teams at most enterprises are divided.

Traditionally, there has been some friction or lack of coordination between the two teams that typically work in isolation. The DevOps movement calls for a greater cohesion between the two and the use of agile software methodology and tools that enable it.

The whole idea of DevOps and agile method is to release newer versions of software or apps as quickly as possible so that new features and benefits could be marketed to existing and potential users.

In addition, given the speed at which mobile technology is moving today, more and faster releases help fix multiple bugs and issues with the software.

The dynamism in the telco universe is causing many to move towards what is known as a catalogue-driven architecture, which allows a telco to dynamically serve up data plans and other service offerings (movie/music downloads, for instance) to customers even if third-party mobile valued-added services providers are involved.

Going forward, most telcos in India, including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and others, will ramp up their digital transformation efforts to increase data revenue and stay relevant in a fiercely competitive market.

(This post first appeared in Mint: http://bit.ly/2fv9srl)

The Company as a Digital-Driven Organism

It is the season of mega mergers and buyouts. I was pondering the questions of life times of companies, their evolution and long-term survival in the wake of Dell-EMC, Microsoft-LinkedIn, Verizon-Yahoo and, back home in India, Flipkart/Myntra-Jabong.

Among the queries crowding in my mind: What makes companies buy or sell other companies? Why do we get the same old dope about synergies and leave the gory details about layoffs out in all those self-congratulating announcements? Does innovation gain or lose in the bargain? How would consumers of the merged entities fare?

While the above are regular sort of questions, another thought was pounding the gray matter inside my cranium: how does the infusion of new technology, especially digital, change the way companies behave in their environment?

I began to think of an organization as an organism: not a mish-mash of lines and dotted lines of hierarchies or collection of assets, liabilities and other attributes that usually go with a company—but as a living, breathing entity that evolves, grows and sustains itself as well as those associated with it.

At this point, out of the many tabs open in my web browser, one particular headline caught my attention and stopped my musings in their tracks—because it more or less mirrored my thoughts! “Live Business: The Digitization of Everything,” it read.

Among other things, in this amazing and wide-ranging paper, Dinesh Sharma, Vice President of Digital Economy at SAP, notes that the old, machine-like view of a company is giving way to a new, digital reality that thrives on hyperconnectivity, big data and adaptive systems.

One of the analogies Sharma uses in comparing the current industrial/knowledge economy to the upcoming digital/adaptive economy is closed systems versus open systems. Here is a largish excerpt from the paper:

“Auto manufacturers in the United States have traditionally focused on building factories to efficiently produce cars in large quantities. These factories are closed systems: as long as they get a constant volume of input, they produce a constant volume of cars. But the auto industry as a whole is an open system, subject to factors such as customer demand, which companies cannot control. The auto industry has outsourced the “open” part of their system to networks of dealers. The result is that auto makers continue to push cars out of their factories, even when demand drops. When this happens, the market becomes glutted with new cars and prices fall. Dealers can’t sell the cars, and manufacturers are forced to offer incentives and sell cars at a loss just so that they can keep the factories running.”

Adaptive systems, in contrast, writes Sharma, “are a special class of open systems, characterized by dynamic networks of agents interacting with each other and their environments.” He avers that adaptive systems are continuously evolving and shifting, much like the complex worlds of ant and bee colonies, stock markets, biological ecosystems and human organizations, including companies.

For many, many years, companies have been designed as “information-processing and production machines” but that machine view is set to be replaced by, if I may say so, an organism view in which learning is a creative process rather than a mechanical one, just as Sharma argues.

The mechanical view and rigid structures of companies have served us well in the industrial and, to some extent, the knowledge era but these must now be replaced with more flexible, agile arrangements that can be conjured up or dissolved quickly as the need arises or fades.

Hyperconnectivity, which rides on the digital cocktail of social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) and IoT (Internet of Things), will make sure that traditional and incumbent organizations across industries play by the new rules of market success.

“Hyperconnectivity is an assault on stable environments that have been the foundation of growth in the knowledge economy. The pace of change in the business world is accelerating to unprecedented speeds. For example, a retailer can engage with customers in the moment in a personalized one-to-one online relationship that is immediately known to a sales associate who helps the customer in a brick and mortar store. In another instance, employees build scenarios for the latest marketing campaigns that draw on real-time company data intermingled with live social network feeds. The new reality is that data can come from anywhere at any time in the new hyperconnected enterprise. The modern business needs to exchange data with its environment at unheard-of speeds,” notes Sharma in his research paper.

He identifies three key attributes of a successful digital business: seamless, connected and data-driven.

Things are jarring on all three of these counts when it comes to India: there are gaps in businesses being seamless, connectivity is broken and unreliable and data is just getting seeded into the entrails of business to make up the case for sufficient data-richness (the rewards of which could be reaped through big data analytics or other tools).

But Indian firms are getting there, in bits and pieces, in jerks and jumps, in the fierce competition of Olas and Ubers, in the dot-com launches/relaunches of ABOFs and BabyOyes, the payments frenzies of PayTMs and Mobikwiks—and the mergers and marriages of Myntras and Jabongs.

Needless to say, it is a time of transition for the industry. Companies that have more digital balm to apply to their internal and external joints will be able to alleviate or lessen the pain that comes naturally as part of this transition.

(Lead image courtesy: Pixabay.com)

The Four Stages of Digital Disruption CXOs Should Know

It is easy for people within an industry to see something repeated quite often as clichéd, boring, hyped or done-to-death. But when it comes to the double dose of “Digital Disruption” (with two heavyweight words wrestling alongside), there is usually a lot of discomfort as well.

And while one often gets to hear the names of the usual “culprits”—the Ubers and Olas, the Airbnbs, the Facebooks of the world—who are causing or have caused a lot of disruption in the market, it is good to come across something that helps the existing enterprises or the incumbents chart digital territory with greater confidence.

McKinsey’s aptly titled “An incumbent’s guide to digital disruption” offers a few silver linings and plenty of hope. The introduction lures you in with these powerful words: “Incumbents needn’t be victims of disruption if they recognize the crucial thresholds in their life cycle, and act in time.”

It goes on to describe in interesting detail the four stages of disruption from an incumbent’s perspective, the barriers to overcome, and the choices and responses needed at each stage.

The four stages are identified in self-explanatory terms—Stage one: Signals amidst the noise; Stage two: Change takes hold; Stage three: The inevitable transformation; and Stage four: Adapting to the new normal.

The authors of the McKinsey article, Chris Bradley and Clayton O’Toole, also help the incumbent organizations in visualization of their current stage on an S-curve and mapping their moves and barriers along various inflection points on the graph.

The authors pepper these stages with real-life examples and insights, which makes for useful reading for companies that are in the midst of their own digital journeys and can take cues from those who have been there or done that (or not done that, for that matter).

Sample a few: as long as 10 years back, Norwegian media group Schibsted made the bold move to offer classifieds online—for free; Netflix “disrupted itself” in 2011 by shifting its focus from DVD rentals to online streaming; and Grocery retailer Aldi is said to have disrupted numerous incumbents globally with its low-price model.

You can read the full McKinsey article here or download an assessment guide that helps an organization in ascertaining its position in the digital journey by clicking this link.

It is always better to disrupt yourself than let someone else do it!

6 Best Practices for Digital Pros and CXOs that Click

Digital marketing is fast coming into its own as a specialized discipline. From the early days of setting up websites left, right and center and cutting checks for search engine optimization, it now encompasses social media, mobiles and apps as powerful new possibilities.

So much so that some companies now have Chief Digital Officers (CDOs). In some cases, the CMO or the CIO may wear the hat of the CDO as well. The point is, the digital realm is getting bigger and more important as you read this.

In a world that is happily clicking away for content, groceries, travel, leisure and anything that fills up our life, how do you do digital? Sure, a bunch of boutique social media firms and others with 360-degree charters and integrated plays have come up recently, but as a digital marketing professional or CXO, it wouldn’t hurt to keep a few best practices handy, would it? So here you go:

1. Identify the digital goals for your organization: There are pioneering companies that have set their ambitions to nothing less than complete digital transformation. At the other end of the spectrum, there are (still) firms that are splitting hair about whether to go beyond a brochure or static website. Deliberate on where your company wants to be in the next one or two years and decide on specific digital goals.

2. Get the T&T (the team and its tools): Both these Ts will be crucial to the success of your digital efforts. However, in all likelihood, if you have the right team in place, they will go find the best digital tools to work with.

Again, in today’s increasingly fluid scenario, having a team doesn’t necessarily mean hiring bench-loads of Facebook junkies; it might work better to onboard a couple of digitally savvy professionals who are nimble-minded. They could even be hand-picked from within the company. Also, they should be able to manage the work outsourced (if any) to specialist agencies, programmers, etc.

3. Have a well-articulated social media policy: We keep reading of employees or customers cribbing on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites, followed by the klutzy approach taken by certain companies to respond to their comments. Given the generally open culture that social media fosters, even those who are not authorized by the company end up jumping in the fray—often causing reputational damage.

Building a brand online may be considered hard but it is nothing compared to the nightmare of salvaging a sullied reputation. It is best to have a detailed, idiot-proof policy (this must remind some of their boss :) concerning the use of social media and responding to comments or taking any other course of action. Goes without saying that a quick complaint-redress mechanism needs to be built alongside the policy. On social media, you must respond in minutes and hours rather than business days or weeks.

4. Mobile in the middle: In the feverish world of e-entrepreneurs, they have a new mantra for a successful business model: it’s called mobile-first. The idea is to think of the mobile phone (essentially the smartphone) as the first touch-point for customers (some storied mobile-first stars include Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Spotify and Evernote, among others).

Not every corporate entity on Earth needs to be mobile-first, of course. But with the usage of mobiles exploding and the number of those phones going smart increasing like crazy, it would be stupid not to give “mobile” the place it deserves. The caveat here is not to think of mobile in terms of any single device but to look at enabling employees, partners, customers—whoever—to interact with your organization anytime, anywhere, using anything that can connect to the Internet (you might have heard of the Internet of Things).

5. Balance speed and quality: If you ask around, most people would agree that the speed of life as well as business has gone up several gears in the past decade or so. In the context of digital, they would also aver that quality—the quality of content, software, etc—has gone down. While the race for digital supremacy is impelling most organizations to cut corners on quality, reduce time-to-market and respond to customers faster than ever, the winners will likely be those who manage a fine balance between speed and quality. It’s tough to achieve, but very much within reach, especially for companies that are not constrained by resources (or mindset).

6. Spread digital as a culture: This one is for the long term as well as the biggest impact. Arguably, it’s also the trickiest one. Remember the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Having said that, people are not horses and digital is much different from water. With a top-down approach, can-do motto, the right tools and persistent monitoring, long-term organizational change can be brought in.

The key here is culture rather than strategy: you can strategize all you want, but unless the organization’s culture is soaked in digital, the results would be sub-optimal. No wonder management guru Peter Drucker is said to have once remarked, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Or lunch, if you are a lunch person, but you get the idea.

And here’s the short, two-word conclusion to this article concerning your digital journey: start now.

(The above article first appeared on IndiaDigitalReview.com.)