Exec

summary for page 1

Problem or opportunity that can be addressed using Data
Analytics

A recently released mobile app targeted at Tier-1/Tier-2 city phone users in India
has acquired over half a million customers in a couple of months. Now they want
to know Who are their customers?
Helping a mobile application to make a disruptive change to the monetization
and feature enhancement of their product

History or background of the client (if applicable) - If you have

already done a project for any client then use that experience
for the whitepaper.

During the first month of our analytics division setup, we landed a very
interesting client. Our client was a mobile application with over 500,000
downloads in a couple of months since launch. The product is a utility app. It
helps users monitor their spends across their mobile operators. The app was
predominantly focused on pay as you go mobile users in India. This segment of
users is almost 95% of all mobile users in the country. Our objective was to use
intelligent, analytics to support them across different parts of the business. For
this white paper we will focus on two key questions that were addressed with
varying solution approaches

Defining the product journey / Product road map
Identifying and isolating reasons for user dissatisfaction / drop off

As a startup themselves there were typical challenges on personnel availability all
the time to drive the analytics forward. Often we were making outputs
independent of industry context. In hindsight this seemed to be the biggest value
we were bringing to the table.

Solution
The data set that we were working on had a wide range of data parameters for
the active user base of the clients product. The data had a wide range of
information ranging from usage parameters of the core product, ancillary
features behavior and interactions of the user with other products / features on
their particular device.
Methodology used with process diagrams

There were three key parts towards helping the client leverage the power of the
data they were collecting

Personi-fying the customer base of the app
Mapping customer usage of product to different customer types
Overlapping patterns across dis-satisfied / dropped customers

The basic analytics methodology that we followed is Fig1.

Fig 1: Overall Analytics Methodology followed at client

The key to this process is the constant analytics that is run at every step along the
process.


1. Exploratory Analytics of Data: The data comprised of voice calling usage,
internet data usage, app usage and recharge behavior of the customer.
We initially looked at each of the data sets independently to extract
emergent behaviors. Here the inputs were critical since subtle behavior
patterns such as Recharge Quantum define a user better than total
amount of recharge over a month.

User Profiling after Outlier Removal and Normalization by Looking at
Various Raw Metrics

2. Outlier Removal / Normalization: The nature of data collection allows few
outliers to creep in. Using the data, we designed multiple outlier detection
methods to remove them right at the beginning. Data in each of the
sources were in different units; to avoid unnecessary confusion we
normalized the data to maximum independent for every data set.

3. Data Management: The next iteration of analytics drives the simplification
and reorganization of the data set in to easier analyzable components (e.g
getting data from multiple mongo db tables into easily analyzable smaller
data sets, to answer the specific focus question for that iteration). Created
~200 metrics for each user from their usage behavior. The metrics were
designed such that they could be easily appended as data accumulated.
Many of these metrics were derived metrics such as Incoming Call to
Outgoing Call ratio. Such derived metrics help capture the non-linear
nature of user behavior and interaction.
4. Clustering Methods: With the clean metricified data, we ran several
unsupervised clustering algorithms such as Random Forests, Hierarchial
Clustering, Multi-step k-means. The clusters were then corroborated with
methods such as Silhoutte Analysis, Training/Testing datasets. We ran
these methods iteratively till we got some obvious user groups.

The results are quite interesting. Most app users were small users of data and
voice calling. The app was largely adopted by users who were keen to control
their usage.


Detailing the customer base:

Objective was to create actionable active customer clusters

While multiple algorithms exist, the key is to iterate across a wide selection of
methodologies to identify one that works best for the specific data set.

Metrics Co-occurrence to remove similar variables

Clustering into 3 distinct groups based on usage patterns

Clustering visualized using d3.js

Technology used
All the analytics discussed above was performed using the most common multi
faceted language for data scientists R

Visualisations were predominantly executed using d3.js

Solution core - How our methodology and technology formed the solution that
addressed the problem

Typically an iterative methodology, as implemented by us is the best practice
for deriving high quality insights from any data set. That doesnt mean that focus
should not be there on constant outcomes. Outcome focus always drives
evolution of the answer. Sometimes evolution of the answer is essentially an
improved understanding of the data scientist and business leader of the data set.

This played out a few times along all the pieces of work executed by us

The Benefits -

The biggest value of this project is measure over a longer duration when this
approach is used repetitively to identify the customer groups, and hence define
what are the most critical features for development.

Specific Impact on minimized development costs

A simplistic approach to quantify impact was the number of features that were
dropped and saved $$ of engineer time in developing redundant features in this
context this could be valued at almost 70% savings on the total development
costs

Secondary impact on user churn
Based on simple features tweaks and improving solutions to support the biggest
chunks of drop offs, an immediate improvement of almost 5% was seen in
minimizing customers uninstalling the app. Over time, as more corrective
features are implemented and assuming appropriate groups are completely
address there is an opportunity to improve customer retention by almost 30%.
The impact of this on marketing $$ spent is significant. In this case, this single
change would increase the runway of the startup on current funding by almost 5
months.

Additional benefits that can be seen but not measured
Customer acquisition costs can be rationalized by focusing on specific customer
segments
Additional monetization avenues were emerging based on the customer
segments through advertising and focused targeting options for advertisers
Alternate industries could be challenged by precise recommendations of
products to each customer segment within the population

Conclusion

While our focus on analytics was to answer a few very targeted questions, the outcomes
were fascinating for the client and us. This piece of work was hence extended into a
recurring relationship where building deeper understanding and awareness of data was
the clear definition of success. In the current context of products (web , apps, IOT
devices) generating large data sets, sophisticated focus is required to draw out insights
from any data set that can materially transform any business.

Our unique skills of business acumen, high quality data scientists and well proven
execution process on any analytics problem, helps us to quickly dive to the essence of
any problem with a client.