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May, 2012

In-Store mobile shopping for Retail:
Enhancing customer experience using a Middleware Based
Intelligent Agent approach
By

Shantanu Paknikar
Happiest Minds, IT Services Group

Paul Jebasingh E
IIM Rohtak, PGPM – 2013
Happiest Minds, IT Services Group




               © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
2


  Introduction
  What is likely to outnumber the billions of human beings
  on planet earth over the next few years? The answer:              Customers in physical retail
  mobile devices. While mobile devices have been around             stores are increasingly using
  for several years, there are two categories that have               smartphone applications
  resulted in the explosive growth in this industry especially         inside the stores to view
  over the last two or three years – smartphones and                  product details, using the
  tabletsi. Consumers the world over are switching to                  store mainly to evaluate
  smartphones and tablets as their default device for                    various products, and
  communicating, messaging, performing basic tasks and               reducing their purchases at
  accessing information over the internet. This revolution is                  the store.
  impacting various industry sectors, one of the significant
  ones being the retail industry.

  For example, customers in physical retail stores are increasingly using smartphone
  applications inside the stores to view product details, reviews, ratings, and compare prices
  with those available online. Better (online) deals from other retailers can result, and in many
  cases are resulting, in customers reducing their purchases at the store, and using the store
  mainly to evaluate various products. To address this threat, retailers will need to adopt the
  “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach. This means embracing the idea that in-store
  smartphone and tablet use is here to stay, and enhancing the intelligence of back-end
  software systems to provide an in-store shopping experience to customers that is seamlessly
  integrated with the customer’s mobile device.

  To achieve the above, two key components are needed. One is a mobile shopping application
  that can be provided by retailers to their in-store customers. The other is a middleware
  platform that has integration and business logic to gather customer information from
  multiple sources in real-time, process it and take decisions in real-time. For example the
  decision could be on the type of offer to be sent to a particular customer based on that
  customer’s preferences and profile. We call the middleware platform an “Intelligent Agent”
  and this is the subject of this paper.



1. The Mobile Revolution and Retail industry: Key Trends
  It is evident that the smartphone and the tablet PC market are becoming more vibrant than
  the desktop PC industry. As the adoption of smartphones and tablets increases, there is a
  significant shift in the usage trends of these devices – they are increasingly preferred as the
  primary device for accessing information over the internet. The other key trend is the use of
  applications on these devices to perform specific tasks, leading to the growth of application
  marketplaces.




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  In the retail industry for example, mobile shopping applications
  are becoming increasingly popular. Acquity Group’s study on            The mobile revolution
  how retailers are using mobile application reports that “one in             represents an
  four large retailers now have at least one mobile application”.        enormous opportunity
  The mobile revolution in the retail industry is being fuelled by       for retailers to engage
  the inclusion of smartphone technologies like barcode scanners,         their customers and
  QR (Quick Response) code scanners, and geo location based in-            improve the overall
  store navigation applications.                                          customer experience

  Does this mobile revolution represent a threat or an
  opportunity for retailers? Some research iiappears to indicate the following:

      1. More than half of smartphone owners are using the internet in stores, with price
         comparison, checking store locations and hunting for discounts.
      2. About 24% of UK smartphone owners are taking their mobile phones with them in
         order to compare prices and inform themselves about products.
      3. 19% of 2,000 online respondents of a survey had used their mobiles to compare
         prices and look at product reviews while out shopping.

  The above trends definitely indicate a threat, especially to physical retailers – that of
  shoppers using smartphones to access online content of other retailers and eventually
  purchasing from online stores or other retailers rather than the store they are currently in.

  However, we believe this revolution also represents an enormous opportunity for retailers to
  engage their customers and improve the overall customer experience. For example QR Code
  scanned data and geo information can provide insights into customer preferences and
  location at real time. Based on these preferences and location in a particular store, retailers
  can then use the mobile ecosystem to send targeted promotions and product
  recommendations to customers automatically, in real time, and in the context of the store
  they are in at that moment.


2. Key Challenges for Retailers Today
  2.1. Changing Customer Preferences
  Customer preferences are ever changing and their behavior within the store also varies from
  time to time. The lack of real-time insight on customer preferences results in retailers
  missing out on stocking and promoting products of customers’ interest; and thereby missing
  opportunities in actual sales to a potential customer. Tracking customer preferences,
  dynamically promoting and stocking products in-store by anticipating customer needs, and
  increasing the overall level of engagement with customers are some of the key challenges
  that retail stores are facing today.




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2.2. The challenge posed by online retailers
Online retailers are taking a share of the physical retail store sales with most online retailers
offering better deals than stores. The stores earlier had the advantage of the consumer
enjoying the product just after the purchase, or having multiple payment options such as
cash or credit. However, online retailers are now nullifying those advantages by providing
attractive features like same-day deliveries and cash on delivery options in addition to online
features like product comparisons, reviews and special promotions. Therefore, a larger
number of store customers are increasingly moving to online shopping.

In addition, stores sometimes don’t have enough information on the products they stock,
limiting customers’ product choices and decision making capabilities. Customers then employ
alternate methods such as smartphone applicationsiii for getting product details and product
reviews. They may eventually make a purchase using the same smartphone application over
the online channel; affecting the sales of the host store.


2.3 Technology Challenges
To take full advantage of the opportunities provided by the mobile revolution, certain
technology challenges need to be overcome.

    1. The problem of ‘Disconnected Worlds’
        Typically, shoppers using mobile applications are in the online world, which is usually
        disconnected from the physical store they might be in at that moment. For example,
        In-store IT systems revolve around Point-of-Sale (POS) software – integrating this
        with mobile applications is a non-trivial task.

    2. Gathering information from multiple sources
        The consumer will typically use the mobile application in a number of ways – for
        example, scanning an item for the price, getting product reviews and comparisons,
        adding and removing items from a virtual ‘cart’, and so on. These transactions need
        to be captured and made available to back-end software in real-time and on a per-
        consumer basis. In addition, a history of past transactions using the mobile
        application also needs to be collected on a per-consumer basis.

        Information from the Point-of-Sale (POS) software such as transaction history, in-
        store coupons and offers, loyalty points for the consumer and inventory levels all
        need to be captured.

        Information available through other channels such as the web (the retailer’s online
        store), news (weather, general trends) and social media is also likely to be of value.

        The number of information sources and the extent of information required to be
        captured is one of the key challenges.




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      3. Deriving customer preferences and trends from the information
          Based on the information collected from various sources, the next challenge is to
          process and analyze it, in real-time, to come up with inferences about customer
          needs and interests.

      4. Converting inferences to decisions
          Once customer preferences are derived, rapid decisions are needed on the offers
          that can be sent across to the customers. These offers need to match the alternate
          ones available to the customer, need to be personalized, and need to be contextual
          to the physical store the customer is in.


3. Addressing the challenges
  The challenges that have been identified vary in scope and
  size. The key is to address these challenges and                      Challenges faced by retailers
  simultaneously delivering an enhanced and customer                     today can be addressed by
  centric shopping experience. This can be achieved by having            having an IT solution with
  an IT solution that understands and acts upon customer                   two key components: a
  preferences. We recommend two components for this                     mobile application platform
  solution: One is a mobile application platform and the other           and an “Intelligent Agent”
  is an “Intelligent Agent” middleware platform. The pictorial              middleware platform.
  depiction of the overall solution is available in Figure 1
  below.




                      Figure 1: Intelligent Agent interfacing with external systems




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  3.1. Mobile application Platform
  The mobile application platform encompasses a mobile shopping application and the
  backend servers with which the mobile application will communicate with. The mobile
  application would typically have features including, but not limited to:

    1.   Shopping cart functionality (creating, adding items, removing items, checking out a cart)
    2.   Payment functionality
    3.   Creation of shopping lists
    4.   Barcode / QR-code scanning for product lookups
    5.   Location services such as in-store navigation.

  Some off-the-shelf applications for mobile shopping already exist in the marketiv. The scope
  of work for this paper does not include the mobile application and is focused around the
  intelligent agent middleware platform, presented in the next section. For an end-to-end
  solution, the mobile application could be custom built, or could be one of the off-the-shelf
  applications available. From the intelligent agent perspective, the key requirements of the
  mobile application are that it needs to provide location data and customer transaction
  information to the agent, on a real-time basis.

  3.2. Intelligent Agent
  This is the heart of the system design and is the subject of the rest of this paper.


4. The Intelligent Agent
  The Intelligent Agent has been designed as a layer of business logic on top of standard
  middleware. The justification for a middleware based approach is straightforward, since one
  primary responsibility of the Intelligent Agent is the integration of multiple information
  sources, which is best achieved using middleware.

  The components of this middleware platform are mentioned in section 4.5.

  The Intelligent Agent has been designed keeping three responsibilities in mind:
      1. Act as an ‘Integration Broker’ between the knowledge sources and the mobile
          application platform as depicted in the Figure 1.
      2. Execute business logic to provide recommendations based on customer need and
          interests.
      3. Help in intelligent demand forecasting and anticipation of customer needs.

  4.1. Act as an ‘Integration Broker’
  In order to better deliver customer centric deals and promotions it is essential for the
  Intelligent Agent to know the complete profile of the customer and his needs, interests and
  buying patterns. In addition, the Intelligent Agent needs to collect information about
  products and brands, as well as market data such as news, trends, demographics, and so on.
  Such information could be tapped from various sources:




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1.   Mobile Transactions and Location: This includes customer interactions with the mobile
     application; transactions for which can be obtained from the mobile application
     platform. This also includes location coordinates of the customer, from which the store
     location needs to be computed. The store location can be a feature of the mobile
     application, or can be implemented as additional functionality in the Intelligent Agent.

2.   External Knowledge Sources: These include Point of Sale (POS) software in stores, online
     channels, Social Media, as well as third party sources such as financial service providers.

     Point Of Sale (POS) Systems
     Typical POS systems handle a number of customer and store related functions such as
     sales, gift cards, gift registries, customer loyalty programs, inventory, offers and much
     more. Integration with POS systems will enable the Intelligent Agent to retrieve data like
     inventory and promotion availability, along with customer information like purchase
     history and loyalty points. This information can then be used to determine the
     appropriate in-store offer for the current consumer in the store. For an enhanced in-
     store mobile shopping experience, the most critical interface for the Intelligent Agent is
     with the POSv.

     Online Channels
     These are basically web sites which can provide information on various aspects such as
     product prices and reviews, brand information, news, trends and weather alerts.

     Social Media
     Social Media are a channel through which the Intelligent Agent can retrieve information
     related with consumers as well as brands. Consumer information can include profile
     information and interests. Brand information can be derived using the concept of
     “sentiment analysis”.

     Financial Services
     Financial service providers such as VISA, MasterCard and card providers such as banks
     hold data on customer purchase transactions. This information is valuable since those
     transactions may not have been through the retail store. Integrating with such sources
     can help the Intelligent Agent to identify purchase patterns and trends across various
     customer segmentsvi.

Integration Approach
There is a challenge in integrating these different sources seamlessly with the intelligent
Agent. We suggest an approach that will be to use an integration bus– a combination of an
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and a messaging bus preferably Java Message Service (JMS) for
integration with the mobile application platform and knowledge sources.

At a high level, integrating with these external systems would involve the following steps:




© Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
8


  1. Identification of Application Programming Interfaces (API) that may be available from
     each of the knowledge sources. In case APIs are not available, data level integration at
     the database or file level would need to be explored.
  2. Corresponding to the feature set needed by the mobile application platform, building of
     web service interfaces for request-response interactions and JMS interfaces for the
     asynchronous interactions.
  3. Developing business logic in the interfaces as per the “VETRI” concept, which stands for
     Validate, Enrich, Transform, Route and Invoke.
  4. Hosting the web services and JMS interfaces on the integration bus.
  5. Make necessary changes in the external systems to invoke the web services and JMS
     interfaces.

4.2. Business Logic to provide recommendations
One way a retailer can ensure a memorable shopping
experience is by providing what the customer wants even          It is important to time the
before they are sure of what they want. The Integration                  delivery of the
Broker functionality discussed above helps the Intelligent      recommendations correctly
Agent to gather customer information from different             to maximize the chances of
sources. The next step is to process and analyse this             making a sale right when
information to identify the potential customer needs;            the customer is most likely
which are then used to deliver personalized                              to accept the
recommendations on products, shopping lists, deals and                 recommendation.
coupons.

For example, a teenager might receive recommendations specific to his or her needs (sports
items for somebody interested in sports). Another example could be during the “back to
school” season when a father shopping in the store might receive recommendations on
school supplies for kids. The Intelligent Agent can get information about the teenager and
the father through the external systems.

The processing and recommendation logic is typically implemented as algorithms on a rules
engine or analytics engine. Use case identification and algorithm design was one of the key
focus areas of this work, some use cases and algorithms are described in section 4.4.

Apart from identifying customer needs and delivering recommendations accordingly, it is
also important to time the delivery of the recommendations correctly. This can maximize the
chances of making a sale right when the customer is most likely to accept the
recommendation. The Intelligent Agent dynamically identifies the best timing for
recommendations delivery based on the customer activity like customer entering the store,
passing a particular aisle, nearing a particular aisle, or walking away from an aisle.

4.3. Intelligent demand forecasting
The Intelligent Agent, having understood customer interests of both in-stock and out-of-
stock products, trends in the purchase patterns, and inferences derived from other
information sources such as news; can use these to forecast category and product demand




© Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
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and replenish stocks in anticipation of demand. This can help lower out of stock ratios and
significantly enhance the customer experience. In Figure 1, this is shown as an outbound
interface towards the Supply Chain Management systems.

4.4. Algorithms and Examples
The Intelligent Agent (IA) will use intelligent algorithms to translate the customer behavior
and information to customer interest and needs. As part of this work, multiple use cases for
customer behavior were defined, two of which are presented belowvii. Additionally, for each
use case, there was an algorithm definition activity, with associated pseudo code. Some
pseudo code examples are also presented belowviii.

In all these examples, the assumption is that the customer is in the physical retail store using
a mobile application with the features described earlier. Such an application would typically
be provided by the retailerix.

CASE 1:
                          Action                              Algorithm Code and Methods
  1.    Suzan scans a wrist watch, reads reviews
                                                        addToCart(WristWatch)
        and adds it to her mobile shopping cart.        removeFromCart(WristWatch)
        Later for some reason she decides not to        readReview(WristWatch)
        purchase it and removes it from the             bookmark(WristWatch)
                                                        Update_CategoryScore(WristWatch)
        shopping cart
  2.a   The Intelligent Agent (IA) understands
                                                        WristWatch.CategoryScore>=
        that Suzan is interested in the wrist watch     CategoryScoreThreshold
        and may purchase it if there was any deal
        or a promotion given to her and triggers        search_Promotions(WristWatch)
        possible offers for the wrist watch.
  2.b   Suzan moves away from the watches aisle
                                                        on_Aisle_Change(Watches_Aisle)
        without purchasing the wrist watch. The         search_Promotions(Watches_Aisle)
        IA understands that it is time to remind
        her of the wrist watch that she was
        interested in along with a promotion and
        triggers promotions on the go.
  3.    The deal, coupon or promotion is pushed         send_Promotions_to_Mobile()
        to Suzan’s mobile app
  4.    Suzan happy with the deal she has               addToCart(WristWatch)
                                                        on_Purchase(WristWatch)
        received adds the watch to her mobile
        shopping cart and makes the purchase
        through her mobile or the store.


For each product that the shopper is viewing the Intelligent Agent tracks the user’s activity
through a table known as “Shopper Engagement Directory”. The Shopper Engagement
Directory helps the Intelligent Agent to calculate a ‘Category Score’ for each product. The




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Category Score denotes the customer’s interest level towards a product within the same
category. For example: for the category Video-Games, a customer’s interest on a particular
video game, say Mario, can be understood from the Category Score for that game.

Typically, retailers would organize their products into various levels of categories, each
having their own sub-categories. For example, we could have a category hierarchy such as
Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Casuals > T-Shirt. Having a Category Score for each
product also helps in identifying the interest level for each category. For example, from the
captured Category Score of two different product T-Shirts and Trousers of the same category
Casuals, the Intelligent Agent can estimate the Category Score of the category Casuals and
therefore its interest level. A pictorial representation of the Category Score approach to find
the Category Score of the higher level is shown in Figure 2.

This approach can help in triggering promotions
based not only on the customer interest
towards an individual product but also on the
score for an overall category level. The Category
Score approach lets the Intelligent Agent cater
to many cases of user interaction where an
individual customer or a customer segment’s
interest is the key consideration to deliver
promotions and recommendations. Consider
the following example:
                                                       Figure 2: Category Score – higher category
                                                                          level
CASE 2:
                          Action                          Algorithm Code and Methods
  1.    Joel enters the store in summer and           on_Customer_Entry(Joel)
        scans some T-Shirts
  2.    From Joel’s Category Score of                 Joel.Casual.CategoryScore >=
                                                      Casual.CategoryScoreThreshold
        Casuals, the IA infers that Joel could be
        interested in other Casuals as well.
  3.    Since it being summer, the IA                 positive_Relation(Casuals,Summer)
        understands that now may be the right
        time to send offers on additional
        Casuals.
  4.    The IA searches deals and                     search_Promotions(Casuals)
                                                      search_Recommendations(Casuals)
        recommendations for products under            send_Promotions_to_Mobile()
        the category Casuals (E.g. shoes) and
        sends to Joel’s mobile.
  5.    Joel using the deals and                      addToCart(WristWatch)
                                                      on_Purchase()
        recommendations that he has received,
        adds products to his mobile shopping
        cart.




© Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
11


  4.5. Intelligent Agent Architecture
  The Intelligent Agent must be seamlessly integrated with the mobile application platform,
  POS software, and all the other external systems. As mentioned in section 4, this is the
  primary reason why a middleware based approach is recommended. The middleware stack
  includes the software components described below.

  4.5.1. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
  ESB is an application integration technology which acts as an intermediary through which the
  Intelligent Agent can communicate with the external systems. The ESB involves mapping data
  to a format compatible with the interacting systems and routing of messages to their proper
  destinations.

  4.5.2. Analytics Engine
  The analytics engine is essentially an inference engine. It helps process the data from the
  various sources and makes sense out of them in terms of consumer interests, trends and
  patterns. It can understand the buying pattern of the consumers and also come up with a
  recommendation of products. Backend monitoring and trend analytics can also help retailers
  in stocking products and making decisions. From a technology implementation perspective,
  one option for the analytics engine is a Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform.

  4.5.3. Rules Engine
  Business rules change more frequently than the rest of the application code. A Rules Engine
  enables externalization of business rules and this allows the application and the users to
  modify the rules easily. The system as a whole becomes more adaptable with business rules
  that can be changed dynamically. Rules can be implemented for recommending actions
  based on a customer activity or a behavior; for example: if customer scans the barcodes of a
  variety of T-Shirts for a specified number of times, an action such as ‘send promotion for T-
  shirts’ can be triggered.

  4.5.4. Business Process Management (BPM)
  The gap between customer expectations and the ability of the Intelligent Agent can be
  maximized by defining processes that are efficient and effective in delivering what customers
  require. BPM is used to define the processes which are critical and customer-driven,
  satisfying and creating loyal customers.


5. Conclusion
  The trend of customers using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets while they are
  doing their in-store shopping is here to stay. Retailers can take advantage of this trend by
  providing and end-to-end solution to their customers. This would involve a mobile shopping
  application at the front end, and an intelligent middleware platform at the back end. The
  intelligent middleware platform would integrate information from multiple sources, process
  it using pre-configured business rules, and deliver recommendations and promotions to the
  customer’s mobile application that are relevant to the customer’s interests as well as




  © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
12


location in a particular store. We believe such an approach will make a significant difference
towards retailers being able to ensure an enhanced in-store shopping experience for their
customers.




© Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
13


References
    1.  Eric Lai. (2012, March 28). iPad and Tablet Market Forecasts for 2012 and Beyond [Charts!].
        Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/ipad-and-tablet-market-forecasts-for-
        2012-and-beyond-charts/2832?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE
    2. Graham Charlton. (2011, June 27). How can retailers appeal to mobile users in store?
        Retrieved from http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7707-how-can-retailers-appeal-to-mobile-
        users-in-store
    3. Chantal Tode. (2011, Oct 12). Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart best-in-class mobile retailers:
        Acquity Group. Retrieved from http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2011/10/12/2011-is-
        the-year-mobile-arrived-for-retailers-acquity-group
    4. Dan Butcher (2011, March 14). More than half of smartphone owners use mobile devices in
        retail stores: study. Retrieved from http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2011/03/14
        /more-than-half-of-smartphone-owners-use-mobile-devices-in-retail-stores-study
    5. Dharan Shetty (2012, January 30). The Growth of Smartphone and Tablet Devices in European
        Market [Study]. Retrieved from http://www.dazeinfo.com/2012/01/30/the-growth-of-
        smartphone-and-tablet-devices-in-european-market-study/
    6. Principles of Marketing. In Retailing and Wholesaling. (Lesson#29). Retrieved from
        http://www.zainbooks.com/books/marketing/principles-of-marketing_29_retailing.html
    7. Atin Bhola (2012, March 6). Leveraging Social Media for Improving Forecast Reliability.
        Retrieved from http://www.infosysblogs.com/supplychain/2012/03/leveraging_social_
        media_for_im.html#more
    8. Karen Gedenk, Scott A. Neslin, and Kusum L. Ailawadi (2005). Sales Promotion. Retrieved
        from http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/kusum.ailawadi/docs/Promotions%
        20Metro%20Book%20Chapter.pdf
    9. Gardiner Morse (2011, Dec) Retail Isn't Broken. Stores Are. Harvard Business Review.
        Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2011/12/retail-isnt-broken-stores-are/
    10. SOA4All Glossary (2012). Retrieved from http://www.soa4all.eu/glossary.html
    11. Google’s Our Mobile Planet data (2012). Retrieved from http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/

Endnotes
i
     In the last quarter of 2010, sales of smartphones outpaced that of PCs for the first time, according to
     data from IDC. A consolidated Analyst report from 14 leading Bank Analysts and 6 Tech Analysts
     reports for 2012 by UberMobile-ZDNet suggests that the tablet market would reach 300million in
     2016. Cisco has predicted that by 2016 there will be more mobile devices than the people on Earth.
ii
      Survey results from Toluna/Econsultancy and iModerate surveys and Google’s “Our Mobile Planet”
     data on the smartphone usage in the Retail stores were researched upon.
iii
     Amazon price check and Google Shopper are two such examples
iv
     Examples are products from vendors like AisleBuyer and NearBuySolutions
v
      Interface design is out of the scope of the current work – the authors may be contacted for details.
vi
     This will require a partnership between the retailer and the financial services provider
vii
      The authors may be contacted for the other use cases.
viii
     The authors may be contacted for pseudo code related to other cases
ix
       Several retailers already have smartphone applications available for most of the major platforms




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14



About Happiest Minds
Happiest Minds is a next-generation IT services company helping clients differentiate and win with a
unique blend of innovative solutions and services based on the core technology pillars of cloud
computing, social computing, mobility and analytics. We combine an unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities in the following industries: Retail, Media, CPG, Manufacturing, Banking
and Financial services, Travel and Hospitality and Hi-Tech with pragmatic, forward-thinking advisory
capabilities for the world’s top businesses, governments and organizations. Founded in 2011, Happiest
Minds is privately held with headquarters in Bangalore, India and offices in the USA and UK.

For further information, please contact business@happiestminds.com


Corporate Office                                      United States
Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd.                 116 Village Boulevard, Suite 200
Block II, Velankani Tech Park                         Princeton, New Jersey, 08540
43 Electronics City                                   Phone:+1 609 951 2296
Hosur Road, Bangalore 560100, INDIA
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                                                      Fax: + 44 11892 56073

About the authors
Shantanu Paknikar (shantanu.paknikar@happiestminds.com) is General Manager, Solution Initiatives in the IT
Services division of Happiest Minds. His expertise areas include middleware systems, SOA, BPM, enterprise
integration, cloud computing, social media, mobility, analytics, multimedia, and distributed computing systems.
He is passionate about innovation, research, and learning. He believes that the IT services industry has turned
the corner and needs to focus primarily on customer business problems and holistic, end-to-end IT solutions
addressing them rather than products, feature sets, individual technology or expertise based offerings.

Paul Jebasingh E (paul@iimrohtak.ac.in) is a student of IIM Rohtak, PGPM – 2013 and a B.Tech graduate in
Information and Technology from Anna University. The work on this paper was done during his internship in the
IT Services division of Happiest Minds.

DISCLAIMER: It may be noted that the authors take full responsibility for the content and IIM Rohtak does not
necessarily subscribe to the views expressed in this paper, which are those of the authors.




© Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

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Cem for mobile shopping white paper 1.0

  • 1. 1 May, 2012 In-Store mobile shopping for Retail: Enhancing customer experience using a Middleware Based Intelligent Agent approach By Shantanu Paknikar Happiest Minds, IT Services Group Paul Jebasingh E IIM Rohtak, PGPM – 2013 Happiest Minds, IT Services Group © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 2. 2 Introduction What is likely to outnumber the billions of human beings on planet earth over the next few years? The answer: Customers in physical retail mobile devices. While mobile devices have been around stores are increasingly using for several years, there are two categories that have smartphone applications resulted in the explosive growth in this industry especially inside the stores to view over the last two or three years – smartphones and product details, using the tabletsi. Consumers the world over are switching to store mainly to evaluate smartphones and tablets as their default device for various products, and communicating, messaging, performing basic tasks and reducing their purchases at accessing information over the internet. This revolution is the store. impacting various industry sectors, one of the significant ones being the retail industry. For example, customers in physical retail stores are increasingly using smartphone applications inside the stores to view product details, reviews, ratings, and compare prices with those available online. Better (online) deals from other retailers can result, and in many cases are resulting, in customers reducing their purchases at the store, and using the store mainly to evaluate various products. To address this threat, retailers will need to adopt the “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach. This means embracing the idea that in-store smartphone and tablet use is here to stay, and enhancing the intelligence of back-end software systems to provide an in-store shopping experience to customers that is seamlessly integrated with the customer’s mobile device. To achieve the above, two key components are needed. One is a mobile shopping application that can be provided by retailers to their in-store customers. The other is a middleware platform that has integration and business logic to gather customer information from multiple sources in real-time, process it and take decisions in real-time. For example the decision could be on the type of offer to be sent to a particular customer based on that customer’s preferences and profile. We call the middleware platform an “Intelligent Agent” and this is the subject of this paper. 1. The Mobile Revolution and Retail industry: Key Trends It is evident that the smartphone and the tablet PC market are becoming more vibrant than the desktop PC industry. As the adoption of smartphones and tablets increases, there is a significant shift in the usage trends of these devices – they are increasingly preferred as the primary device for accessing information over the internet. The other key trend is the use of applications on these devices to perform specific tasks, leading to the growth of application marketplaces. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 3. 3 In the retail industry for example, mobile shopping applications are becoming increasingly popular. Acquity Group’s study on The mobile revolution how retailers are using mobile application reports that “one in represents an four large retailers now have at least one mobile application”. enormous opportunity The mobile revolution in the retail industry is being fuelled by for retailers to engage the inclusion of smartphone technologies like barcode scanners, their customers and QR (Quick Response) code scanners, and geo location based in- improve the overall store navigation applications. customer experience Does this mobile revolution represent a threat or an opportunity for retailers? Some research iiappears to indicate the following: 1. More than half of smartphone owners are using the internet in stores, with price comparison, checking store locations and hunting for discounts. 2. About 24% of UK smartphone owners are taking their mobile phones with them in order to compare prices and inform themselves about products. 3. 19% of 2,000 online respondents of a survey had used their mobiles to compare prices and look at product reviews while out shopping. The above trends definitely indicate a threat, especially to physical retailers – that of shoppers using smartphones to access online content of other retailers and eventually purchasing from online stores or other retailers rather than the store they are currently in. However, we believe this revolution also represents an enormous opportunity for retailers to engage their customers and improve the overall customer experience. For example QR Code scanned data and geo information can provide insights into customer preferences and location at real time. Based on these preferences and location in a particular store, retailers can then use the mobile ecosystem to send targeted promotions and product recommendations to customers automatically, in real time, and in the context of the store they are in at that moment. 2. Key Challenges for Retailers Today 2.1. Changing Customer Preferences Customer preferences are ever changing and their behavior within the store also varies from time to time. The lack of real-time insight on customer preferences results in retailers missing out on stocking and promoting products of customers’ interest; and thereby missing opportunities in actual sales to a potential customer. Tracking customer preferences, dynamically promoting and stocking products in-store by anticipating customer needs, and increasing the overall level of engagement with customers are some of the key challenges that retail stores are facing today. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 4. 4 2.2. The challenge posed by online retailers Online retailers are taking a share of the physical retail store sales with most online retailers offering better deals than stores. The stores earlier had the advantage of the consumer enjoying the product just after the purchase, or having multiple payment options such as cash or credit. However, online retailers are now nullifying those advantages by providing attractive features like same-day deliveries and cash on delivery options in addition to online features like product comparisons, reviews and special promotions. Therefore, a larger number of store customers are increasingly moving to online shopping. In addition, stores sometimes don’t have enough information on the products they stock, limiting customers’ product choices and decision making capabilities. Customers then employ alternate methods such as smartphone applicationsiii for getting product details and product reviews. They may eventually make a purchase using the same smartphone application over the online channel; affecting the sales of the host store. 2.3 Technology Challenges To take full advantage of the opportunities provided by the mobile revolution, certain technology challenges need to be overcome. 1. The problem of ‘Disconnected Worlds’ Typically, shoppers using mobile applications are in the online world, which is usually disconnected from the physical store they might be in at that moment. For example, In-store IT systems revolve around Point-of-Sale (POS) software – integrating this with mobile applications is a non-trivial task. 2. Gathering information from multiple sources The consumer will typically use the mobile application in a number of ways – for example, scanning an item for the price, getting product reviews and comparisons, adding and removing items from a virtual ‘cart’, and so on. These transactions need to be captured and made available to back-end software in real-time and on a per- consumer basis. In addition, a history of past transactions using the mobile application also needs to be collected on a per-consumer basis. Information from the Point-of-Sale (POS) software such as transaction history, in- store coupons and offers, loyalty points for the consumer and inventory levels all need to be captured. Information available through other channels such as the web (the retailer’s online store), news (weather, general trends) and social media is also likely to be of value. The number of information sources and the extent of information required to be captured is one of the key challenges. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 5. 5 3. Deriving customer preferences and trends from the information Based on the information collected from various sources, the next challenge is to process and analyze it, in real-time, to come up with inferences about customer needs and interests. 4. Converting inferences to decisions Once customer preferences are derived, rapid decisions are needed on the offers that can be sent across to the customers. These offers need to match the alternate ones available to the customer, need to be personalized, and need to be contextual to the physical store the customer is in. 3. Addressing the challenges The challenges that have been identified vary in scope and size. The key is to address these challenges and Challenges faced by retailers simultaneously delivering an enhanced and customer today can be addressed by centric shopping experience. This can be achieved by having having an IT solution with an IT solution that understands and acts upon customer two key components: a preferences. We recommend two components for this mobile application platform solution: One is a mobile application platform and the other and an “Intelligent Agent” is an “Intelligent Agent” middleware platform. The pictorial middleware platform. depiction of the overall solution is available in Figure 1 below. Figure 1: Intelligent Agent interfacing with external systems © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 6. 6 3.1. Mobile application Platform The mobile application platform encompasses a mobile shopping application and the backend servers with which the mobile application will communicate with. The mobile application would typically have features including, but not limited to: 1. Shopping cart functionality (creating, adding items, removing items, checking out a cart) 2. Payment functionality 3. Creation of shopping lists 4. Barcode / QR-code scanning for product lookups 5. Location services such as in-store navigation. Some off-the-shelf applications for mobile shopping already exist in the marketiv. The scope of work for this paper does not include the mobile application and is focused around the intelligent agent middleware platform, presented in the next section. For an end-to-end solution, the mobile application could be custom built, or could be one of the off-the-shelf applications available. From the intelligent agent perspective, the key requirements of the mobile application are that it needs to provide location data and customer transaction information to the agent, on a real-time basis. 3.2. Intelligent Agent This is the heart of the system design and is the subject of the rest of this paper. 4. The Intelligent Agent The Intelligent Agent has been designed as a layer of business logic on top of standard middleware. The justification for a middleware based approach is straightforward, since one primary responsibility of the Intelligent Agent is the integration of multiple information sources, which is best achieved using middleware. The components of this middleware platform are mentioned in section 4.5. The Intelligent Agent has been designed keeping three responsibilities in mind: 1. Act as an ‘Integration Broker’ between the knowledge sources and the mobile application platform as depicted in the Figure 1. 2. Execute business logic to provide recommendations based on customer need and interests. 3. Help in intelligent demand forecasting and anticipation of customer needs. 4.1. Act as an ‘Integration Broker’ In order to better deliver customer centric deals and promotions it is essential for the Intelligent Agent to know the complete profile of the customer and his needs, interests and buying patterns. In addition, the Intelligent Agent needs to collect information about products and brands, as well as market data such as news, trends, demographics, and so on. Such information could be tapped from various sources: © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 7. 7 1. Mobile Transactions and Location: This includes customer interactions with the mobile application; transactions for which can be obtained from the mobile application platform. This also includes location coordinates of the customer, from which the store location needs to be computed. The store location can be a feature of the mobile application, or can be implemented as additional functionality in the Intelligent Agent. 2. External Knowledge Sources: These include Point of Sale (POS) software in stores, online channels, Social Media, as well as third party sources such as financial service providers. Point Of Sale (POS) Systems Typical POS systems handle a number of customer and store related functions such as sales, gift cards, gift registries, customer loyalty programs, inventory, offers and much more. Integration with POS systems will enable the Intelligent Agent to retrieve data like inventory and promotion availability, along with customer information like purchase history and loyalty points. This information can then be used to determine the appropriate in-store offer for the current consumer in the store. For an enhanced in- store mobile shopping experience, the most critical interface for the Intelligent Agent is with the POSv. Online Channels These are basically web sites which can provide information on various aspects such as product prices and reviews, brand information, news, trends and weather alerts. Social Media Social Media are a channel through which the Intelligent Agent can retrieve information related with consumers as well as brands. Consumer information can include profile information and interests. Brand information can be derived using the concept of “sentiment analysis”. Financial Services Financial service providers such as VISA, MasterCard and card providers such as banks hold data on customer purchase transactions. This information is valuable since those transactions may not have been through the retail store. Integrating with such sources can help the Intelligent Agent to identify purchase patterns and trends across various customer segmentsvi. Integration Approach There is a challenge in integrating these different sources seamlessly with the intelligent Agent. We suggest an approach that will be to use an integration bus– a combination of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and a messaging bus preferably Java Message Service (JMS) for integration with the mobile application platform and knowledge sources. At a high level, integrating with these external systems would involve the following steps: © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 8. 8 1. Identification of Application Programming Interfaces (API) that may be available from each of the knowledge sources. In case APIs are not available, data level integration at the database or file level would need to be explored. 2. Corresponding to the feature set needed by the mobile application platform, building of web service interfaces for request-response interactions and JMS interfaces for the asynchronous interactions. 3. Developing business logic in the interfaces as per the “VETRI” concept, which stands for Validate, Enrich, Transform, Route and Invoke. 4. Hosting the web services and JMS interfaces on the integration bus. 5. Make necessary changes in the external systems to invoke the web services and JMS interfaces. 4.2. Business Logic to provide recommendations One way a retailer can ensure a memorable shopping experience is by providing what the customer wants even It is important to time the before they are sure of what they want. The Integration delivery of the Broker functionality discussed above helps the Intelligent recommendations correctly Agent to gather customer information from different to maximize the chances of sources. The next step is to process and analyse this making a sale right when information to identify the potential customer needs; the customer is most likely which are then used to deliver personalized to accept the recommendations on products, shopping lists, deals and recommendation. coupons. For example, a teenager might receive recommendations specific to his or her needs (sports items for somebody interested in sports). Another example could be during the “back to school” season when a father shopping in the store might receive recommendations on school supplies for kids. The Intelligent Agent can get information about the teenager and the father through the external systems. The processing and recommendation logic is typically implemented as algorithms on a rules engine or analytics engine. Use case identification and algorithm design was one of the key focus areas of this work, some use cases and algorithms are described in section 4.4. Apart from identifying customer needs and delivering recommendations accordingly, it is also important to time the delivery of the recommendations correctly. This can maximize the chances of making a sale right when the customer is most likely to accept the recommendation. The Intelligent Agent dynamically identifies the best timing for recommendations delivery based on the customer activity like customer entering the store, passing a particular aisle, nearing a particular aisle, or walking away from an aisle. 4.3. Intelligent demand forecasting The Intelligent Agent, having understood customer interests of both in-stock and out-of- stock products, trends in the purchase patterns, and inferences derived from other information sources such as news; can use these to forecast category and product demand © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 9. 9 and replenish stocks in anticipation of demand. This can help lower out of stock ratios and significantly enhance the customer experience. In Figure 1, this is shown as an outbound interface towards the Supply Chain Management systems. 4.4. Algorithms and Examples The Intelligent Agent (IA) will use intelligent algorithms to translate the customer behavior and information to customer interest and needs. As part of this work, multiple use cases for customer behavior were defined, two of which are presented belowvii. Additionally, for each use case, there was an algorithm definition activity, with associated pseudo code. Some pseudo code examples are also presented belowviii. In all these examples, the assumption is that the customer is in the physical retail store using a mobile application with the features described earlier. Such an application would typically be provided by the retailerix. CASE 1: Action Algorithm Code and Methods 1. Suzan scans a wrist watch, reads reviews addToCart(WristWatch) and adds it to her mobile shopping cart. removeFromCart(WristWatch) Later for some reason she decides not to readReview(WristWatch) purchase it and removes it from the bookmark(WristWatch) Update_CategoryScore(WristWatch) shopping cart 2.a The Intelligent Agent (IA) understands WristWatch.CategoryScore>= that Suzan is interested in the wrist watch CategoryScoreThreshold and may purchase it if there was any deal or a promotion given to her and triggers search_Promotions(WristWatch) possible offers for the wrist watch. 2.b Suzan moves away from the watches aisle on_Aisle_Change(Watches_Aisle) without purchasing the wrist watch. The search_Promotions(Watches_Aisle) IA understands that it is time to remind her of the wrist watch that she was interested in along with a promotion and triggers promotions on the go. 3. The deal, coupon or promotion is pushed send_Promotions_to_Mobile() to Suzan’s mobile app 4. Suzan happy with the deal she has addToCart(WristWatch) on_Purchase(WristWatch) received adds the watch to her mobile shopping cart and makes the purchase through her mobile or the store. For each product that the shopper is viewing the Intelligent Agent tracks the user’s activity through a table known as “Shopper Engagement Directory”. The Shopper Engagement Directory helps the Intelligent Agent to calculate a ‘Category Score’ for each product. The © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 10. 10 Category Score denotes the customer’s interest level towards a product within the same category. For example: for the category Video-Games, a customer’s interest on a particular video game, say Mario, can be understood from the Category Score for that game. Typically, retailers would organize their products into various levels of categories, each having their own sub-categories. For example, we could have a category hierarchy such as Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Casuals > T-Shirt. Having a Category Score for each product also helps in identifying the interest level for each category. For example, from the captured Category Score of two different product T-Shirts and Trousers of the same category Casuals, the Intelligent Agent can estimate the Category Score of the category Casuals and therefore its interest level. A pictorial representation of the Category Score approach to find the Category Score of the higher level is shown in Figure 2. This approach can help in triggering promotions based not only on the customer interest towards an individual product but also on the score for an overall category level. The Category Score approach lets the Intelligent Agent cater to many cases of user interaction where an individual customer or a customer segment’s interest is the key consideration to deliver promotions and recommendations. Consider the following example: Figure 2: Category Score – higher category level CASE 2: Action Algorithm Code and Methods 1. Joel enters the store in summer and on_Customer_Entry(Joel) scans some T-Shirts 2. From Joel’s Category Score of Joel.Casual.CategoryScore >= Casual.CategoryScoreThreshold Casuals, the IA infers that Joel could be interested in other Casuals as well. 3. Since it being summer, the IA positive_Relation(Casuals,Summer) understands that now may be the right time to send offers on additional Casuals. 4. The IA searches deals and search_Promotions(Casuals) search_Recommendations(Casuals) recommendations for products under send_Promotions_to_Mobile() the category Casuals (E.g. shoes) and sends to Joel’s mobile. 5. Joel using the deals and addToCart(WristWatch) on_Purchase() recommendations that he has received, adds products to his mobile shopping cart. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 11. 11 4.5. Intelligent Agent Architecture The Intelligent Agent must be seamlessly integrated with the mobile application platform, POS software, and all the other external systems. As mentioned in section 4, this is the primary reason why a middleware based approach is recommended. The middleware stack includes the software components described below. 4.5.1. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) ESB is an application integration technology which acts as an intermediary through which the Intelligent Agent can communicate with the external systems. The ESB involves mapping data to a format compatible with the interacting systems and routing of messages to their proper destinations. 4.5.2. Analytics Engine The analytics engine is essentially an inference engine. It helps process the data from the various sources and makes sense out of them in terms of consumer interests, trends and patterns. It can understand the buying pattern of the consumers and also come up with a recommendation of products. Backend monitoring and trend analytics can also help retailers in stocking products and making decisions. From a technology implementation perspective, one option for the analytics engine is a Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform. 4.5.3. Rules Engine Business rules change more frequently than the rest of the application code. A Rules Engine enables externalization of business rules and this allows the application and the users to modify the rules easily. The system as a whole becomes more adaptable with business rules that can be changed dynamically. Rules can be implemented for recommending actions based on a customer activity or a behavior; for example: if customer scans the barcodes of a variety of T-Shirts for a specified number of times, an action such as ‘send promotion for T- shirts’ can be triggered. 4.5.4. Business Process Management (BPM) The gap between customer expectations and the ability of the Intelligent Agent can be maximized by defining processes that are efficient and effective in delivering what customers require. BPM is used to define the processes which are critical and customer-driven, satisfying and creating loyal customers. 5. Conclusion The trend of customers using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets while they are doing their in-store shopping is here to stay. Retailers can take advantage of this trend by providing and end-to-end solution to their customers. This would involve a mobile shopping application at the front end, and an intelligent middleware platform at the back end. The intelligent middleware platform would integrate information from multiple sources, process it using pre-configured business rules, and deliver recommendations and promotions to the customer’s mobile application that are relevant to the customer’s interests as well as © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 12. 12 location in a particular store. We believe such an approach will make a significant difference towards retailers being able to ensure an enhanced in-store shopping experience for their customers. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 13. 13 References 1. Eric Lai. (2012, March 28). iPad and Tablet Market Forecasts for 2012 and Beyond [Charts!]. Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/ipad-and-tablet-market-forecasts-for- 2012-and-beyond-charts/2832?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE 2. Graham Charlton. (2011, June 27). How can retailers appeal to mobile users in store? Retrieved from http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7707-how-can-retailers-appeal-to-mobile- users-in-store 3. Chantal Tode. (2011, Oct 12). Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart best-in-class mobile retailers: Acquity Group. Retrieved from http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2011/10/12/2011-is- the-year-mobile-arrived-for-retailers-acquity-group 4. Dan Butcher (2011, March 14). More than half of smartphone owners use mobile devices in retail stores: study. Retrieved from http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2011/03/14 /more-than-half-of-smartphone-owners-use-mobile-devices-in-retail-stores-study 5. Dharan Shetty (2012, January 30). The Growth of Smartphone and Tablet Devices in European Market [Study]. Retrieved from http://www.dazeinfo.com/2012/01/30/the-growth-of- smartphone-and-tablet-devices-in-european-market-study/ 6. Principles of Marketing. In Retailing and Wholesaling. (Lesson#29). Retrieved from http://www.zainbooks.com/books/marketing/principles-of-marketing_29_retailing.html 7. Atin Bhola (2012, March 6). Leveraging Social Media for Improving Forecast Reliability. Retrieved from http://www.infosysblogs.com/supplychain/2012/03/leveraging_social_ media_for_im.html#more 8. Karen Gedenk, Scott A. Neslin, and Kusum L. Ailawadi (2005). Sales Promotion. Retrieved from http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/kusum.ailawadi/docs/Promotions% 20Metro%20Book%20Chapter.pdf 9. Gardiner Morse (2011, Dec) Retail Isn't Broken. Stores Are. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2011/12/retail-isnt-broken-stores-are/ 10. SOA4All Glossary (2012). Retrieved from http://www.soa4all.eu/glossary.html 11. Google’s Our Mobile Planet data (2012). Retrieved from http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/ Endnotes i In the last quarter of 2010, sales of smartphones outpaced that of PCs for the first time, according to data from IDC. A consolidated Analyst report from 14 leading Bank Analysts and 6 Tech Analysts reports for 2012 by UberMobile-ZDNet suggests that the tablet market would reach 300million in 2016. Cisco has predicted that by 2016 there will be more mobile devices than the people on Earth. ii Survey results from Toluna/Econsultancy and iModerate surveys and Google’s “Our Mobile Planet” data on the smartphone usage in the Retail stores were researched upon. iii Amazon price check and Google Shopper are two such examples iv Examples are products from vendors like AisleBuyer and NearBuySolutions v Interface design is out of the scope of the current work – the authors may be contacted for details. vi This will require a partnership between the retailer and the financial services provider vii The authors may be contacted for the other use cases. viii The authors may be contacted for pseudo code related to other cases ix Several retailers already have smartphone applications available for most of the major platforms © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
  • 14. 14 About Happiest Minds Happiest Minds is a next-generation IT services company helping clients differentiate and win with a unique blend of innovative solutions and services based on the core technology pillars of cloud computing, social computing, mobility and analytics. We combine an unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities in the following industries: Retail, Media, CPG, Manufacturing, Banking and Financial services, Travel and Hospitality and Hi-Tech with pragmatic, forward-thinking advisory capabilities for the world’s top businesses, governments and organizations. Founded in 2011, Happiest Minds is privately held with headquarters in Bangalore, India and offices in the USA and UK. For further information, please contact business@happiestminds.com Corporate Office United States Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. 116 Village Boulevard, Suite 200 Block II, Velankani Tech Park Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 43 Electronics City Phone:+1 609 951 2296 Hosur Road, Bangalore 560100, INDIA 2018 156th Avenue NE #224 Phone: +91 80 332 03333 Bellevue, WA 98007 Fax: +91 80 332 03000 United Kingdom 200 Brook Drive, Green Park, Reading Berkshire, RG2 6UB Phone: +44 11892 56072 Fax: + 44 11892 56073 About the authors Shantanu Paknikar (shantanu.paknikar@happiestminds.com) is General Manager, Solution Initiatives in the IT Services division of Happiest Minds. His expertise areas include middleware systems, SOA, BPM, enterprise integration, cloud computing, social media, mobility, analytics, multimedia, and distributed computing systems. He is passionate about innovation, research, and learning. He believes that the IT services industry has turned the corner and needs to focus primarily on customer business problems and holistic, end-to-end IT solutions addressing them rather than products, feature sets, individual technology or expertise based offerings. Paul Jebasingh E (paul@iimrohtak.ac.in) is a student of IIM Rohtak, PGPM – 2013 and a B.Tech graduate in Information and Technology from Anna University. The work on this paper was done during his internship in the IT Services division of Happiest Minds. DISCLAIMER: It may be noted that the authors take full responsibility for the content and IIM Rohtak does not necessarily subscribe to the views expressed in this paper, which are those of the authors. © Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved