My brief stint as an intern at Ma Foi Analytics started on the 15th of April. On the whole, it was a very good learning experience because I got to work on one of the latest themes in the retail industry, that of mobility in retail. Mobility is about making relevant data available on the go to anyone with the access rights on smart devices. How mobility has changed the retail industry and how it can further improve the retail industry was the crux of my research report. Mobility can be understood from 2 angles: enterprise-centric and customer centric.

The idea of mobility can be first understood with relation to enterprise mobility which is about making employees gain access rights to enterprise emails, information systems or introducing digitization of business processes. Actually, it is the digitisation of business processes that is enabling mobility in retail today. In order to understand customer-centric mobility take the example of a customer feedback form. These days when one visits a restaurant or a retail outlet, customers are requested to fill up a feedback form using a tablet. The data collected from the tablet is analysed to produce a measure of the customer satisfaction and other metrics which is then used to influence the ways the business interacts with the customers. As is visible here, there is a big role of analytics in making a sound business case for mobility in the industry. Other examples of customer-centric mobility include apps for retail business, Point-of –sale mobility solutions, location-based ads services. On the whole, mobility aims at the use of analytics to reduce manual intervention in jobs through use of analytics and machine learning in order to create value for the business.

Ma Foi  Analytics is a mid-sized firm which is in the business of providing analytical tools to the companies to measure customer satisfaction, retailer satisfaction etc. I got to learn that in a midsized firm one needs to be open to doing any kind of work as and when required. So work could range from project management to designing the payroll of the employees. Team spirit and collaboration is highly important for the success of such type of firms.