Last Updated on August 14, 2024
Amogh Raghunath is a software developer and data/knowledge extraction expert who’s currently working with a major audio entertainment company.
It goes without saying that Big Data remains crucial for virtually every business operating today, especially for businesses with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers. Gathering data and finding ways to derive value from all that data represents a massive opportunity to improve the customer experience and expand the customer base even further.
Data analysis also has wide-ranging applications outside of commerce and customer experience, particularly in non-profit spaces.
Raghunath has brought his incredible data extraction skills to so many different projects through the years, and for this article, we’d like to explore just a few of his major career accomplishments. Raghunath himself will provide commentary along the way.
Let’s kick things off with a number of projects that Raghunath has tackled during his tenure at the company, where he’s been working since early 2020.
Then there are the marketing opportunities presented by the platform, as well as the integration of different customer accounts.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways that Raghunath’s work has made things better for both users and companies.
LiveRamp connection to Amazon publisher services
First up is a tool called LiveRamp connector through Amazon publisher services. Raghunath built this connector tool, the crux of which is how to achieve targeted marketing within a relatively new landscape of privacy discourse and legislation.
The third-party cookie debate rages on, and new rules have posed a challenge for marketers. Targeted marketing is still possible, of course, but it needs to be done carefully and respectfully.
LiveRamp allows marketers to target customers in paid media channels in a privacy-compliant way. Not only that, but it also allows companies to message customers via the most performant channels.
Raghunath explained how this tool manifests in value for companies and marketers.
“This enables efficiency, using marketing dollars to increase the customer base and retain them. That makes it a huge win for Amazon publisher services because it encapsulates all the complex system capabilities and makes ad suppression campaigns to reduce dollar value and better target customers in real-time.”
This is an excellent solution for marketers that want to target customers while also respecting the privacy of those customers.
The result is the ideal marketing win-win: companies successfully market their products or services to customers who want or need those products or services. Both parties gain value in the process.
Less money is wasted on failed marketing attempts, and customers feel less hassled by marketing efforts through various channels.
Marketing Data Cloud
Raghunath’s third and final major project that we’d like to talk about here is the Marketing Data Cloud, but before we get to that, we need to set up why there was a need for it in the first place.
One of the challenges of data-driven marketing and customer experience work in the modern landscape is that, at times, there’s simply too much customer data to sift through.
Especially when it comes to making real-time, analytical decisions, companies can get overwhelmed not only by the sheer amount of data but also by customer privacy considerations.
“In order to accelerate discoveries, there is a need to correlate large amounts of big data to predict accurate prospects and market/target them. Since there is an enormous volume of data, including sensitive personal data, security issues are similar to a large healthcare setting.”
So, companies need to make use of customer data quickly, but also safely, and that’s where Raghunath’s contribution to Marketing Cloud comes in.
“The Marketing Cloud allows clients to understand how their marketing performs across different media channels. This is critical for many companies because it can inform how they want to market to their customers.”
But this tool isn’t just for the benefit of companies. It also provides advantages for customers.
“At the same time, this tool maintains customers’ trust and adherence to privacy policies. Companies can engage in effective marketing without overreaching.”
This is another example of a data-driven solution that leads to marketing win-wins. Data privacy laws and guidelines continue to evolve, and companies need to adapt quickly to these changes.
The Marketing Cloud provides a successful model for conducting advanced marketing analysis without losing sight of the customer’s rights, and we hope that other companies and platforms will follow suit with their own marketing tools.
Refugee resettlement tool
Moving on to Raghunath’s development work with academic institutions, let’s take a look at the software that places refugees in real-time.
When refugees are processed inefficiently, the resulting backlogs can intensify the humanitarian crises that caused them to flee their homes in the first place. The same inefficiencies can affect refugee placement, leaving refugees without the social, economic, and cultural support they need to thrive in their new homes and contribute optimally to their new communities. While working with Professor Andrew Trapp of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Raghunath helped develop an automation tool that addresses this exact issue.
Through the use of Machine Learning and integer optimization, this software finds optimal placements for arriving refugees, and in fact, it’s been used by an official US resettlement agency.
The development process was challenging, and Raghunath told us that managing data and making sure that the software could be deployed successfully in real-world scenarios were key points during development.
Forward movement
InspirationFeed would like to thank Mr. Raghunath for giving us the fascinating opportunity to take a closer look at just some of the high points of his career thus far.
In turn, this has given us a window into cutting-edge data extraction and analysis work, as well as innovative software development for major organizations and companies.
If there’s a clear lesson here, it’s that every obstacle has a solution. In certain cases, there may even be multiple solutions, and it takes talented professionals to discover and implement these solutions.
Industries evolve, parameters change, but with adequate resources and support, developers can help companies overcome just about any challenge.
