Case studies

Vistaar Logistics runs four Pune hubs with 1,852 field staff on the roll. Last quarter 484 of them resigned — 26.1%, or 33.8% once the people who joined and left inside the quarter are counted. HR can hold 120 retention conversations before the next quarter starts. Which 120?

Zenith Skills sells a Rs.48,000 data-analytics certificate. Two months of enquiries produced 6,395 people after deduplication, of whom 7.79% enrolled. The counselling team can properly work 1,200 leads before the intake closes. Which 1,200 — and how would anybody know it was worth doing?

Sahyog Cooperative Bank in Nashik took 9,195 loan applications last year, approved 62.5% of them and lost money on 14% of those. The board wants to lend to more people without losing more money. The bank has repayment records for the loans it made - and nothing at all for the 3,444 it refused.

PayNimbus is a payment gateway that processed 79,991 card transactions last month. 799 of them were fraud - one in a hundred, high for the industry and normal for a young gateway with a risky merchant mix. The review team can open 1,200 alerts a month. The existing rules engine raises 5,968.

Setu General Insurance receives about 14,000 policy questions a month. Every answer is in the policy wordings and finding it takes an agent nine minutes. The assistant retrieves the relevant clause and either quotes it or refuses. The hard part is not answering - it is knowing when to refuse.

Ujjwal Broadband handled 57,995 customer contacts last month. Its assistant closed 41.6% of them without a person, reported as a Rs.22 lakh saving. Nearly a quarter of those customers contacted the company again within seven days about the same problem.

Nagrik Seva, a city corporation's grievance cell, receives 11,795 complaints a month and a clerk reads every one to decide which of eight departments it belongs to. Two clerks given the same complaints agree 80.8% of the time. Can a classifier do this, and what does 'right' mean when the humans disagree?