Tagged as the sexiest job of the century according to Harvard Business Review, Data Scientists, help companies make data-driven decisions to create value and impact that has the potential to revolutionize businesses across all industries.
Data Science is often perceived as a complex and nascent field that not everyone understands. It’s a broad umbrella term to which statistics, advanced mathematics, and computer science are applied to data sets to extract actionable insights.
Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s not always easy to get accurate, real-time data. Marketers and researchers everywhere know this: while it’s easy to get statistics on online transactions, offline consumer behavior remains opaque, eluding capture—till now. Some of the challenges in the market research industry today is to answer business problems related to competitor analytics, consumer profiling, and basket analytics, leveraging different analytic methods such as data exploration, data visualization, pattern recognition, image processing, machine learning, etc.
How Snapcart captures the data
Here comes Snapcart, a big data analytics startup company established in 2015 that is already shaking up the 100-year old market research industry with its innovative approach of utilizing current technologies such as using a mobile app to capture data. In its two years of operation, it is already recognized globally and hailed as one of the top 22 most disruptive companies in the world by Disrupt 100, and has proudly partnered up with over 75 brands of fast-moving consumer goods companies in South East Asia. In return for rewards, users upload their shopping receipts in the mobile app, where it’s processed by Snapcart’s proprietary technology. To date, Snapcart has processed over 8 million receipts.
At the helm and driving these processes are Snapcart’s data scientists, who are responsible for refining and shaping this wide variety of data gathered from its users into actionable insights. Teresa Condicion, co-founder and Chief of Operations and Data at Snapcart, and former APAC Associate director of Consumer Analytics and Insights at P&G says, “In other companies, like Amazon, data scientists help to steer the direction of the company’s products; at Snapcart, our work is the product.”
Snapcart is an exciting place to be for aspiring data scientists, combining the energy and innovative mindset of a startup with the resources and depth of an established company. The breadth and size of data can make any data scientist’s heart palpitate—from millions of images to user profile, app-behavior, and various other structured and unstructured data crowdsourced from its almost 1 million downloads. The sky’s the limit in terms of analytic approaches—from statistical modeling to machine learning and deep learning. Indeed, Snapcart’s data Scientist, in close collaboration with the technology team, has helped developed best in class technology in the areas of advanced machine learning, Artificial Intelligence-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, image recognition capabilities and fraud analytics. On the data side, they helped developed new-to-the-world marketing analytics that is taking shopper understanding at a new level—whether it be real-time price optimization at its most granular level or media attribution for offline analytics that was not possible before.
Emphasis on career development and employee engagement are some of the focal points in Snapcart. Young data scientists are encouraged not only to focus on the technical aspects of their work but to understand the significance and business context of their actions. The innovation made here for this new field is going to dictate much of the methods to navigate around market research in the future. Being part of the team gives an opportunity to innovate, to create things from scratch using both research and data science techniques that deal with torturing grass-root level data which is more effective for businesses to make decisions based on an actual purchase data.
“Data scientist is a competitive advantage for Snapcart,” says Condicion. “Brands get immense value from bringing big data analytics to traditional stores where most of the shoppers still buy, taking us closer to the innovative capabilities of advertising and retail giants like Amazon and Google.”
It’s not only South-East Asia who’s paying attention to Snapcart. This big data analytics start-up, which is currently most active in Indonesia and the Philippines, is preparing to expand in a new country, in response to the demands of the multinational companies looking to get a market edge.
A chance to learn from the best in the world, exciting learning opportunities, international exposure and a chance to make a real business impact—what’s not to like?
“As a data scientist,” Condicion concludes, “Snapcart provides exciting challenges to learn and grow.”
