I’m attending the Microsoft Imagine Cup, a global competition that empowers young computer science students to team up and use their creativity, passion and knowledge of technology and quantitative skills to create applications that improve the world in which we live. This year’s event is the 16th annual event that includes 49 teams from around the […]
Author Archive | Bob Hayes
Predicting Customer Churn with IBM Watson Studio
Business leaders understand the advantage of using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to stay ahead of their competitors. However, understanding the power of AI is a lot different than actually successfully implementing it in companies. For example, in 2017, Gartner estimated that Big Data projects have a success rate of only 15%. […]
Customer Success Executives Need to Answer These 3 Critical Questions
In today’s subscription-based economy, customers are no longer trapped in long-term contracts; instead, they are able to jump to competitors easily when they become dissatisfied with their current vendor. Consequently, many subscription-based and SaaS companies are turning to the practice of Customer Success to retain their customers. Customer Success is the function in a company […]
Data Science Reveals 3 Problems with the NPS Dogma
The Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric used to gauge the health of the customer relationship, has been used by companies for years. By applying data science principles to understanding the research behind the NPS, however, we see that the NPS claims have three serious problems. First, the “research” behind the NPS claims is flawed. Second, […]
4 Reasons Why Customer Retention Matters to Your Customer Acquisition Efforts
Business growth depends on acquiring new customers and keeping them around for a long time. Yet businesses are over 2x more likely to focus on acquisition efforts than they are retention efforts. In today’s post, I want to discuss why businesses need to increase their focus on customer retention efforts and why the are imperative to your […]
Brands In One Word: Donald Trump
A recent political poll of 800 Americans conducted by Cards Against Humanity showed the usefulness of a one-word response to understanding brands. The question used to elicit the one-word response was, “What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of Donald Trump?” The top words were: President, Idiotic, Asshole, Liar and […]
Salaries of Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers From Around the World
Annual salaries for data scientists and machine learning engineers vary significantly across the world. Based on a 2017 Kaggle survey of data professionals, countries with the highest paid data scientists and machine learning engineers (in USD) were: US ($120K), Australia ($111K), Israel ($88K), Canada ($81K) and Germany ($80K). Countries with the lowest annual salaries were: […]
Top 5 Paying Data Science and Machine Learning Jobs in the US
A recent survey by Kaggle revealed that the annual median compensation (salary + bonus) of data professionals in the US was $118K. US data professionals who self-identified as machine learning engineers, software developers and data scientists had the highest annual compensation at $128K, $120K and $120K, respectively. Data professionals who self-identified as data scientists reported […]