The services sector not only makes up a large portion of India's GDP, but also draws substantial foreign investment and generates substantial employment. The services industry in India encompasses a broad range of activities including trade, hotel and restaurant, transportation, storage, and communication, financing, insurance, real estate, commercial services, community, social, and personal services, as well as services related to construction. With a contribution of 53% to India's Gross Value Added at current prices in FY22, the services sector continues to be the country's main source of economic growth (ibef.org). In India, the services sector, which creates more jobs than any other sector, accounts for over 55% of FDI.
Given the rate of employment development and expansion within the service sector, it has turned into a major draw for young people and job seekers. More than ever it is now essential to develop the right skill set in order to establish a viable career in the service industry.
Making informed decisions with data analytics is one of the skills. Data analytics is a process that involves inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analytics provides the knowledge, reporting capacity, and the drill-down analysis necessary for wise corporate decision-making in direct support of services & operations.
Data analytics is useful in the areas of service operations with respect to stronger enterprise-wide demand and supply visibility, improved inventory planning and management, improved budget forecasting, and improved service lifecycle management processes.
Modern techniques have been created to better understand the customer and create marketing/campaign strategies that take it into account. Some of the key elements of data analytics include comprehending and developing dashboards for the presentation of various business reports (both routine recurrent reports and ad-hoc reports), as well as doing data analysis of historical data to obtain insightful information.
It is interesting to note that the tools used to perform the data analytics are simple to use and don't need any pre-requisite in order to learn. Through our Post Graduate Program in Service Operations (PGP), we at ISH help students hone their data analytics skills in relation to service operations. Our PGP students gain the confidence to handle the data and derive insights from it by applying the experiential learning through cases in the sectors of hospitality, tourism, retail, aviation, real estate, facility management, banking and finance, insurance, luxury, etc.
About the author -
Dr. Chirag Malik (PhD., MBA., UGC-NET, B.Sc.) is working as Associate Professor at Indian School of Hospitality, Gurgaon. He has 23 years of work experience in industry and academics. His areas of interest are, Business Analytics, Marketing Analytics and Marketing Research. His current research areas are Recommendation Engine, Market Basket Analysis, Text Mining, Environmentally Conscious Consumer Behaviour and Machine Learning for Transforming Education. He is a member of Analytics Society of India, IIM Bangalore. He has published various research papers in Scopus indexed, Inderscience, Sage Publications, ABDC indexed national and international journals of repute. He has also presented papers in many national and international conferences organised by reputed institutions, such as IIM Indore, IIM Lucknow, IIM Ahmedabad, MDI Gurgaon, and IIT Roorkee. He has been session chair of various technical sessions at international conferences held at reputed institutions. He has conducted workshops on research methodology and analytics using various statistical tools such as Python, R, SPSS, AMOS and advanced excel.