My Experience From An Intern To A Member At Redcarpet

At Redcarpet, we value consistent efforts and aim to grow with employees that are ready to take on a challenge with confidence. In this blog, two of Redcarpet members talk about their experience at Redcarpet. They detail their internship experience, their most challenging moments and how they became a member of the Redcarpet family.

Redcarpet Taught Me That No Odds Are Unsurmountable - An account by Aamir Siddiqui

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After gaining my degree in mechanical engineering, I invested myself in my first job where I spent 1.5 years. However, I had a passion for crunching numbers and after a lot of discussions, decided on pursuing that. That is when I joined Redcarpet as a Data Analyst in the sales team. Despite a dyslexic mind and virtually no coding experience, I was able to contribute to Redcarpet in a massive way because of its competitive and enriching culture.

I aimed to help my colleagues monitor, regulate and gain meaningful insights from the huge volume of sales data. However, my experience at Redcarpet helped me go a step further. I was encouraged to come up with solutions and ways to implement those ideas by myself. This section details my days at Redcarpet as an intern and how that culminated into a fulfilling job opportunity.

When I approached the task of monitoring huge chunks of sales data, I already had a few solutions in mind. The gravity of this task was evident as monitoring and regulating sales data has a direct impact on a company’s growth. Eventually, I decided on enabling Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) on every sales touchpoint. This allowed us to track important data which could then help us analyse our methods and performance. Under the mentorship of Swagat Sharma, I was able to complete this process out to completion.

Furthermore, in the process of optimising the business process, I noticed the need for optimizing our automation processes. Our sales team used to spend a major chunk of their time in entering values in excel sheets manually. I set out to automate these processes which ended up saving the time of the sales personnel and brought in more transparency. Furthermore, we implemented email automation for cron email job with the help of Apache Airflow. Now, we had complete control over our emails process. For instance, we could manage when they were sent and we could decide the time at which those actions were executed. Moreover, it was easy to write the code and manage the operations for the same. This simplified our processes and optimised them at the same time.

After the analytical data was in our reach, my job was to create a report out of the same. However, this task turned out to be quite a challenge in itself. The data that we had was complex and had to be broken down in a way that it was easy to comprehend and revisited when needed. Moreover, I had to sit with the teams and understand the problems that they were facing. Once I understood their issues, I had to come up with a solution on the basis of the data in hand. My goal was to be 100% transparent about the state of things so that fruitful decisions could be made out of those insights. This process gave me an idea for my next big challenge. I decided on presenting this data in the most fun, interactive and exhaustive way possible. Indeed, we decided that it was time to change the conventional report system.

Over the next few weeks, I researched extensively and came up with a solution. I chose Google Data Studio for our reporting and data visualization needs. Kartik Venkataraman helped me in setting up the Data studio. Beforehand, I set up the Google Bigquery Data for interactive analysis of major datasets. Google distributed the computing used by BigQuery across different compute resources. Moreover, it automatically replicated data between zones that led to high availability. This minimised the negative impact of any hardware failure as well and proved to be a good decision for us.

Now it was time to implement the Data Studio. Essentially, it pulled data from 12 different sources and combined them into an easy to edit, share and understand report. We could also make use of the available features like graphs, charts ad widgets to visualize our data. The visually stunning dashboards were liked by everyone. In fact, we soon installed a screen in our office for real-time analytics. It also allowed us to compile our reports with lots of data options and metrics. We could now consolidate many reports just by applying the required filter.

Furthermore, it allowed us to share these reports with dedicated account managers without wasting any time. Google Studio has built-in sharing capabilities, just like Google Docs. This eliminated any time wasted in downloading and sending reports manually. Now, any person could make changes to the report and it was visible to all the other team members simultaneously.

Moreover, the Data Studio is extremely customizable in terms of the report’s layout. Before using Data Studio, reports went out in tabular forms (CSV sheet) which was extremely cumbersome to consume. Moreover, we could now easily change the fonts, colours, used widgets and make the report fun to read. Apart from getting real-time reports, we could also choose to save some data for a specific period of time. So, if there was a metric that we did not want to include in our data now, we could choose to use it at a later time.

As my internship at Redcarpet was coming to an end, I noticed how much I had learned through our brainstorming sessions and trying out solutions for each problem we encountered. After becoming a full-time employee at Redcarpet, I continued analysing huge volumes of data to bring meaningful insights to our team. The time I spent creating the Sales Prediction Model stands out in this regard.

All in all, it has been a process of continuous learning and taking initiatives. Moreover, it is a place where I learned to voice my opinion. My mentors at Redcarpet taught me to always stand my ground and always be open to learning. Our founder, Sandeep Srinivasa is extremely open to new technologies and that gave me an opportunity to widen my horizons and experiment with new technologies. Through my journey here, I have mastered Python, SQL, BigQuery, Tableau, Data Studio and Airflow. And I still believe that the major chunk of my learning curve here at Redcarpet is yet to arrive!

How Redcarpet Taught Me To Embrace Every Challenge With Confidence - An account by Meenu Sharma

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Internships are often considered synonymous with ‘a learning experience’. My experience as an intern at Redcarpet was no different. However, what I didn’t expect was for that learning experience to span 1.5 years (and counting!) Redcarpet gave a chance to learn and unlearn a lot of things that helped me to shape my knowledge about my field and gave my career a more defining direction. This blog details why I have always considered my commitment to join Redcarpet as the ‘best decision of my life’.

The best thing I gained during this internships was the guidance of mentors. As I was given more and more tasks to complete, my mentors at Redcarpet guided me into doing things the ‘smart way’ not the ‘hard way’. For instance, my first task was to create an app in the Android Studio. I had no experience in the field and was naturally perplexed due to my lack of knowledge. However, my Redcarpet mentors reinforced my spirit of embracing a challenge. I ended up completing this task in 1 day and learning a lot from the same.

My next major task was related to the Redcarpet Total Recall (TR) app. This task stood out the most during my internship experience because it proved to be the most challenging as well. The issue with the TR app was that our sales agents & brand ambassadors were unable to track the progress of users they had referred to. Usually, while creating an account, there is an optional field where the user can input the referral code of the agent. Through this, agents can track the progress of the users in the Total Recall App. However, due to some technical issue, even after entering the referral code, agents failed to see the users in their hierarchy. Even after multiple rounds of discussions, we could not figure out the reason for this anomaly. However, after inspection, I realised that there were two optional fields of referral code in the client app(Redcarpet App). Thus, users were confused and started entering the referral code in the first screen (while creating an account) but failed to enter it at the next screen (registration).

I ended up joining Redcarpet as a full time as a Q & A Engineer after the 6 month internship period. Since then, I have got the chance to work with some really talented and experienced Android and backend developers. This has helped me grow and learn the ins and outs of my field in an exhaustive way.

Conclusion

We at Redcarpet understand the importance of building a strong company fabric on the basis of hard work and consistent efforts. Our vision to provide financial services to each and every corner of India is strengthened by the dedication of our team members. In the end, we believe that our goals are only as good as our actions and our members work tirelessly to ensure that our actions don’t fall short of our words!

About The Author

This blog was authored by Aamir Siddiqui and Meenu Sharma. It was drafted by Etee Dubey.