What Do You Want From Your Data? Five Must-Have's

In a recent post, I wrote about the pitfalls of taking your data at face value and last week, I blogged about not knowing the true impact of critical organizational attributes without diving more deeply into the data (read: do more than explore it visually or look at up/down trends).

My business partner sent me an excellent article this morning by Stacy Harris that asks the question: Are You Considering Firing Your Employee Engagement Partner? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about data and how to make sense of it and I recommend this article for anyone else on a data journey. I think Stacy’s research applies to any type of data collection method. I’m summarizing what I took away from the article:

It’s not enough to have a survey; you need a strategy. A stand-alone survey gives you just that: one view whereas designing a survey that supports a business strategy provides data that can be aggregated with other data sets for a more accurate and complete picture.

If you ask generic questions, you get smiley or frown-y answers but no insight. Whether you have 12 questions or 40, if they don’t speak to your culture, your workforce or your targeted customers, I’m hard pressed to see how you will get any “aha’s” that are worth the time and expense of a survey.

What specifically do you want from a survey or any “listening post” that you design? “Because we’ve always done one” or “Because everyone else does it” are not specific objectives. What business issue do you hope to resolve? What’s keeping you or your boss up at night?

How are you analyzing the data? Scores alone may not tell you what you need to know. Trends without relationship to some rationale are just up or down points on a chart. Desktop tools exist to assist. Help is available (call me).

If you’re hung up on benchmarks, you may never get to the “why” of your own project. I know that some organizations swear by a benchmark study and who can argue, as long as the benchmarks map precisely to your own situation and as long as it’s not your only measure. Like generic questions, without the appropriate construct, a benchmark exercise can leave you with no specific roadmap for your success.

Collecting data is a critical component of every function these days. It's a project like any other, with objectives, outcomes and measures. Is your data giving you what you need?

Can You Hear Me Now? It's Your Customer Calling

Does anyone still breathing believe that we can succeed without customers? I didn’t think so. If people don’t want what we’ve got to sell, we’re toast. So, there should be no argument that customer satisfaction and loyalty are goals we should be eagerly pursuing since the pundits tell us that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep one.

I know, some of you are saying satisfaction and loyalty, yes, “but not at all costs” and “not the wrong customers for our business”. Exactly. So how are you managing those customer issues for your benefit and theirs?

Hello? I’m Out Here and Here and Here…: There are so many channels from which to collect customer feedback and each one potentially provides data gold. However, what is interesting may not be useful. Before buying, jettisoning or adding onto your business intelligence platform, a game plan is imperative.

Customer orientation is a critical part of developing a business strategy. It’s hard to describe competitive advantage and competencies unless we’ve defined how we will deliver products and how we will serve our customers. Business intelligence needs to be aligned with both strategy and customer needs. A company’s market research used to be private; now it is open and available on every social media outlet and search engine just by mining customer comments. We shouldn't ignore the qualitative nature of data and fail to integrate that into other customer data sets as it is necessary for ongoing strategy development

See Your Company Through Your Customers’ Eyes: It’s disappointing to deal with companies that seem to have no idea how many customer touchpoints they have and infuriating that they are not integrated. It’s inexcusable that frontline employees are neither selected nor trained for a service job. If you invite some of your co-workers into a room with a big white board and start mapping customer interactions, it is a mind-boggling exercise. Or, just read your customer comments online.

Create a Single View of a Customer: I’ve said it before: customers do not care about our silos. It’s not their job to sort out which department is responsible for resolving a problem. A fragmented approach rather than Outside-In customer experience design means that your employees have a perspective of your customer based on their job roles not on customer expectations.

It’s Called Voice of the Customer: I design a lot of feedback and research surveys and I am sent a few as well. It takes me less than 30 seconds to decide whether or not I’ll complete a survey depending on how it’s constructed. Questions should be properly worded and of an appropriate length; be free of bias; be actionable and be linked to the customer experience as well as the company’s metrics and Key Performance Objectives.

I’ve been on a data and analytics soap box for a while and there is no doubt that through collection of behavioral, rational and experiential data, we are doing a better job of knowing who buys from us and why. To understand what we didn’t sell and why requires tapping into customer emotions. Maybe someone will develop an App for that. Until then, we have to collect, aggregate and understand qualitative data to hear what are customers are feeling as well as saying.

To paraphrase a line from my newest favorite film, The King’s Speech, your customers have a voice. Yes, they do.

Transform Your Metrics From "So What?" Into "Who Knew?"

There are a lot of 3D movies out; have you noticed? I don’t seek them out but I appreciate the fact that people may enjoy a film more when it is multi- dimensional and they can feel immersed in the action.

I think we get too fond of our metrics; we have them because we’ve always had them. We track metrics and manage them and present their variances against performance goals. The problem? They often are one-dimensional and not very meaningful outside of our own function. And, if they aren’t tied to a real business outcome, it’s hard to make a case for the programs we want to implement. We may not monetize metrics, which is the language of our bosses; so there’s a sense of “so what?” when we present.

So, how do you make a common metric like turnover (employee or customer) more 3 dimensional and get people immersed in your action?

Embed Metrics With Data: Not just the obvious data of people in/people out. Drill down; explore data. There’s an “aha” in there I promise and since you have the business context, there is no one better positioned to see it and explain it.

Use Data Sets from Other Departments: Make your metric multi-dimensional by bringing in data from HR, Sales, Marketing, Operations, Process, Call Center: whatever data set you have, add to it in a smart way by collaborating with other departments who also have valuable data that isn’t yet insight. We have to dismantle data fiefdoms and share. Where does turnover impact the business? How does it impact the business?

Try Simple Statistical Tests: This is the point at which people click off because they think it’s not in their skill set. If you have Excel on your PC, you have a statistical toolkit. Invest in a great little e-book that provides a huge amount of good information and it is well presented (Using Excel to Solve Business Problems by Curtis Seare). Try out various assumptions to see which are more powerful. Who is leaving? What is driving turnover? How does it affect customers? How does it impact employees? Where does it affect business goals? Experiment with results and keep testing.

Provide a Business Context: Sometimes people get hung up with statistics, even simple ones and forget that the most important point is taking what statistics can tell you and mapping that to what you know about the business.

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know: aka Monetize the Results. When you know what turnover really costs the company and what it costs to improve the situation, you will have the attention of people who haven’t seen your metrics/data/ideas presented in a way that they understand.

Then, your metrics are multi-dimensional and provide real intelligence for the organization.

How are you helping your decision-makers get immersed in your metrics? Are they in 3D?

To Prune or Not to Prune? It's Not Only For Gardens

I’m a wanna-be gardener; so I listen avidly almost every Saturday to a popular local radio talk show about gardening. Last week, a caller offered three reasons for pruning and he suggested that these reasons apply to every day living, too.

So, we prune in a garden:

• To protect health

• To encourage a different direction

• To promote growth

I used to be afraid of pruning; scared I’d forever damage the shape and dimensions of trees that were planted long before I arrived. I’ve learned, though, to step back and look at my subject from its totality and to see limbs that didn’t survive a winter storm or that were growing against others and would eventually cause disease. With fewer boughs and branches, more light reaches the interior and making the cut at the right place encourages growth in the right direction. The future shape of the tree is determined by my own eye, hand and perspective.

Not to belabor this metaphor too long, but the gardener had the right idea, about trees -- and people and businesses, too. Here are my thoughts on the business side:

To Protect Health:

• Have the right tools to do the job and get advice and input when you need it.
• Use your wisdom developed through experience and maintain the courage of your convictions. Then, make an informed decision.
• Look at the shape of your organization: is it hindering the way things need to be done today?

To Encourage a Different Direction:

• Take a step back and view the totality of your business or operation. Don’t wait until there is a crisis or an economic meltdown to act. You get no points for that.
• Set a course with your strategy, have a back-up plan and review often. Things happen too fast to set anything in stone.

To Promote Growth:

• Shine a light on your internal processes, management practices, customer relationships and organizational culture. What is holding you back?
• To know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been and where you are. It’s going to take a lot of good data to provide insight that leads to great business decisions. This is the time to bring Business Intelligence from the IT department to the entire operation.

What kind of business gardener are you? Are you promoting health; steering a new direction and encouraging growth? It's a great time of year to start pruning.

Why We Love Predictions So Much & 3 of Mine

Have you had enough of the look-backs at 2010 and the predictions for 2011? Apparently, most people haven’t, which is just as well, judging by the number of blogs and articles hitting my RSS feeds, Google Alerts and email box. Why do we love predictions so much?

Humans are unique in the animal world in that we can detect and make meaning from complex patterns all around us that result in decisions about how we should behave, think, live our lives and so on. Predictions – our own and others’ – are aggregates of these patterns so we find them confirming or interesting or sometimes just weird but we pay attention to them.

We have a strong need to exercise individual control, some of which is cultural and some of which is human. Getting a handle on the possibilities for the future, gives us a sense of mastery, self-esteem and even optimism. We tuck these predictions away in our memory banks and they become part of our pattern recognition process.

According to Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of Health Psychology at UCLA, “positive illusions” about the future are mentally and physically healthy; they improve the ability to care for and about other people and they increase the capacity for creative and productive work.

As predictions seem to be so important to our general well being, I’ll offer three of mine for the business environment:

• CEO’s will be more open to experimentation at work BUT these experiments will be verified by analytics. Managing risk is still hugely important in this fragile economy. Trust but verify.

• Social capital will become a key hiring criteria for positions that influence business performance. The quality of a person’s relationships will become as important as her experience and skill set.

• Customers will be more quixotic than ever and companies will make even larger technology investments to try to predict their moods, behaviors and buying intentions. Whether these investments pay off will depend upon:
• Business Strategy
• Organizational Culture
• Quality of Leadership
• Employee Fit
• The Right Data, Metrics and Analytics

As a recent blog from IBM stated, there is no ROI from Business Intelligence unless someone uses it to make decisions.

Happy New Year and let’s get 2011 started!!

What are some of your predictions for 2011?