Granular knowledge of customers

Here is an easy misconception. Yes, granular knowledge of customers is key to serving them better, but no, this does not mean gathering more and more data on them. Organisations are guilty of collecting information on the basis that “maybe this will come in handy in the future.” Often this is data which is not directly tied into their business goals and has no strategic use. Sometimes this data is collected with no real plan in how to access it, meaning bespoke tools or data lakes are constructed at great expense. Having masses of data is rarely practical and may mean your team spends more time summarising data then they do analysing it. Think carefully about what information you really require in order to take make decisions and take action. Remember that customer-centric behaviour does not begin with understanding customers and their needs. It begins with identifying business goals, and then understanding the customer needs you have to fulfil to meet those goals.

Educate your team

A good analyst knows what to look for in data and what to ignore. The problem is they are often not the people commissioning the research. Its easier said than done but in an ideal world your Insight team would be working closely alongside different departments to aid them in decision making. That means they need to fully understand the strategy and thinking behind a particular question/research project.

Instead, what often happens is that other than a short briefing, the Insights department is expected to go off and find answers to X. Often this is at short notice and with a quick required. The Insights team start to spend most of their time ‘fire fighting’, and with a busy workload can potentially become a bottleneck for important actions.

It’s important therefore, that expectations around the process of capturing insight are laid out. Internal stakeholders need to understand the process of getting data, realistic timelines and have an idea of which insights are available. Insights are crucial if any organisation is looking to become more customer-centric but without the right training and education its easy to get side tracked.

Outputs

Outputs are critical in order to share Insights and prompt action and in avoiding analysis paralysis. Having relevant information displayed in eye-catching and interesting ways should spark ideas and prompt action. As customer centricity is an area which is likely to touch all parts of your organisation, you’ll need a variety of different media (video, posts, banners, infographics, interactive websites) aimed at different groups and for an ongoing basis.

You can waste some serious time creating outputs that are never really used, so be sure to ask for plenty of feedback on the info and format that different stakeholders need. Do a test run and see how long it will take you, even if your dashboards may not be set up or showing the relevant data yet.