Itni Shakti Humein Dena 'Data'!!

Are our MI Reports making the desired Impact?

 

Most often, post our discussion with our clients and stakeholders we start creating MI reports. Reports depicting performance trends, task volumes, success rates, TAT and a range of other important metrics. We discuss more, and we continue creating new reports and making amendments to the existing reports. We continue generating more reports, for more people, with more frequency to ensure that our stakeholders have all the information that they’ll ever need. However, twist this scenario and think. Thanks to all our enthusiastic reporting and the reams of reports we generate. However, will our stakeholders EVER NEED all this information?

Can we please go back to all our reports in our respective processes and try to look at each of them through the following seven lenses?

1. Is it simple and Relevant?

It’s easy to get overly ambitious and want to provide highly detailed, real-time reports covering each and every slice-and-dice analysis that’ll provide our stakeholders with multiple dimensions. But instead of spending multiple weeks or even months working through our first iteration, take it step-wise. Start with simple and key metrics and then work through several short cycles of prototype, test and adjust.

2.  Is it uncluttered and unambiguous?

Do not clutter your reports with unimportant (though good-looking) graphics. Keep your report simple and impactful in its visual appeal. Resist the temptation to make it too flashy or over-designed graphics and charts. As pretty as those may seem, they get in the way with your report’s objective i.e. rapidly and easily informing your audience.

3.  Is it too entangled and misrepresentative?  

Often reports start simple. And then there are complex formulae’s like percentages, lookups, deriving values from multiple sheets, sum and if conditions, circular errors (where a cell refers to its own value to recalculate a new value) and similar convolutions. It is here that we run a risk of data misrepresentation. When it takes too many sheets and entangled formulae to arrive at a new value, there is always the chance of our final graphs (despite being visually high-impact) showing an inaccurate picture.

For e.g. last month the team occupancy was 80%. Of that 80%, 70% of bandwidth deployed was for Project A. Within this Project A, we used 90% of our bandwidth for activity XYZ. Now, a different chart somewhere might show bandwidth on XYZ is 90%. However, that’s absolutely misleading as the actual bandwidth deployed on activity XYZ is just about 50% (90% of 70% of 80%).

Hence, it is always suggested to frequently go deep into all the formulae and charts in all our existing reports. It is an imperative step to iron out all the inherent chinks that might’ve inadvertently crept in.

4. Is it well structured, designed and formatted?

Take care in how you design your graphs and charts. For example,

·         3D offers no increase in viewer comprehension.

·         Garish colors can interfere with interpretation.

·         Choosing a pie chart for more than 6 values makes the graphic virtually impossible to read.

·         Have we ‘wrapped text’ for long remarks/statements and aligned it well (both horizontally and vertically)?

·         Are we following a standard colour scheme?

·         In case of currencies, have we inserted the right symbol and ‘000 separators?

·         In case of numbers, have we standardized the decimal spaces?

·         Do all the worksheets have appropriate titles?

·         Are all the embedded links and formulae correct and functional?

And finally, beyond the aesthetics, some of the most important questions for all our reports –

5. Can we reduce the frequency?

Not everyone needs every bit of information on a daily basis. Some information doesn’t even add much value on a weekly basis (there are hardly any movements). So should we reconsider the frequencies of our all our existing reports? Can some of them be reduced from dailies to weeklies to bi-weeklies to monthlies?

6. Can we merge two reports?

When two or more reports have a large proportion of exactly similar elements, why then are we wasting our efforts in extracting the same information multiple times? Is there a possibility of merging multiple reports and reducing our redundant efforts?

7. Can we become dispassionate and have a realistic discussion around do we actually need a particular report? What if we stop it completely?

Often we keep doing things, following MI routines and generating age-old reports which are perhaps no longer relevant to anybody. Often, we make innovations and introduce new reports with high-relevance metrics that everyone is keenly looking at. However, we continue to keep running the old reports alongside the new ones, just in case, someone wants to revert to the old format for some comparison trends.

However, there should be a clear-cut, well-defined period of generating such ‘just in case’ old reports. If we keep generating all our old reports alongside the new reports till eternity, the very purpose of introducing innovations is defeated. Till the time all new innovations that are introduced (to bring in efficiencies) do not see any corresponding ‘old practices’ being stopped, the innovations are an additional strain on our systems and resources. It’s an ideal case of building in more redundancies rather than efficiencies.

Hence, time and again, keep questioning all the existing reports for the value and relevance they bring to the table. If you haven’t heard any feedback or questions around a particular report for a long time, perhaps no one is actually looking at it any longer!

And how does one identify such ‘just in case’ redundant reports? Just one approach – keep questioning! Frequently keep challenging and questioning yourself with tough questions around “What if I don’t generate this report?” rather than going over-board with your ‘It will be done!-delighting-the-stakeholder’ attitude.

In the current testing times, deriving efficiencies out of our existing systems, resources and reports plays a much bigger role than ever before. Do your bit. Ask the right questions. And contribute in avoiding the information overload. Cut the flab, get lean!

Itni Shakti humein dena ‘Data’, Kabhi Insights Kamzor ho na!

Let’s explore the Power of Data!

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 5: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

Touchpoint Marketing: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

This is the fifth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third and fourth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

It takes just one tenth of a marketing spend efforts to retain an existing company, right? So it’s time that organizations start growing this ‘easier to market’ share of current customers by understanding how to optimally increase customer engagement across Touchpoints. Be it via social media, direct mailers or one-to-one conversations, customer engagement needs to essentially start with “Your Issues first!” approach.

No customer wants to be sold ‘personalized equity advices’ when he is losing his cool on a mis-sold plan. It’s a marketing faux pas to be selling ULIPs to a customer who is well researched and is insisting on Traditional Life Plans.

One of the most important pieces of the customer ecosystem jigsaw is listening to the Voice of the Customer. You attract him, get him in the door, Engage him, Link-up with him, sign him on….and then move on to acquiring another customer?  Close of sale is not the end of it. It’s infact the beginning of a new relationship and that’s precisely where most of our marketing muscle should be focused on. Yes, in strict functional terms, customer concerns should sit under Operations, under Quality. However, it’s essential for Marketing to participate in these initiatives. If Marketing is the biggest stakeholder of costly Market Research exercises (studying attitudes and preferences of potential customers), why shouldn’t they be keen to hear the voices from their home turf as well? The attitudes, preferences and concerns of existing customers in their own backyard? As it goes, Get your House in order First!

 Listen to your heartbeat (existing customers) and Address them with a sense of urgency -

• Improve the experience across the customer lifecycle and all touch points including online, in-store, mobile, social, and phone
• Enhance product and service positioning with actionable insights from both surveys and unstructured feedback
• Make loyalty and rewards programs more effective using customer preferences
• Act on customer feedback to increase first-time sales, repeat business, and brand advocacy
• Improve customer satisfaction and barriers to sales at key points across the customer lifecycle
• PR and the public social media universe will play a big role in addressing existing customers. Companies should be prepared to manage consumer response, both on other social media sites and channels outside of social media.
• Get head-on into Customer experience management. Build a Voice of the Customer strategy aligned with your key business goals.

Collect

• Document customer interactions across segments and lifecycle stages (customer journey mapping).
• Gain early insights on service breaks, emerging issues, customer sentiments and needs through all traditional and social Touchpoints.
• Try to understand local, regional, and national feedback about your competition
• Adapt to Text analytics and go about uncovering valuable insights. Create an infrastructure to analyze surveys, transactions, customer feedback, and other VOC data.

Analyze

• Analyze customer data by product, life cycle stage, line of business, and channel. Classify customer comments with strategic business context to increase relevance.
• Analyze root causes to identify pain points that dissatisfy customers. Prioritize the factors that impact customer retention and loyalty.
• Text analytics can be deployed to solve complex business challenges. Text mining enables you to unlock the value from surveys, call center notes, email, social media feedback, help desk tickets, and other sources of unstructured text data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) based analytic tools automatically capture the main ideas from customer comments. To identify key issues, a classification engine can sift through millions of documents to track the main ideas.

Action

• Showcase findings by exploring emerging issues, top themes, customer sentiment, and more.
• Provide channels for brand advocates to recommend your services.
• Deliver consistent and improved customer communications.
• Train your team to interpret VOC results and take action.

To know more, continue reading the sixth part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 3: The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

This is the third part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Do catch up on the first and the second part of this series to build more context about this piece.

Knowing the characteristics of your customers can help to clarify and identify potential leads. Yes, it’s right that 20% of your existing customers are bringing in 80% of your revenues. But choose to ignore the other 80% at your own risk. Customers change. Their incomes, attitudes, preferences, life stages evolve at a much faster pace than our ability to garner insights. We could be sitting on potential blockbuster, currently dormant customers. It would be naïve and myopic to not acknowledge the unique, niche segments within your customer clusters. All it takes is a bit of a nudge and push to activate them. They may be too miniscule in terms of their segment size, but may still have the potential to emerge as your most entrenched customers. But yes, it definitely takes some deep-dive understanding about these customers to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

It’s time that companies wake up to the power of these niches and start looking at these smaller segments for their unique characteristics. It’s time to stop looking at customers as one large mass that’ll react similarly to mass marketing ‘pulls’. Somewhere, we need to go beyond the existing lazy segmentation of key accounts, high net worth (HNWs) and the rest.  Marketing to this ‘Rest’ could be a real game-changer! If marketers put concentrated marketing efforts toward knowing about these high-potential niche customer segments, they're going to do a whole lot better than if they go after everybody in a similar manner.

Now is the time to use the knowledge of your CRM systems and Data Warehouses for clarity and better decisions. For quicker, agile and more targeted offers/mailers. If there is newly discovered information that you should be capturing in your CRM system, now is the time to add the additional fields into your adaptable CRM system.  

Going ahead with a multi-media campaign that claims “Hum Rishtey samajhte hain” and not caring for your existing ‘Rishteys’ doesn’t really add up. It’s great to be gloating about your social media success through the sheer no. of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page. But is there any metric that tracks the sheer no. of ‘dislikes’ for your customer service? High-pitched above-the-line media campaigns bring immediate, far-reaching success (or so you think), but it are consistent below-the-line, Touchpoint-based, one-to-one efforts, the make you the revered organization you always wanted to be.

Multiple customer service roles were introduced to bring your product/service closer to the customer. To help him, to advise him, to guide him, hand-hold him and lead him to this best interests. Excellent, ideal concepts to begin with. But somewhere along the way, all these additional roles are simply adding to your brand clutter. These numerous ‘faces’ of your brand (with no real brand ownership) could be steadily eroding into and diluting your core proposition.

It’s time Organizations de-clutter themselves and get out of the complex web of Organizational structures. It’s time customer-centric finally places the customer at the centre (rather than pushing him across the organization centers). Your customers are not just a part of a fancily-labeled segment (Young achievers, late bloomers, mid-life identity seekers), each one is a distinct individual. Each one is interacting with multiple Touchpoints of your company on a regular basis. It’s time each such Touchpoint starts being the essence of your brand characteristics. The features and attributes that you’ve been so aggressively marketing through your ATL campaigns, finally boil down to a few moments of truth. The moment a potential customer finally comes face to face with your brand.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about leveraging the potential of these moments. By no way is this revolutionary concept. CRM, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Point of Sale (POS), merchandising…companies have been practicing these concepts for a long time. It’s just that we need a consolidated fresh-look at all these initiatives from a ‘One Customer’ perspective. We need a strong culture that enforces the belief of ‘One Customer’ who deals with multiple Touchpoints in our organization. Rather than multiple Touchpoints catering to multiple customer segments, with no dialogue between each of such Touchpoints.

The idea of Touchpoint Marketing may infact find much resonance in John Carlzon’s definitive work in ‘Moments of Truth’ way back in 1987.

As famously emphasized by John Carlzon - A company is defined in the minds of its customers as the composite total of every moment of truth -- those short periods when the customer interacts with the company or one of its employees. The best approach to delivering consistently high-quality moments of truth lie in building a customer-driven company. The essential characteristics of such a company being –  

• The employees who interact with customers have the authority to make decisions on behalf of the company.
• Middle managers who work to manage resources so the frontline employees can be more effective.
• Corporate leaders who develop a vision of where the company should be heading and provide inspiration.
• A flat organizational structure where real-world experience from frontline employees is learned from and built upon.
• A willingness to look at everything solely and exclusively from the same perspective a customer uses.
• A commitment to narrowing the focus of the company to the delivery of exceptional service.

 

Bring all of those elements together and a customer-driven company can achieve some very significant business success, regardless of external financial conditions, competitive challenges or any other factors.

About 2 and half decades down the line, Moments of Truth still continues to be a truthful, profound ethos of everything that customer-centric companies should aspire to be. Today, Touchpoint Marketing simply tries to build upon these ideas through the twin lenses of Analytics and Social Media. Some impossibly powerful tools that were yet to be discovered way back in 1987.

To know more, continue reading the fourth part of this seven-part series here

The Paradox of Studious Professionals

The Paradox of Studious Professionals

Throughout our student life, we wanna grow up, step out, try to be creative, imaginative, do our own thing, don’t want to blindly follow instructions or simply cram the books. In a nutshell, we are so damn eager to be Professionals!!

Cut to our Professional avatars. We will strictly follow our set KRAs, walk with blinkers, never attempt what we were never asked to, never question set processes, rarely look beyond our silos. Our student-mind, so restless to get out of the box, suddenly goes blank and numb the moment we turn professionals. Professionals happy to stay cocooned within our comfortable boxes (also called as Job Profiles).

As students we hated the concept of 'ratta maar' education?. However, the same ourselves are now seeking some divine help (in the form of sample papers and paper patterns) in our professional roles. We hated our teachers for favouring the by-hearters, the quintessential good boys & girls, the front-benchers who won’t know an iota beyond the books. We titled these single-trick ponies as Bookworms, immersed in their books, oblivious to the world around. However, the same inquisitive and brimming with ideas ourselves now hate our bosses for not providing clear instructions. Not being specific in exactly laying down the expectations from us – A, B, C, D…

It’s much akin to the children versus grown-up syndrome. As children, we try too hard to look, behave and project ourselves as mature grown-ups. And by the time we actually grow-up, the reverse process has already started. We try too hard to look, behave and feel younger, cuter and not necessarily smarter. No wonder the repeated reassurance through “I am still a child at heart!”

Corporates have long been emphasizing and underlining this aspect of there being no correlation between Education and Employability. The seemingly sharpest of Engineers are happy doing some of the most redundant jobs. They were refrained from asking too many questions as students. And now, they are too conditioned to not ask questions in their existing job profiles.  Some of the sharpest Engineers from some of the sharpest institutes, but never sharpened to be imaginative. Never engineered to be enterprising. Look around and it’s not a case of over-qualified professionals stuck in monotonous jobs. It’s more a case of under-inquisitive professionals very rightly mapped to the jobs they are possibly the best at – clear, unambiguous, process-driven. ‘Ratta maar’ jobs!

Growing up in value-chain can never be achieved by being served highly intellectual projects on a platter. As it goes in the Bournrville advertisement, “You do not buy a Bournville, you earn it!”

An exciting job profile is necessarily an acknowledgment and award of some exciting ideas. You don’t graduate to intellectually-stimulating projects by demanding for it. You exhibit Intellectually-stimulating ideas and thoughts and then graduate to such projects. Your clients and stakeholders will never ask you to do rocket science, till the time you don’t educate them about the impact of rocket science and infuse (their) confidence in your capabilities to do so! But how will you exhibit such rocket science traits amidst your existing ‘A, B, C, D…’ job profile? Now that’s a classic Catch 22 and that’s something that you’ll have to imaginatively figure it out for yourself.

It’s odd to be quoting a cliché in this piece on imaginative thinking. But perhaps some clichés are unavoidable and necessary to drive home a point - “Ask not what your job has done for you, rather challenge what you have done for your job”.

Look around for all those goody-two shoes toppers and front-benchers in your school and college. Are they necessarily at the top of their game? Are they the front-runners in their professional avatars as well? Ummmm….not exactly, right?

During an interview for the position of head of an analytic team, I questioned a potential candidate on a simple aptitude problem. A problem that involved calculating the area of a circle. He fumbled and had retorted “But how is that important to my role? And as it is, it was too far back in school. Can’t exactly recollect the formula.” Can’t recollect the area of circle formula? You were the Math topper mate! “But we do have Google and all the advanced tools and techniques for formulae.” 

Another potential candidate, who had been at a very senior position in a reputed consulting firm, was asked to run me through his most acclaimed project. Some project where advanced analytics was put to best use with some very insightful and actionable results.  I requested, “Walk me through your statistical/analytical approach to the problem”. He was deadpan in his response “But, I had teams doing it!!”

Yes Google will answer everything and there will be teams doing the groundwork. But as leaders if you don’t know the basics of flying, why would I hand you a pilot’s license? Won’t it be a recipe for disaster? Yes, leaders are meant to provide directions, navigate teams and clients, steer thought processes. But it would be dangerous to be led by an explorer captain and hope to discover America. As they say, Hope can’t be a strategy.

Yes, the area of circle formula was way back in your school. You crammed it up then, topped the grades and then started focusing on the new syllabus and paper patterns.

There is a wonderful book from Marshall Goldsmith, ‘What Got You Here Won't Get You There’. It argues that at the top level, the problems are behavioural, not skill-related. You may have been a meticulous and diligent student throughout. Crammed through your books and sailed across top schools and top colleges with top grades and have now landed a top job. However, what got you here won’t get you there! Welcome to the corporate world, the real world. From here, life won’t be an instruction manual. It’s time you finally apply what you’ve learnt and be your own guiding star.

The true sign of Intelligence is not Knowledge but Imagination. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. - Albert Einstein

But unfortunately, Imagination, Lateral Thinking and Creativity were never full-fledged courses in our education system. Coming back to the crammers from your schools and colleges. Yes, so have they made it large? Have they arrived and are thriving in their professional roles?  Some of them, definitely Yes! Some who had the foresight to adapt to the new rules of the game. They have leveraged their cram-abilities to land up at the right place at the right time. And are now doing the right things, by being rightfully self-driven and imaginative.

Ofcourse, there are many others from those batch of crammers, who are still struggling to make a mark. Perhaps, they are still looking for sample question papers and paper patterns to decode the corporate jigsaw. Perhaps they were never forewarned in their schools, that a major part of what happens in life will be ‘Out of Syllabus’!