NEWS8 October 2024
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NEWS8 October 2024
UK – Insight teams must encourage stakeholders to engage with and use their research if they are to make the voice of the customer central to decision-making, insight leaders at brands including British Gas and Cardfactory told last week's FlexMR Customer Salience Summit.
Speaking on a panel session at the conference in London on 3rd October, Stuart Hotchkiss, advocacy manager at British Gas Business, said that due to restricted resources in the business-to-business insight team, he had warned that requests for research would be prioritised for those who had been seen to use the findings in previous projects.
“We told people ‘if you don’t use the research we do for you, you go to the back of the queue next time you want something’,” Hotchkiss said. “That drove it home – it got them to get us and the voice of the customer included at the start of projects, not at the end of them.
“There was a great habit of coming to us once they’d made all the decisions and looking for validations for what they’d decided to do – it doesn’t work that way.”
Hotchkiss also said this method of engaging had positive impacts on the insight function at the company: “It made us more reflective – what was the quality of the insight and recommendations we were providing back to the business? It got us to look at that and improve what we were doing as well. I think has benefited us and our reputation in the business.”
Also on the panel, Liz Lamb, director of insight and customer experience at Cardfactory, said that discussion and debriefing was important to keep stakeholders engaged with the insight team’s output.
“If you have skin in the game and feel like you have taken a part in moulding those actions, you are more likely to act on the result,” she said.
“That said, I do expect the agencies I work with to have a go – what are the implications and what could the next steps be? There is a purity that comes from that initial piece of work that can get lost in the discussion thereafter. Please always put recommendations on the table, but the best outputs come from insight team involvement and further business involvement as well.”
In a separate session at the conference, Lucy Davison, chief executive and founder at Keen as Mustard, said that insight teams needed to be better at communicating the voice of the customer within the organisation.
“I feel we are really missing a trick of actually taking that delightful, wonderful load of stories about people and really driving that into the organisation and getting the voice of the customer heard,” Davison said.
This does not necessarily mean storytelling. “What [storytelling] doesn’t do is elevate insight. It means we dispatch it, deliver it and move on,” Davison explained.
“What I am looking for is a continuous stream of controlling of that narrative and a continuous stream of stories, so it is not storytelling but it is driving the voice of the customer into the organisation.”
Davison said there was much that could be learned from other forms of media, such as Hollywood. “We should be thinking about a campaign,” she added. “We should be the curators and the controllers of the relationship between the organisation and its customers.”
Paul Hudson, chief executive and co-founder at FlexMR, said that “customers are far more aware of what your organisation stands for, how they behave and how they operate”, which has exacerbated their belief in the customers’ influence over organisations.
He said that insight functions needed to tackle siloes of data and thinking in organisations, including the role of linear hierarchies in creating “siloes of inefficient communication, siloes of thought and siloes of different ways of approaching what the customer is”.
Technology increases complexity, Hudson added: “We think about the great advantages of new technology, but we don’t think about the increase in complexity it brings in dealing with legacy systems, linear hierarchies and data siloes; the long tail effect of technological change that happens, let alone the change in customer thinking.”
There is a “delivery gap between what we say as an organisation we know is important and we are going to deliver, and the ability of the organisation to actually deliver that”, Hudson argued, adding that decision-making should be viewed as continuous.
“Every decision has to be held in a continuous state of flux, because the customer is changing so much and your competitors are changing so much,” he said. “Even if a decision was correct yesterday, it doesn’t mean it is necessarily in the same state today.”
Susannah Spencer, insight solutions lead at KPMG Nunwood, added that voice of the customer should not be seen in isolation.
“How are we going to bring in not just survey data, but loyalty, behavioural data, social review data, insights from colleagues on the front line and colleague behaviours into the model to really understand not only how we drive not only better customer experiences, but ultimately, the customer goals and behaviours we are looking to achieve? You have to have the right data model in place, and it has never been more important to do so as we enter the AI-enabled insight world.
“The way that insight will be generated and also visualised back into our businesses is set to fundamentally change. We are already seeing the capability there.”
Spencer added: “Unless you do solid thinking before you build reporting solutions, you are not going to be able to quickly give access in a simple and digestible way to those insights to your key stakeholders.”
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