Category: Analytics

A Sentimental Journey
When Doris Day sang the jazz classic ‘Sentimental Journey’ she described the joy of returning home to the things she had missed. Back here in the 21st century we also feel a sense of joy when we get home, but it’s often because we can finally get a reliable internet signal through our Wi-Fi. Mails download, WhatsApp messages pour in and all those photos and vids we took get uploaded to share. The sentiment that people feel when they get home and find their internet service is not working is generally far less happy. It’s a sentiment that I experienced first-hand, having suffered from a service that was slower than old fashioned dial-up for several months. Web pages with sliding graphical widgets and targeted advertising completely stopped loading. After endless rounds of calling support, listening to distorted 80’s pop tunes while stuck on hold, and re-booting of modems I just didn’t want to speak to them anymore. In today’s marketing vernacular, I was not having a good “customer experience”, so I left them and went to another service provider.

Although the initial buzz around customer experience may have died down from a few years ago it is still regarded as the single most important ingredient needed to have a successful business. In a recent report Watermark Consulting studied the cumulative stock returns of the top 10 “Leaders” and bottom 10 “Laggards” in Forresters CX index and found

Leaders outperformed the broader market, generating a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index.

Laggards trailed far behind, posting a total return that was 45 points lower than that of the broader market.

In a world of commoditized products and services businesses now rely on customer experience more than ever to differentiate themselves from the competition. However, in the report ‘Customer Analytics: How to make Best use of Customer Data’ the Aberdeen Group has reported that

‘96% of companies are not fully satisfied with their ability to use data (both customer and operational) in CEM programs’

In order to provide good a customer experience companies need to do 5 things
1. Introduce good data governance practices around customer data
2. Create a unified view of customers across all touch points
3. Profile and segment their customers
4. Track the emotional impact of a customer interactions with the company over time.
5. Use that intelligence to guide agents on how to provide the best support for customers.
Enter the world of the customer journey map. A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of all the interactions a customer has with a company, through every touch point, with a measure of the customer’s attitude towards the company during those interactions. For example, receipt of a bill may be a negative experience, whereas receipt of some reward, like bonus loyalty points, would be viewed more positively. These sentiment scores may be collected directly through touch point surveys and recording call dispositions, or inferred based on history and through the use of analytics.

Agents that have an immediate grasp of a customer’s journey and level of satisfaction are far more successful at resolving issues and upselling than agents who do not have that insight.

The first step in understanding a customer’s journey is to introduce good data governance practices and create a unified view of the customer. The Aberdeen group also observed (in their ‘Big Data in CEM’ study) that

More than half of all (56%) businesses lack a unified view of the data captured across multiple channels and stored in systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, e-commerce and enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Customers should then be profiled and segmented along demographic, financial and behavioral lines. Then, by recording their changing sentiments during various interactions with the company, a picture can be built up of how different segments progress through their customer journeys and it becomes possible to understand which interactions lead to greater customer loyalty and value, and which lead to churn.

Customer journey mapping helps companies to understand their customer needs and provide the kind of personal advice and support that builds trust. Trust that encourages customers to buy more, stay loyal and spread good news about your business.
January 7, 2016
Reporting “The Smart Way” in RA

“As is”
Read the news using your favorite news app on your smart phone or device? Notice how the app renders news items that are important to you or of interest to you and stacks them together with short headlines followed by a short summary thereby making sure that one wouldn’t need to feel short of time finding what really needs to be read.

Is this done in your RA department?

The below diagram illustrates how majority of the RA departments report the necessary information to all concerned departments and how the subsequent action items are publicized and owned by various departments.

In majority of RA functions the following gaps exist in the reporting of findings and their subsequent action points:

• Reports rarely designed with specific information that is immediately consumable by target audience
• Reports rarely designed with specific requirements to the target audience than can be easily converted to action items
• Majority of the RA operations use one reporting template for all business functions

“Smart Reporting”
The below figure illustrates the ideal modus operandi that requires to be followed in a RA reporting structure.

Key improvements in the model are as follows:
• Reports specifically designed to target audience. For example: Reports to CxO will address revenue & cost savings, key mitigation measures taken, not exceed a time length of 5 minutes and requiring specific actions / escalations
• All reports to address specific actions required from various business functions and will be time bound
• Organizational news feeds will be made part of RA reporting

Here the emphasis is on smart reporting, which can be quickly consumed and acted upon.

September 7, 2015
Spreadsheets and the Underwater Analyst

You’re an Analyst so you love data, right? Data is the oxygen of an organisation, but just as a living creature needs a heart and clean arteries to keep its oxygen infused blood flowing smoothly, an organisation also needs to maintain its systems and system interfaces to keep that data flowing smoothly and efficiently. As an analyst you will probably feel physical pain if your supply of data is cut off, and may even begin to experience panic attacks, but a good analyst will persevere in finding a cause of the blockage and find a way around it. That’s why we have spread sheets everywhere. Spread sheets are like virtual scuba tanks for an analyst, providing a personal supply of data to play around with in a world where the usual source is either unreliable to completely unavailable. What’s even worse is that the supply of data is generally under someone else’s control, which will often be your resident IT group. Need a report on Sales for a new product by region? Ask IT. Need the data on a daily instead of weekly basis? Better ask IT to change the extract. Need to know which customers are churning by a specific market segment? You guessed it.

So you get a report to tell you everything about everything, stick it into a monster spread sheet and start to play. But then the data changes. It’s no longer relevant and you haven’t been able to get an update. You’re blind and the presentation is tomorrow morning! You are facing the same reality that countless organisations are facing across the globe, which is that data held in spread sheets and on laptops around the organisation starts turning stale as soon as it’s loaded, and that can lead to organisational paralysis. Despite the promise of flexibility and agility spread sheets can actually cause inflexibility, as functional silo’s become more divided and inter-functional processes break down.

There must be a better way. If only the data was always to hand and you didn’t need to go to IT cap in hand to get a report that is obsolete before it’s delivered. If only you could get instant access to the data you need in an enterprise strength repository that automatically loads data 24/7, and then provides you with all the tools you need to transform, enrich, aggregate, correlate, forecast and generate beautiful charts to make sense of it all. Then imagine that the product that does all this is the core for a wide range of integrated solutions from billing to network management, asset assurance and cost management, and that you, or anyone else in the organisation, is now able to pull up to the minute analytics out from any those systems, as well as any other systems within your organisation, from one central portal. Then you would be looking at the Subex ROC, the powerhouse at the core of a comprehensive range of products that put control back in your hands.

April 16, 2015