Category — Insight Skills

Geological conditions often point to where diamonds may be found; similarly,  insight is more likely under certain market and organizational conditions.

According to research by Dr Brian Smith, it is more likely in areas of the market that are complex and/or turbulent.  So the current market for mobile communications may throw up more opportunities for actionable insight than the current market for confectionary.  Although in the latter case, turbulence in political and social trends is creating more insight opportunities. It is also found:

• when data from different sources is fused to create a big picture eg customer behaviour data, social trends, attitudinal market research, feedback and econometric models.

“Customer insight is lost down the cracks between different customer information departments” Julian Berry, the customer partnerships

• in cultures where thinking is valued and given time, and where different thinking styles are melded together  eg lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving,

Thinking is the means of productions.  You can no longer have the situation where one person thinks and the rest follow orders.

• in learning organizations,  where the insight behind the current strategy is recorded and understood,  and there is an organized process of scanning information, turning it into relevant knowledge and challenging what is known in order to distilling insight.

Have you worked out where the best place for insight is in your market and organization?

Customer Insight managers would like a new job - internal customer consultants, called in to give ‘insightful’ advice whenever action is needed.  Being a trusted advisor starts with knowing that insight is more than a report of the latest sales figures.

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth life’s experience” said American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes.  When we think of insight we think of it as rare and valuable, discerning and perceptive;  a knowledge that transcends the superficial and gets to the heart of the matter, to find its inner character:  a character hidden to the less discerning.

Insight in the world of customers can be either ‘flashes of inspiration, or penetrating discoveries that can lead to specific opportunities’ like mining for diamonds.  Or, more usually, a deep understanding of the customer in the context of the market.  Insight is the ability to get into the customers head in a way that is valuable to the business.  The insight that customers think blue washing powder gives a cleaner wash than white, even though the chemicals are the same, is not that useful to a telecoms company, but key to a detergent manufacturer.

Insight unlocks the ‘secrets’ of the market underlining threats and pointing to opportunities.   Which indicates it has several other characteristics:-

• It should be useful, and actionable
• It needs to be ‘of its time’ and can include both hindsight (perception gained analysing the past, and foresight (perception gained from modelling the future).
• It is not obvious to others or easily found

“CRM is not about technology” was the popular mantra of 2000: so it is ironic that in 2008 CRM means ‘customer relationship management supported by technology’. Even Forrester has redefined it this way. However, to view CRM as secondary to customer relationship strategy – as some business managers do - is to be blind to the opportunities for innovation and value creation spilling out of the heads of IT professionals. For there, flows a wealth of ideas to realize the vision of sales through service, differentiating customer experience and conversational marketing.

With the escalating pace of IT change, and investment in CRM technology (licences and maintenance) set to reach $11bn by 2011 it is now a pre-requisite for strategic marketing managers to be IT literate and work in collaboration with IT colleagues to spot opportunity, innovate and set relevant business change in motion. Fortunately, new software delivery models such as open source and software as a service (SaaS) enable this transformation by increasing access to IT and lowering the cost of experimentation.

So here are some key technologies to look out for. Many are at long last able to meet the CRM vision we have had for so long; others promise to remove the ‘Berlin Wall’ between IT and business; some will revolutionise industries.

Enhancing the customer value proposition

• Real-time decision support (aka next best action)
• Social productivity platforms
• Mobile and location based services
• Mashups

Augmenting people - your most valuable asset

• Enterprise 2.0
• Voice recognition

Generating the adaptive business

• Model driven CRM applications
• Cloud computing

Behind the scenes

• Information security
• Service orientated application or architecture (SOA
• Bandwidth and memory storage
• Virtualisation

For more detail see “New Technologies every marketing manager should know about”.

Many organizations ask customers what they want: that’s a mistake. How does the customer know? Errrrmmm I’d like that widget in pink and tuned into Radio Mars please.

Meanwhile, in HR the latest employee satisfaction survey (fashionably renamed engagement survey) shows that front line employees dislike the lack of two way communication, and a ‘them and us’ attitude by managers. Although job roles are clear, customer service is seen to have a high priority, and only 7% rate it a poor place to work.

Killing two birds with one stone

In the traditional, unconnected organization these issues might well remain unconnected. When the answer to both is the same – engage front line staff by asking them to be the voice of the customer, and involve them in product and service design. Set them free from the chains of transactional measures, and recognize their importance as insight workers. For not only do they understand what customers want – after all they deal with them day to day – but they also understand what the solutions are - because they know your business.

It may be very true that senior managers are out of touch with customer needs, but it is highly unlikely that your front line staff are!

When your service giving staff are used in this way, customer service moves from the end of the ‘make and sell’ process into the heart of the customer proposition design – and lo sales through service gets in the DNA.

(Extract from Engaging Employees the John Lewis Way more…..)