Employee Engagement

According to Walker’s Customers 2020 study, the role of the CX professional is changing. (This study is focused on how the customer experience industry will look in the year 2020.) Several emerging leadership roles on the customer experience management team are identified. New roles will evolve, all roles will change, and the expertise, requirements, and responsibilities will be a bit different from what they are today.

For example, the role of customer intelligence advocate will require even more in the future. These professionals will be responsible for supporting the use of customer intelligence within their part of the business which will be increasingly broad – internal operations, such as HR and Finance, Product groups, such as R&D and Product Development, and client-facing roles, such as Sales and Account Management.

What does this mean for customer intelligence advocates?

• They will be key communicators within the organization. They will need to understand, socialize and “sell” customer insights to help make change happen.
• They will work cross functionally, communicating both internally and externally.
• In addition to understanding customer feedback & insights, other critical skills will include: establishing credibility, exerting influence, and of course being great communicators.

Based on a conversation with a group of customer strategists, my take is that the customer intelligence advocate role of the future builds on what is happening today - yet kicks it up several notches. More focus and dedicated attention will be needed, along with additional skills and experience. To be successful, our VoC teams will require executive support & buy-in, along with a culture of being customer centric.

Do you have what it takes?

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President

During Walker’s recent Customer Experience summit in San Diego, we focused on two major releases from Walker experts –  Customers 2020 which looks into the future of B-to-B customer experience, and Driving Results which provides a practical guide for using CX to drive action, real change and business results.  Along the way, I heard many people talking about CULTURE.  Some are just plain lucky – CX professionals that inherit a true customer-oriented culture find it to be one of their most important accelerators.  For those who aren’t so fortunate, of course, they want to know how to take steps to get there.  Usually, the place to start is leadership and securing genuine awareness and support.  But there are grassroots efforts that can change the landscape too.  Here is one such story I was fortunate to witness:

The setting…   New Voice of Customer program, with inside sales teams being asked to approach “hot alert” follow-ups with customers for the first time in a formal way

What happened?…   One particular person came on strong as an early adopter – his name is Corey.  Within a matter of days, he single-handedly contacted dozens of customers, and was able to pull from some of his roots in customer service to engage in a very positive and natural way with customers.   This activity was a natural fit for Corey and he got the job done.   Later, when Corey was asked to share his experiences at a monthly CX leadership team meeting, what started as a good thing turned into something bigger - something that could actually ignite a culture change.

So what happened next?…   Corey stood up and shared his story with 25 leaders newly charged with CX responsibilities.  With great confidence and pride, he went on to share his viewpoint:

• This was an amazing move for the company – most customers wanted to tell a story, and through this process they had the opportunity to do just that. 
• Customers were truly impressed that someone actually reached out to them about their feedback, especially this quickly.
• Despite the complexity of the business, many issues could easily be diffused within the first contact.  For some, there was simply a disconnect, and now a chance to be able to educate those customers a little bit more. 
• With great enthusiasm he said he was “very proud to be part of a company that does this and honored to be involved in this capacity by being the first touch back with customers.”  

For his efforts and probably most of all his renewed and positive attitude, he was given a big round of applause from the team.  As CX professionals, we know that closing the loop with customers can have a direct positive impact on both loyalty and future response rates, but sometimes we forget what effect it can have on the staff that participates in the process.  This type of attitude and willingness to engage with the customer is what is needed for employees to transform an organization’s culture to truly be customer focused. 

Krista Roseberry

Vice President, Consulting Services

As customer strategists, we love to hear stories about how customer insights have been used to drive meaningful results in our organizations.  Unfortunately the road to achieving these results can be long and filled with hazards.  A common obstacle to achieving results is not having the right team in place.   Driving results happens when there is a strong network of customer advocates across the company who are responsible for stewarding customer initiatives. 

Here are a few tips on building strong customer advocacy teams:

• Right People:  Make certain that teams have an executive sponsor and are cross-functional in nature. Take the time to recruit the right people who will serve as customer evangelists in the organization. Consider rotating team members on a regular basis to prevent team fatigue.

• Right Purpose:  Create a mission statement or charter for your customer strategy team.  Too often teams are pulled together with no specific purpose and teams are left wondering what it is they are supposed to accomplish. Mission statements and goals should be measurable & specific, as this will allow the team to determine the success of customer initiatives.

• Right Process: Develop a communication plan that identifies what information your team will need and when.  If team members are not kept informed they are less likely to stay engaged in the team. Also make certain that there is a process in place to recognize & reward team members for a job well done to encourage long-term engagement in the team.

   

I have spoken to many HR professionals who talk about the difficulty of finding talent, even with high unemployment.  Well buckle up because it is just going to get worse, which is bad for HR but if you are a highly skilled employee, is good for you.  Mike Hicks, Director for the Center for Business and Economic Research, recently spoke at Walker and then was interviewed on Inside Indiana Business.  He has been studying job markets during the past several recessions and has concluded we are at an unprecedented time where the jobs of low skilled employees are not coming back, leaving these employees in a difficult position.  What it also does is place a premium on employees with key skills as the Indiana economy shifts from a manufacturing economy to a more service based economy.   Employees who are educated will be in demand as organizations will not be able to find the critical positions due to lack of employees with necessary talent.

This will also place a premium on employee loyalty and keeping top talent as it is going to be increasingly difficult to replace the loss of top talent.  Therefore, companies must get rid of the traditional ways of doing work and come up with new and creative ways to work.  I predict a fundamental shift in how work is done in the future, by that I mean no longer the traditional 8-5 in the office Monday-Friday, and I also don't mean the traditional come in, do your work and get your paycheck.  Work is going to becoming increasingly flexible and more give and take will happen in the workplace.  The reason is, if you aren't progressive in work and the workplace, employees will find a company that is, it will become a recruiting tool and a way to improve employee engagement and loyalty. 

I wrote a blog containing a pictograph of employee loyalty, I think it might be time for many HR and business leaders to becoming familiar with this, because this is the challenge they will be wrestling with more and more. 

I recently conducted a radio interview on the 5 R's of employee loyalty and retention with MyLocalJobNetwork.com, this was the second interview with them.  The first interview can be heard here.  This interview were based on the HBR article I blogged about previously and we discussed the 5 R's of employee loyalty along with some employee loyalty trends in the national workforce right now.  To listen, click here. 

Validation involves demonstrating how customer initiatives are impactful on other authoritative sources of information that drive companies’ business success. Characteristics of world-class validation include:

• Financial linkage is actively understood and used in account planning and decision-making, such as forecast refinements.
• Integrated metrics (customer/operational/financial/quality/employee) are actively managed as indicators of overall business health.
• Clear employee-related goals are linked with customer/partner-related goals, which are aligned with strategic goals.
• Feedback is customized by area and included in incentive compensation plans.

Indiana, as a state, is fat.  According to the CDC:

• 65.9% of adults are overweight, with a Body Mass Index of 25 or greater
• 29.6% of adults are obese, with a Body Mass Index of 30 or greater

With the rampant obesity problem and the continued implementation of the Affordable Care Act, more emphasis is being put on wellness.  I see a lot of companies talk about wellness, but last night on the news, I saw a company that not only preached about wellness, but is taking steps to do what they can to improve the wellness of their employees.  The company is Brown & Brown, Indiana's largest employee benefits company.  It is encouraging to see a company that provides wellness consulting and expertise with its clients, actually practicing what it preaches.  They have purchased two treadmill desks where the employees can sign up for half an hour blocks.  I spoke with Andrew Lockerbie, SVP at Brown & Brown, and at first they weren't sure how receptive employees will be to utilizing these desks but the slots are full weeks out and the treadmill desks are almost always in use.  He is a regular user of it and has been able to shed a few of those unwanted winter pounds just by walking a couple of miles a day.  You can view the video here.

At Walker, they pay for a portion of a gym membership, which I love.  I would never join a gym but when they began paying for a large portion of it, I was quick to sign up and regularly work out over lunch, of course that led to a major knee injury which I blogged about here.  We have also recently begun offering fruit, granola bars, oatmeal and other healthy snacks and will pay for entry fees into marathons, mini-marathons, triathlons, etc. 

So my blog is about employee loyalty, what does wellness have to do with employee loyalty?  One of the key drivers of employee loyalty is a company that shows genuine care and concern about an employee.  Providing opportunities easy methods of being healthier is a way to show you care about the employee.  It is also helps differentiate the company from the competition so if any employee is looking for a job, or receiving an offer for a job, it is one of the perks that would need to be factored in when deciding to leave or stay.  It is kind of sad that companies have to make it easy for employees to exercise but that is the state we are in and companies that are doing it, will be differentiated from others in the marketplace and it will help attract talent.   

Customer experience professionals are often called upon to share customer insights and recommendations. Consider these four must-haves for your next presentation:

1. Compelling & Relatable: Your audience is looking to learn something new; something they don't already know. Highlighting an unexpected insight will grab (and keep) the attention of your audience.
2. Concise & Relevant: The recommendations must be well thought out. Focus on the elements that tie to your customer retention & growth strategies and the activities that are important to the audience. Be on-point and specific with your recommendations.
3. Balanced:  Try to avoid using customer survey research terms and use terms your executives uses. This will help make the information relevant for the audience.
4. Actionable:   Frame your recommendations with the Call to Action(s) clearly stated, prioritized and obtainable.

Julie is a strategic account manager. She manages a number of complex business accounts and each one of them involves multiple relationships that all are important to maintain. She is focused on the performance of her accounts and her activity is aimed at driving growth within each of those accounts. It’s personal too – her income is directly connected to the performance of her customers. She is busy, aggressive, and determined.

YOU are in charge of customer experience initiatives. It's your job to provide Julie and other strategic account managers with customer intelligence to help them retain and grow their accounts. While Julie cares about her customers, she doesn't really care much about the reports and information you provide. Here are five reasons why Julie isn't very customer-focused and why it's your fault:

• It's a hassle. Instead of viewing your information as helpful, Julie sees it as more work. 
• It's too hard to access. It's a pain to log into another system, so customer intelligence is often overlooked.
• It's too complex. You provide great information, but it's too much. She doesn't have time to wade through it all.
• It's not relevant. Too much of the information doesn't really relate directly to her work with her accounts.
• It's not actionable. You haven't provided any training, so there is no clear instruction on how to put it to use.

Simple, fast, and relevant – those are the keys to driving results through strategic account managers like Julie. She already has more tools to access, more reports to file, and more company emails to read than she desires. Giving her one more thing to do, will not help. To get Julie on-board the customer intelligence you provide must help her retain and grow her accounts, which of course will help her be more successful.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

Here are three common reasons why customer experience initiatives fail:

1. Companies don’t start with the end in mind – Journey maps can be an effective planning tool. With a solid understanding of customer moments of truth and internal stakeholders engaged, customer experience professionals can create a plan that is focused on collecting the right information from the right customers.  
2. No action, no impact – Taking action implies change, which often encounters resistance. Be prepared for this resistance with executive support, a network of advocates, communication plans that reach a broad audience, and engagement workshops to ensure people understand their role.
3. Documented success – Once action is underway it is easy to change priorities and move on to the next topic. In doing so, companies lose sight of the initiatives’ outcomes and don’t document success. Avoid this pitfall by creating regular status updates and a dashboard that will demonstrate the business outcomes that are being achieved. 

Are channel partners interested just in incentives, profits, and compensation for their efforts with customers? The direct compensation VARs receive in return for their investment in a provider relationship is no doubt important, as it contributes to the viability of a partner today and in the future, but will partners recommend a product purely based on the incentives associated with it?

Across several partner-focused studies conducted by Walker that look at aspects driving preference of one provider over another, the Product Quality has much more influence than margins, rebates, and other incentives. This suggests that providing Products that VARs can count on, contribute to fewer implementation problems, require less ongoing support, and are interoperable across platforms are most effective in guiding partner recommendations.

VARs stake their reputation on the trust being placed in them by their customers, and regardless of the compensation associated with a particular provider or product line, Quality wins out most of the time, over other aspects like being Easy to Work With, Sales Enablement, or even Profitability.

Interestingly, while many customer feedback efforts allot significant focus on gathering product-specific feedback, most partner feedback initiatives only scratch the surface in identifying perceptions of the partners on Product Quality. Much more attention is spent on feedback related to Onboarding, Enablement, Training, and new or evolving Marketing Programs and Incentives.

Given the strong influence that partners play in their customers’ decision making process, more time should be spent understanding the concerns VARs have with individual products, and where their biggest successes are found. This information can be combined with customer feedback to identify the biggest areas of potential growth that will appeal to both partners and customers.

In addition, if partner perceptions are preventing new products from reaching large groups of customers, identifying and removing those barriers, with the help of product groups and engineers, will allow for additional customer feedback opportunities in the future.

Are you getting the right feedback about the quality of your products? Or, are you spending most of your time reacting and responding to feedback based on the incentives you provide to VARs?

A few years ago, I wrote a blog about the “Groupon Phenomenon”.  At the time, Groupon was booming.  Everyone was talking about it.  It’s hard to imagine that today the company seems to be barely hanging on, or at least not enjoying the same success they were in 2010.

So, what happened?  At the end of February, CEO Andrew Mason was let go from the company and offered some parting thoughts to employees, which included two things I wanted to call out specifically:

1. Have the courage to start with the customer.
 

2. The moments he regretted the most where the ones where he let a lack of data override his intuition about what is best for the customer.

Let’s start with item #1.  Have the courage to start with the customer.

Easier said than done, particularly in companies where product is king.  However, it is an important point that we as customer advocates need to consistently promote.  We need to have the courage to stand up within our organizations and make sure that customers have a voice and a vote on every agenda.  It’s ok for organizations to have a strong focus on products and operations, but there has to be a balance of customer focus as well.  Otherwise, it could be a very slippery slope.

Item #2.  Letting a lack of data override intuition about what is best for the customer.

We all fall into “prove it to me” mode, but we also need to trust our intuition.  We know our businesses, and we do know ultimately what customers want if we stay in tune to their needs.  Our decisions need to be based not only on strong data points, but ultimately also by using our gut.  Know what customers want and act upon it.  Don’t let the red tape get in the way.

I love a few things about Andrew Mason’s departure letter, including the humor.  However, what I most admire is his honesty to admit that he did fall short on being focused on the customer and was urging his company to not go down that path again.  It was an inspiring turning point to hopefully what will be a new start for Groupon.  We’ll see.

Katie Kiernan
Vice President, Consulting Services

Share one of these topics at your next company meeting, in a newsletter, or intranet site:

• A story of how someone turned around a customer relationship
• A new product idea that came from customer input
• The financial impact of a change that was prompted by a customer
• The top five things customers are saying on Twitter or Facebook
• The top five challenges customers are mentioning most often
• A product improvement based on customer input
• Share what is most important to customers
• Important customer initiatives
• The top things customers are proud of
• The top things customers want the company to work on

This blog series focuses on some trends and themes that I predict will have a great impact on the discipline of customer experience in 2013. In my last blog, I forecasted that we will continue to see great volatility in customer sentiment in 2013; this time, I want to focus my attention on a topic that is getting immense attention – big data.

“Big data” has become the buzz word du jour; like many buzz words, there seem to be different definitions of what this means, which results in different expectations on its impact. For purposes of this discussion, I would posit that “big data” relates to the collection and synchronization of disparate data sources with the intent of having a more holistic view of a system and its component parts. When looked at from this perspective, big data does not seem like such a radically new notion – after all, companies have always had customer lists, financial data, employee data, etc. The key point is on the notion of synchronization – in the past, most of these data sources were not able to talk to one another.

Big data reflects the realization of the promises of CRM – that is, firms can now not only look across a wide variety of data that is organized and linked in an efficient (if not complex) manner, but they can also begin to mine this data to reveal the underlying relationships that may not be evident to the casual observer. While I would offer that the full realization of CRM’s promise is yet to be achieved, we have certainly made great strides over the last decade.

How does this relate to the work of customer strategists? I would offer a few observations:

• As more behavioral data become available, we have the ability to identify meaningful customer segments; this will be especially valuable in identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
• Linking survey-based data with behavioral data will become more the norm, not the exception. More emphasis will be placed on linking customer listening exercises to hard financial outcomes.
• Having a mechanism and process by which we can understand the inter-relationships of various data provides greater opportunities – and more imperative – to take a more action-oriented analytic approach. Stated differently – analyses that do not focus on action (and business outcomes) will have little value in organizations.
• The complexity of the data systems will require that customer strategists be skilled (or at least conversant) in the theory of data structures.
• As the volume of transactional data grows, the opportunity (and demand) for sophisticated longitudinal analysis and/or complex predictive analytics will increase. Customer strategists will need to be not only more data-savvy, but also will need to be more skilled in the use of complex predictive analytics.

Big data represents a great opportunity for the customer experience industry; however, it will require customer experience professionals to evolve. Here are my recommendations for staying ahead of the curve:

Continue to learn – Being conversant in data structures and analytics are a must. Even more important is to be more comfortable and capable in dealing with financial concepts and models in order to link customer experience work back to business outcomes.

Build new relationships – Learning new skills does not necessarily mean going back to school; expanding your business network beyond the boundaries of customer experience to include IT and financial resources will provide go-to resources who can aid in your ongoing learning.

Be proactive – Look for ways to embrace big data before you are asked; doing so shows initiative, and will speak to your ability to think strategically.

How is big data impacting your organization? What advice would you offer to customer strategists? As always, I welcome your comments.

Mark A. Ratekin
Senior Vice President, Consulting Services

Have you considered the importance of having an extended team focused on the customer experience? It takes way more people than simply the Customer Strategy owner or even the Customer Experience Team to fully embed a commitment to customers throughout all parts of your organization. 

No one is that good that they can do it themselves. We need a team working together to ensure customer feedback is understood and acted on.  At Walker, we believe having the right team is an essential element of a world class customer listening program. 

Here are a few tips: 

• The steering team should be represented by all cross-functional and front line groups.
• All team members should be proactively engaged in customer-related activities.
• Your highest level executives should see customer focused initiatives as part of their job and be actively involved in steering team activities.

See this blog for more information about the characteristics of effective teams. 

But, it goes beyond the team. A company I work with understands the importance of communicating with others throughout the organization. They recognize that acting on customer feedback is critical in conveying their commitment to customers. Everyone in the organization needs to be aware of the customer initiative; they need to understand it, believe it, and act on it. As a result, customer insights are being shared at their “All Hands Meeting” because they realize the importance of having all employees involved.

Do you have all hands on deck to act on customer insights from your VoC initiative? 

Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services

Journey mapping is a relatively recent term – one that’s generating a lot of buzz in the market.  This activity, in all its previous names, is something that Walker has conducted for companies for decades.  Journey Mapping engages both customers and cross-fuctional internal teams in exercises to illustrate the customer interaction points, critical moments of truth, unique strengths, and common challenges present in relationships between companies and their customers.  Customer relationships are complex, particularly in business-to-business – Walker’s “sweet spot” – and this process helps to make sense of these complicated relationships.  At its core, it harnesses three types of critical intelligence:  company/operational, customer, and competitive/marketplace.

The primary benefits to the companies we serve are:

• to advise the design (or redesign) of a customer listening strategy, including current or new operating metrics related to customer experience,
• to identify, understand, and align other critical (i.e. non-survey) sources of customer input,
• to engage audiences to create alignment on the areas that are most important to customers,
• to optimize resources in launching new initiatives or allocating towards existing initiatives,
• to define both current and ideal customer relationship elements,
• to create a ongoing living training tool to orient and educate employees and customers on the nature of their mutual relationships

In each engagement, Walker and the client collaborate in the process that includes defining customer strategy goals, identifying initial hypotheses around customer interactions, conducting cross-functional customer-facing workshops or role shadowing (complemented with select external customer interviews), identifying internal key metrics (KPI’s) to align with external perspectives, creating a visual depiction of the key relational elements, and developing a recommended customer experience roadmap to pursue.

Please share your own thoughts or experiences related to Journey Mapping and its benefits.

Brad Linville

Walker Information

Through our employee loyalty program here at Walker this year, a priority that was identified was an increased focus on mentoring.  As such, we have charged an internal team to re-energize our mentoring program.  There are three primary objectives for this:

1. Stay Competitive: increased competition drives the need for continuous learning, and talent development can yield competitive differentiation in a crowded market.
2. Stay Connected: increasing remote/virtual communications, social media, etc. are decreasing human connections and relationships, and mentoring offers proven ways to share our knowledge, experiences, and best practices (often in face-to-face, personal methods).
3. Stay Ahead: mentoring is shown to improve leadership elements such as retention rates, employee morale, individual self-confidence, trust, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, accelerated leadership development, reduced stress, stronger/more cohesive teams, and heightened learning.

A 2011 Sun Microsystems survey (a study conducted over 5 years) cited additional statistics to support the advantages of mentoring:

• Mentors are promoted 6x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Mentees are promoted 5x faster than those not in a program of this type
• Retention rates for both mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) are significantly higher than those who did not participate in mentoring (49%)

In addition, our own exit interviews and employee survey results show people want to stay when they are invested in relationships within the company.  With its impact on employee satisfaction and loyalty, mentoring contributes to the Service Profit Chain linking internal development investments to business success:

As the diagram depicts, mentoring can be a contributor to higher Employee Loyalty, which translates to better customer service and customer experiences, which influence stronger Customer Loyalty, which aligns with and impacts a company’s improved financial performance leading to success of the business.

Bottom line, not only is the decision to invest in mentoring reap internal benefits (such as retention, morale, trust, stronger teams, and deeper talent), but it also is strongly related to external advantages that give a company a competitive edge and a leadership advantage.

Please share your own experiences where being mentored or mentoring someone else led to a positive outcome for you in your career.

Brad Linville,

Walker Information

Journey Mapping engages customers and cross-functional teams in exercises to illustrate the customer interaction points, moments of truth, unique strengths and common challenges present in relationships between companies and their customers. The five steps for creating a journey map are:

1. Customer Strategy Goals – First, understand the goals, and be sure that the intent, situation, and measures of success are clear.
2. Internal Hypothesis – Conduct in-depth internal discussions to identify initial hypotheses, including the broad stages of interaction and moments of truth.
3. Workshops – Facilitate cross-functional teams as they walk through each stage of interaction, exploring what the customer is trying to accomplish and how the company is organized to support the customer.
4. Customer Interviews – Conduct customer interviews to confirm/refute hypotheses and enhance the understanding within each interaction from an external perspective.
5. Maps and Recommendations – Use an iterative process to create and analyze the map. The outcome should include a visual illustration of customer interactions, recommendations, and a plan to communicate across the organization.

In my last post I made the case that the future of business will require more reliance on powerful, computer-based analytics that interact with (not supplant) skilled data scientists who bring both analytic and business context knowledge into the process. Modern, effective customer insight analysis requires this kind of efficient cooperation between the analyst and the analytic engine to meet the business objectives of our customer insight function.

While this cooperation between analyst and the analytic tools is critical to effectively producing useful customer insights, it is equally critical to getting those insights implemented within the business. This is especially true when attempting to apply predictive analytics to the way we manage and interact with our customers. We need a system that is designed around the people for whom the insight is produced - a system that allows the insights to support the decision-making of the people and processes that directly impact your customers.

I have been part of many predictive analytics projects over the last 5 years. Nearly all of them have successfully extracted a set of useful insights that have impacted the way companies think about or interact with their customers. However, very few of them have made an impact on the specific actions taken toward specific customers, which is necessary to experience the full power of predictive analytics. For instance, I once built a model that predicted whether or not a channel partner's revenue to the OEM was going to decrease in the following year. It was a very accurate model, and it highlighted a number of key reasons behind declining revenue. The drivers of decline were immediately seized upon by channel management, and task forces were put in place to better understand and fix them. However, no one was able to find a use for the ability of the model to identify specific partners who were likely to decline in the coming year.

There are many reasons that customer (or partner) focused predictive analytics fail to impact specific decisions made about specific customers. A majority of the reasons I've encountered can be attributed to an excessive gap between the point of insight production and the point where the insights result in actions toward specific customers. In the pioneering book on enterprise decision management - Smart (Enough) Systems - Neil Raden and James Taylor dub this phenomenon the 'insight-to-action gap.'    

In my experience, there are two critical reasons that this gap exists for customer-focused predictive analysis projects:

1. The analysis project was not focused on a specific, customer-focused decision-point. Many insight projects start with the goal to see what we can find that will predict an increase in revenue. This is not a bad thing. Sometimes we need to start this way to understand where to dig further. Just don't expect these projects to yield quick and specific action.

2. There was no forethought or buy-in to the process by which insights will be delivered to the front-line employee for action. This often happens when a customer strategy group gets access to previously unintegrated datasets about the customer and has been tasked with providing insights about a particular issue like low renewal rates. They, rightly, decide that predicting who will and will not renew is more actionable than just looking for drivers of renewal, and a predictive project is launched. I fully support this thinking except there is no definition around getting the 'actionable' insight into the hands of those who will act.

The reason both these situations yield a gap between the insight and action is illustrated in the figure above. After an insight is developed, the next defined step is developing a report and presenting it to group of managers or executives. We bring our amazing project and results, and lay it out for them to approve or disapprove of. The best case is that they approve and say, "We need to use this information to intervene and stop the predicted bad things from happening while capitalizing on the predicted good things!" Then what? Then a group of people, which may now include at least a manager of those who will take the action, is convened to create a strategy for operationalizing the insight. By the time the insight actually impacts a customer it could be months later.

Thankfully, there is a better way, and it's all about beginning with the end in mind. Start by defining the specific customer outcome you want to predict - not something broad like customer revenue, but a specific aspect like customer spend on new products. The next step involves identifying the decision or interaction point at which you will intervene. This requires involving the group who will be responsible for the intervention and designing the process/system to do it. Then we move on to identifying and integrating data, running analysis, putting the insights into action, via the pre-defined and agreed-upon process, and validating the impact. An upcoming post will discuss this process in more detail, but the most important step is knowing exactly what to predict and what you will do with that prediction when it comes. Without that, your well-crafted insights are likely to stagnate. We need to mind the gap.

I saw this article this week on how much time is wasted at work.  According to this article, almost 50% of employees waste between one and five hours a day on non-work websites and 64% visit non-work websites every day.   I have seen articles like this before, especially when college basketball tourney is going on and how much time is wasted, blah, blah, blah.   The article states, "Yet time is precious, and every hour spent on non-work related activities impacts the bottom line."  Really, is it really impacting the bottom line?  How do you know, are they not getting their job done, THAT is the question that needs to be asked. 

My question to all of this is, "Who cares?"  If organizations are giving their employees specific objectives to accomplish, and then ensuring those tasks are accomplished and if not, working to determine what changes need to happen to ensure the tasks get done, who cares how much time is spent on non-work related websites.  This is the entire problem I have written about before on caring too much about the hours worked and caring too little about what actually gets accomplished.  I have a buddy of mine who was just told to really stay at the organization, he needed to work 60 hours a week.  What about telling him the specific things they needed him to accomplish in the next 90 days and then let him figure out how long that will take. Yeah, he left and found a better job.

However, I do like the last page of the article where it mentions the problem being employees aren't challenged enough.  That I would agree with.  And I really like this "[t]here are those who are fully engaged in their work, who are given incentives to do better, who are satisfied with their career, are not bored — these are all reasons why people work hard, and the converse is true. If they’re bored or unsatisfied or feel like they’re working too many hours or are not motivated enough, that’s management’s role to try to fix that."  Although the employee has a role in this too, they can't just sit back and expect their boss to notice they are bored.  They need to be proactive and determine their career path and then take steps to move along that path.