Be Prepared

Have you developed a comprehensive insight portfolio yet? During the year, if over 30% of your work is ad hoc and in response to unplanned customer demands, you may be working inefficiently. This is partly because it isn’t feasible (or cost-effective) to produce bespoke products that meet every need. Urgent requests for one-off information can be a real drain on the limited resources available to Insight teams.

 

However, if you have a well-planned core of research and analysis in place, you will probably be able to meet most needs without having to commission individual projects. You should therefore have a portfolio of products and services that can be modified to meet the requirements of most of your customers. You can then fill gaps and respond to ad hoc requests where the potential business value is demonstrated and justified.

 

 

Your portfolio should have two distinct elements:

You probably already produce regular core studies on different topics. If you look at how these can meet most of your needs, you should find that they will meet many detailed insight requirements. This will avoid resources being unnecessarily side-tracked on diverse ad hoc requirements. However, you will also need to take a broader view that looks at further integration.

 

An effective portfolio of core insight solutions will also help to ensure a consistent approach. This will enable results and information from different sources to be reconciled more easily. This is a vital requirement for establishing the credibility of the information.

 

One way of achieving this is by adopting standardised questions, definitions and ways of grouping your answers. For example, you may need to decide how you put people into age groups, or how you group different industries. If you don’t have consistent rules, simple issues such as the frequency of purchase and customer profiling can be a real nuisance!

 

The issue of consistency becomes even more important and challenging if you are working on a global basis. Increasingly, customers want to be able to compare performance and issues across markets and countries. Make sure that you have agreed core questions that can be accessed easily (for instance, on the intranet), and ensure that these are used as a common basis across all markets.

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