Issue 8 - Five Minute Insight - Customer Insight Solutions



	Issue 8 - September 2007 CONTENTS Introduction Insight in Practice - Incorporating Insight into Induction - Acting on Intuition - Meet the Client - Disorganised Dianne Developing Skills - Preparing an Agency Brief - Satisfaction Guaranteed? - on using complaints data - Question From Last Month - subscriber message board? - Tip of the Month - Economist Numbers Guide Training and Feedback - Autumn Courses - Still some spaces! INTRODUCTION Welcome to the eighth edition of 5-Minute Insights, the e-mail newsletter from Steve Wills and Sally Webb at Customer Insight Solutions (CI Solutions). We hope that in the few short minutes that it takes to scan the key messages, you will find snippets that are both informative and stimulating. If you want to find out more, we have provided links to longer articles for some of the insights. INSIGHT IN PRACTICE INCORPORATING INSIGHT INTO INDUCTION Sometimes internal clients can appear to overlook (or not really value) the expertise of Insight teams, and the positive contribution that they can make to the company. In contrast, Insight teams would like to be highly respected, involved at an early stage in any projects, and treated as partners – not servants. One solution is to make sure that your team is involved in any induction sessions that your company might run. This will both raise awareness of the insight role and also show potential users what it can achieve (which in turn will manage their expectations and help them in providing clearer requests). Any involvement should also be followed up with further training, information and contact, all designed to raise awareness of your capabilities. This approach will help to: Establish the ground rules for using your Insight team Enhance planning, by reducing the number of late and impractical requests Improve understanding that rushed or badly managed projects can affect the quality of the results For more information on how to build awareness of insight, please click here. ACTING ON INTUITION Insight teams use many different data sources, and we can produce some pretty comprehensive lists of them. However, one of the most important sources is often omitted – intuition (involving both you and your internal clients). Professor Karl Weick describes intuition as ‘compressed expertise’. Basically, it’s all about trusting your own knowledge and judgement. For instance, how often have you completed a project that has confirmed what you already knew? Sometimes there are political reasons why this has to be done, but how frequently do you take part in projects that you know are a waste of time and money? So, start with a simple check: look at the objectives of the research. What do you expect the answer to be? Ask your internal client what they are expecting to find out as well. Alternatively, ask them what they would do if you didn’t carry out this piece of research? What decision would they make? What risks are involved in making that decision without researching it? The answer may mean that a project can be dropped if knowledge is high and the risks low. But it could change the nature of a project if it’s obvious that one area has more risk than another, and that levels of knowledge are higher or lower in the critical areas. Trust your knowledge and judgement: don’t waste your valuable time on projects that don’t really need doing! DISORGANISED DIANE This is the latest in a set of 'pen portraits' of different types of internal clients, and the issues you may need to address when working with them. Disorganised Diane Diane is a member of the advertising team, and could be a very valuable source of inspiration to the Insight team because she is highly creative. However, she also has a tendency to be completely disorganised in both her personal and working life. This can cause particular problems if Diane is involved in commissioning research. This may involve providing stimulus materials; inviting people to attend groups; and organising a debrief. She is likely to mess up these responsibilities; not deliver the requirements on time; or simply get them wrong. Diane needs some sound, practical help: Start by making sure that she realises that you have recognised her creativity Offer to carry out some of the organisation for her – particularly any vital, time-critical issues Cover yourself by sending emails that include any agreed actions and the person responsible for each one To learn more about how to stop Diane causing too much chaos, click here Next edition - meet Demanding Darren... DEVELOPING SKILLS PREPARING AN AGENCY BRIEF Clients and agencies can have a rather tense relationship. Clients are often frustrated by the lack of high level strategic input and thought leadership shown by agencies. On the other hand, agencies can feel frustrated by the lack of clarity provided by the client, and by the desire for a fast and cheap service. One key cause of problems is the agency brief. If you want to get the most out of your agency, you need to produce a really clear brief, which includes ways of working as well as the project details. Some of the key questions you should consider when preparing this include: How much detail should your brief include? How do you want things to be managed on a day-to-day basis? Who do you want to do the work, and to manage the relationship with you? What level of interpretation do you need for the project? What onward communications do you want? Ultimately, you may find that your differing needs might not all be met by the same organisation. Perhaps one agency should collect the technical data, and another act as a high level consultant. For more details of how to prepare an agency brief, please click here. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED? Many companies spend large sums of money on measuring customer satisfaction. Sample volumes can be high, and reports may even be produced monthly. This can therefore become a very expensive process. So why not take a different approach? Harness the power of an alternative source – customer complaints! These provide an almost instant indicator of new problems. As a result, you can probably reduce the frequency of your more general customer satisfaction measurements to just three or four times a year, to pick up slower moving trends. As the main expense of large-scale customer satisfaction trackers is the fieldwork cost, just think how much you could save by slashing the frequency! So how do you achieve this? Find out who has responsibility for complaints, and ask them for a formal feed to highlight the key issues. Be wary of internal politics. Be diplomatic and involve someone more senior if necessary. Decide how to report the data. How do you filter out a sudden surge in complaints caused by a single incident? How do you avoid duplicating any existing reports? This may involve some effort, but could lead to significant cost savings whilst also making your organisation more responsive. To find out more, please click here. QUESTION FROM LAST MONTH A Subscribers' Message Board? In our last newsletter, we asked if a message/discussion board would be valuable. To be viable, this would need a significant number of contributors. As only a few of you said that you would welcome one, the idea has been shelved for the moment. However, if a lot of you didn’t respond but would still like a message board, please get in touch - we are always willing to reconsider our decision! TIP OF THE MONTH It All Comes Down To Numbers… Although many insight workers have good statistical expertise and technical understanding, some still lack basic financial and business numeracy skills. Too often we can be criticised for not being sufficiently commercial, or for not translating results into the kind of business terminology that our organisations use. You might therefore be interested in a publication by the Economist: “Numbers Guide – The Essentials of Business Numeracy” (available from Amazon for £13). This covers basic numerical and statistical techniques as well as a wealth of financial approaches. It includes forecasting, various research approaches, and sections on decision-making and how to incorporate results into our judgement processes. Although it won’t teach a researcher anything about research, it may help them to explain approaches to their internal clients. It explores issues such as the difference between internal rate of return and net present value. It also shows how to translate results into financial terms, and how those results might be used. For £13, it’s certainly a useful book to have in your reference library. Visit: http://politics-now.com/books/numbersguide.php for more information or look at the reviews on Amazon. TRAINING Our Autumn training courses have started - with the first on Insight Management having been a success. There is still time to book on our other two courses coming up: Thu 4th Oct 2007 - Commercial Thinking Thu 1st Nov 2007 - How to Communicate For Maximum Impact Please book now to be sure of a place. Click here for more details FEEDBACK We want 5-Minute Insights to be as useful as possible. That's where you come in! Please email us at feedback@cisolutions.co.uk with any comments you have about its content, its style, or with requests for items that you would like to see. If you have a difficult problem that you are having trouble solving - such as a Marketing Director who insists on ignoring unwelcome insights; or an issue that is challenging your team on the journey towards insight - please let us know. If we can make helpful suggestions we will, and if several people have a similar problem, we will write an article for 5-Minute Insights. If you would like to pass this newsletter on to your colleagues, please feel free to do so. Equally, if you know anyone who would like to be added to the mailing list, please let us know. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.