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Welcome to the ninth 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

BE PREPARED!

If over 30% of your work is ad hoc and in response to unplanned customer demands, you may be working inefficiently. The solution is to 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 include:

• Individual pieces of research and analysis from different sources
• A process that integrates and reconciles information from different sources

One key benefit of a good portfolio is that it can help to ensure that you maintain a consistent approach that enables results and information from different sources to be reconciled more easily. One way of achieving this is by adopting standardised questions, definitions and ways of grouping your answers.

For more information on how to develop an effective portfolio, please click here.

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE (WITH A LITTLE FORETHOUGHT) 

Insight customers vary considerably, and have different characteristics and needs. If you can identify these, you can develop presentations in a range of formats that will dramatically improve the overall impact of your findings.

One format that is very adaptable is PowerPoint, as you can produce different versions of a presentation fairly easily. Take a look at our ‘Tip of the Month’ for more information!

A range of factors will affect your decision about the most effective formats you should use for your customers:

• The level of detail required
• Their need to see all or just part of the results
• A format that will facilitate onward communication
• Presenting results indirectly or face-to-face
• Adapting your style to meet your customers’ preferences

Please remember that a single style of presentation may not do real justice to your results – so why not explore the benefits of different formats? To discover more, please click here.

DEMANDING DARREN

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.

Demanding Darren

Darren will typically be in a middle level post – possibly a Marketing Executive. He may be a hard worker, whilst not being particularly intellectual. Although he’s nice and well meaning, he can also get quite annoyed if he feels that he’s being fobbed off.

Unfortunately, he makes constant demands on your time by always wanting bits of information and needing work to be done. Although his demands may seem to be perfectly reasonable, responding to all of them will use up a disproportionate amount of your resource. You want to be responsive and to provide a good service, but you also have a range of other priorities.

The way to achieve a good balance is to:

• Look at the way in which he works and the types of requests he makes
• Use this information to see how you can mitigate his demands
• Eliminate many of his potential requests by making more information available to him so that he can find things out for himself

You could also use our ‘SCQA’ approach – click here to find out more.

DEVELOPING SKILLS

The most important resource of any team is its people. When trying to draw the best out of your team, never underestimate the importance of good people management. A positive, motivated team can achieve much more than one that is poorly managed.

Team members will typically respond well to:

• Strong leadership – a positive attitude and a determination to put insight at the heart of your organisation’s decision-making.
• Interesting and meaningful work – Make sure that you communicate new findings and ideas with conviction and enthusiasm.
• Flexibility – Be prepared to introduce change where and if it is needed (but do so cautiously)
• A sustainable environment with the right people and a succession plan – try to develop your team members: broaden their skills and enhance their job satisfaction.
• Personal development programmes. Training and development can cover issues such as technical skills. However, don’t forget insight management skills. CI Solutions would be happy to provide you with help in this area.
• Clear expectations and performance management – Make sure that your appraisal system covers agreed ‘ways of working’. And don’t forget to celebrate any successes!

For more details of how to improve your people management, please click here.

IF THE CAP FITS.....

'6 Thinking Hats’ is a book by Edward de Bono, in which he develops and enhances the concept of brainstorming. It’s the type of skill that Insight teams should have in their armoury whenever they need to get to grips with a difficult issue, or find a solution to a problem.

The six coloured ‘thinking hats’ represent the different ways in which groups or individuals can thoroughly explore any issue:

White hat – Neutral: the discussion is objective and focuses on facts.

Red hat – Passion, emotion: how people really feel about the topic.

Black hat – Gloom: the potentially negative aspects or weaknesses.

Yellow hat – Sunshine: discussing the positive elements and the potential benefits.

Green hat – New life: looking at creative or alternative approaches to the issue.

Blue hat – Sky: overview and control of the thinking processes being used.

To delve deeper (including links to further references), please click here.

TIP OF THE MONTH

TAKING NOTE OF POWERPOINT

One great advantage of PowerPoint is that it is standard and everyone uses it. But people often forget that it can be used in different ways. So, even though you may want to keep your PowerPoint slides simple, bear in mind that copies of your presentation may get circulated to others.

You should therefore consider having an alternative version for circulation which either has slides that contain more detail or uses the ‘Notes’ facility to provide the detail that you might have given verbally in the presentation. However, be aware that few people look at PowerPoint in Notes mode, so they miss them. If you use the Notes facility, make sure that you put a reference on the slide to say that there is more information in the Notes.

You could also adopt the opposite approach. If you want your message to reach different types of customers, why not start with a detailed PowerPoint presentation from which you can extract different combinations of slides to form different versions? And if you want to give a simple overview, it is relatively easy to summarise the detailed presentation by perhaps just using the slide headings or subheadings, and then expanding on these verbally.

TRAINING

Our current series of courses has been run for the autumn, but dates are currently being arranged for them to run again in February/March 2008. Dates will be in the next newsletter, but if you are interested just contact us.

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.

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