Complaints can be very useful to Insight teams, as they highlight potential service or product problems. A company recently approached us about benchmarking the level of complaints they receive. However, this can be a complex procedure, because any benchmark has to confront three issues:

• You need a critical mass before the results could be regarded as valid.
• It’s very difficult to benchmark complaints in simple volume terms.
• Different industries log complaints in different ways.

So can you actually benchmark the volume? Or can you simply benchmark the way in which complaints are handled? Or is the most valuable benchmark the way in which complaints are used as part of the insight process?

Although complaints have a huge potential value, complaint handling isn’t discussed much. So would you like to benchmark the complaints your organisation receives? Please let us know what you think. Contact us at info@cisolutions.co.uk.

For a few more thoughts about complaints, please click here.

One of the best known ways of assessing people’s working styles is by the Belbin approach. This categorises people within a team according to one of nine natural roles:

• Shaper – Dynamic, task-orientated
• Implementer – Systematic and efficient team player
• Completer/Finisher – Pays attention to detail and completes the job
• Co-ordinator – The confident team leader
• Team Worker – Enhances the smooth running of the team
• Resource Investigator – Knows where to get the resources needed
• Plant – The main ‘ideas’ person
• Monitor/Evaluator – A clear thinker
• Specialist – Expertise in a specific area

Try using Belbin to look at the way in which you and your colleagues work within your team. To look at each of the above roles in more detail, please click here. You might also want to check out the Belbin website at www.belbin.com.

Jack is an Operations Manager who wants to deliver the best service possible to customers and is happy to listen to anything that the Insight team can tell him.

However, he is sometimes too keen and doesn’t always listen to the whole story. For instance, he may hear a complaint from a customer and will want to act upon it immediately without fully considering its legitimacy.

There are two ways to handle Jack:

• By educating him in the principles of insight and the different types of research that are carried out
• By being very diplomatic when presenting results to him, focusing on the key conclusions first (otherwise he may jump to his own, wrong conclusions)

To learn more about how to help Jack to stick to the facts, please click here.

If you’re rapidly becoming inundated with requests for information and insight from all quarters, you need to step back and ask, “Who are our key stakeholders?” Then make a list of them and group them according to their goals and interests.

Which business areas do they come from and where do they sit within the organisation? Cross check these details with information about how they are using your resources – does this fit in with the key needs of the business?

To maximise your impact and effectiveness, you need to:

• Make sure that your key stakeholders include the senior team.
• Know the main issues and challenges that your key stakeholders are facing.
• Allocate a member of your team to each key stakeholder.

Don't forget that it's not just what you deliver, but how you deliver it. Make sure that you know your stakeholders’ communication preferences. A few quick wins will make all the difference to them – and to you and your team.

To find out more, please click here.

 

 

For insight management to be truly effective, you need to seek, nurture and develop the ‘four skills’:

1. Intellect – this enables you to identify the issues that are really important – to sort the wheat from the chaff.
2. Courage – sometimes you will need to be the bearer of bad news, and you have to have the courage to deliver it gently but firmly.
3. Diplomacy – when you have identified something that isn't working properly, or something that is going wrong, you need to be tactful.
4. Determination – If at first you don't succeed, you may need to try, try and try again. If your message is really important, don't give up!

So, which skills do you and the other members of your team have? Why not start strengthening those areas where you are weakest ?

For more details on the four skills, please click here.

 

When a consultant uses a matrix to express results or to put across a particular point, people will often comment, “That’s what makes him a consultant!”. But consultants often use matrices simply because they work and their clients seem to understand them.

How often do you use them? Do you know the classic examples, such as The Boston Matrix and the Ansoff Matrix? You can find explanations of both of these at sites such as: www.businessballs.com (scroll the list on the left hand side to find them) or just try Google. Another classic approach is to plot business opportunities or products using scales based on ‘Attractiveness/Profitability’ versus ‘Ease of provision’.

So, next time you want to put across a serious point or drive home a message, think about whether a matrix would help. Find two relevant axes and try plotting different ideas/companies/products on them to see what they look like. And if you really want to get fancy, try plotting the points on the matrix using blobs of different sizes according to their value! This is particularly easy if you use PowerPoint.