Outsighting – insight outside the box

I first thought of the concept of outsighting some years ago.  Why would several different companies all pay insight teams to get their information when they could work with non-competitive organisations and pool their resources?  Getting an outside view of their data would only add value. 

So the idea of an external full service insight agency was born.  It rattled around my head for a few years, and then I thought: why not give it a go?

Of course we all pay market researchers (I’ve been known to run more than a few surveys in the course of my work) to give us the external viewpoint.  From a market researcher’s perspective, it’s both very hard and yet very easy. 

The hard?

Firstly, you have to ask the right questions.  Secondly, once you know you’ve asked the right questions, you have to ask the right people.  Thirdly, you have to make sure that the people you’re presenting back to at the organisation don’t simply hear what they want to hear. 

The easy?

If people hear what they want to hear, you’re less likely to get the blame.   Market research is like an old pair of jeans- fits well, feels comfortable and familiar, and stretches to fit new shapes.  Moreover, and I digress slightly, research often takes place after all the thinking has been done.  The amount of times I’ve heard: ‘we know what’s going on – we just need to prove it’.  You might as well say: ‘I’m going to waste $20k justifying to the board that what I want to do is right’.  In fact, if you’re so sure, why not put the $20k into a pilot to prove it.  You might even get some sales.

Market research on its own (and I’ll probably get into trouble for this analogy) is like a three legged dog – you have a huge fondness for it, it gets from a to b, but it will never be able to run as fast, jump as high or achieve as much as its four legged counterpart – full service insight. 

Full service insight (or outsight, when it’s shared or outsourced) integrates analysis, data mining and market research.  It’s harder to do – it requires three different kinds of thinking to come together.  Because of this, it’s a lot harder to argue away inconsistencies.  You have to face them, own them, and amend strategies to suit.

Let’s take some market research as a start point.  Maybe there’s internal reporting that can tell you what to measure.  Most organisations have information that can tell you what’s going on – feedback from the call centre and sales leads, demographic analysis of sales projections and conversion rates, basic management information.  Trawling this is time-consuming and often involves a struggle with the IT department or Finance to get the relevant information.  But it is worthwhile.

The second source is data mining.  Not just univariate or even multivariate analysis, but hard-core analytical techniques – segmentation, propensity modelling, pipeline modelling, channel performance evaluation.  Without fail I have found that using these techniques in larger organisations gives better insight and a clearer picture than market research on its own.  By understanding what works, you can also understand what doesn’t work, and more effectively target your research.

The sad fact is that very few marketers are sufficiently data literate to engage fully in insight. It’s often seen as a geeky adjunct to marketing, an engine room to give answers to the marketing team – ususally the ones that they’ve predefined.  Where insight has been used to drive strategy, however, in organisations such as Vodafone or Tesco or Amazon, the effects can be huge. 

So how is outsighting different?

What makes insight at large companies so successful is the scale that they can bring to bear, and the sheer volume of customers.  I’ve worked on datasets of 14 million customers, and not even given it a thought.  For a smaller company, particularly in the smaller markets of Australia and NZ, this is problematic.  So what’s the answer?  Where outsighting is different to insighting is that you give everything away.  A single agency, with the benefit of experience across multiple sectors and companies, and specialist knowledge of how things connect, has access to the end to end process, linking things together that would not be considered by the company themselves, for management information reporting, to business analysis, to market scoping, to data mining and modelling, to market research.  That’s the first layer of benefit.

But what about the next layer?  What about sharing data, research and modelling outcomes between power and telecommunications companies, online forums and supermarkets, sports venues and universities?  I’m not talking about sharing customer information, but using the insights gained from each piece of work to add to the next.

Maybe that’s a pluralist view.  Maybe it’s just moonshine.  But wouldn’t it be nice if when you asked a question, you got a real answer, not a best guess?  Outsighting’s probably a pipe dream until companies start to pool their resources.  In the meantime maybe I can work to make it happen – at least on a small scale.

CRM: win big, lose big

CRM, CRM, CRM.  I first started working on CRM… although I didn’t call it that… back in 2000.  I was working in a UK publisher, pulling together management information systems and other useful tools and making people’s lives easier.  That was, in its own small way, a CRM process – automating business processes, putting the customer first, providing feedback channels… of course there wasn’t a contact management system, but still, I was adding to the estate of knowledge and delivering varying levels of service to different clients.  We called it customer service, or more explicitly, keeping the important people happy.

I’ve since worked for global companies, establishing CRM strategies and reviewing RFP processes.  I’ve implemented several layers of tactical and strategic automated processes and delivered CRM thinking into telecommunications, education and business information.  And yet, even now, there still seems to be no agreement on what CRM is. 

I was reading an article only yesterday that claimed that a CRM system and marketing automation were two different things.  Que????????

Sales force automation and marketing automation?  Yes.  Contact management and marketing automation?  Yes.  CRM and marketing automation?  Well to me the second is part of the first.  In fact they are all elements of a CRM system.

But in the right environment, good CRM can be implemented without a CRM system.  One of my recent clients had a department where the entire focus was around the customer.  The culture was customer centric, the structure was designed to interpret a large and complex organisation for the customer, the team actively encouraged customer loyalty.  And they ran this out of an Excel spreadsheet.  I was impressed, and that takes a lot!

It’s a lesson that many others could learn.  I am still amazed, after all these years of failed CRM implementations, that companies still don’t take on board that CRM starts with culture, is delivered through process and delivered at scale through technology.  It’s not about the difference between MAS and SFA, or giving someone a tool to make their life easier.  It’s about a culture of customer before job, service before everything, ensuring that the customer is so delighted with the service that they keep coming back for more… and more.  It’s about creating a scenario where the company and the customer both win.

CRM systems just allow you to do this BIG. 

On the other hand, if your business practice is to create brand terrorists rather than brand advocates then you’re in trouble.  If the focus is ‘sales at all costs’, if the system is abused to spam customers to death, if the process is used to make mass promises that can’t possibly be kept, if the processes haven’t been put in place to ensure follow through and follow up, then a CRM can destroy your business faster than you can think… and it will have happened in the time it takes you to ‘sort the system out’.  In the days of fast-pace roll out through SaaS, this can happen even more quickly than that.

I’ve seen this happen more than once, but that’s a matter for another post.

So what are the lessons for those implementing CRM? I can think of at least three off the top of my head.

• Don’t decide on your CRM technology until you know what you are going to achieve by implementing it
• Don’t get hooked on the sales pitch if you don’t know – inside out – your organisation’s processes
• Don’t go into a CRM implementation until you undertsand the changes that need to be made to culture and process – and implement these along side your technical implementation

Failing this, if you are having problems with your implementation, throw as much resource as you possibly can at ensuring the customer experience is as smooth as possible.  If it’s a choice between short-term loss and long-term bankruptcy, there’s no choice.

And make sure the person that made the decision to implement without evaluating culture and process sorts it out before they leave.