Find the Value in the Data | Team Member and Customer Experience Value

Zeuss Karravala, a principal analyst at ZK Research, shared results from a recent study his company conducted which showed “two-thirds of millennials admitted to changing loyalties to a brand because of a single bad experience.” Zeuss also noted the importance of data analytics and swift action involved in delivering customer experience value in a post-pandemic world. Zeuss stated:

“There’s an axiom in data sciences that states, ‘good data leads to good insights.’ A corollary to this is also that partial data leads to fragmented insights and that’s what most companies are dealing with today. Businesses generated more data than ever before but most of it exists in silos. This can cause companies to have blind spots in their analysis and make business decisions that aren’t based on the complete picture…When it comes to digital transformation, there’s no such thing as moving slow. The fact is that slow decision-making equates to a broken business and will cause a company to fail faster than you can say, ‘What happened to Toys R Us?’ Also, the difference between being a market leader and a laggard is minuscule today.”

This is the sixth and final post in a series titled “Team Member and Customer Experience Value.”

In my recently released book Stronger Through Adversity, Natasha Hritzuk the Vice President and Head of Consumer Insights at WarnerMedia Entertainment shared the challenges leaders can face when mining consumer insights to understand value drivers – especially in the context of a pandemic. According to Natasha, “In the first two months of our journey with COVID-19, we were concerned about a consumer survey being unwelcomed and receiving a low response rate. So, we initially engaged people in ways that were a bit unusual for us—through online focus groups and ethnography [descriptive or immersive studies using tools like customer journals]—before we returned to a survey approach.”

Natasha and her team had some additional concerns about the quality of the input they would receive from surveys collected during a pandemic. However, she noted, “We didn’t see a decline in quality. Instead, we saw significant changes from week to week, and that variability made it hard to provide meaningful insights for the business units. When we were two months into weekly surveys, we backed off on our survey frequency so consumer reactivity could settle out. Over time consumer feedback showed less volatility, and we could get a better gauge on how they were doing, thinking, and processing.” Natasha summarized considerations for conducting surveys by noting, “My career and the success of our brand hinges on gaining customer insights at scale through formal listening. The key is to understand that trends can be hard to identify when stakeholders are extremely unsettled.”

Inspired by Zeuss and Natasha, here are this week’s challenge questions:

• Are you mining good data to get the needed insights required to produce customer experience value?
• What actions are you taking to leverage customer information to ensure you create the minuscule difference that separates market leaders from market laggards?
• How would you rate your ability to drive customer success by using customer analytics at scale through formal listening?

For more about the role of value creation in the future of customer experience success, please pick up or gift a copy of my book Stronger Through Adversity or you can download one of my many complimentary eBooks including one I just wrote about Stronger Through Adversity.