The volume of customer data that is available to organisations continues to grow. Executives need to think beyond the issue of how to handle the volume of data and address the critical question of how to turn it into insight and use it to drive value. We know from the assessment of customer management capabilities in hundreds of organisations that few have optimised the value they can create from the customer data they already have, let alone the enterprise-wide or big data.
The first step many organisations still need to take is to recognise that data is used to create insight and that insight adds value by improving commercial activities, to win more and better customers, keep the profitable ones longer, develop and manage their value and manage the costs of sale, service and failure. Nick Broomfield also wrote recently about how brands need to consider the ‘DIKW’ model and focus on turning raw data and information into knowledge, wisdom and actionable insights.
However, to optimise value, some high performing organisations use the Insight Team to facilitate learning on how best to leverage insight effectively within the organisation. This means addressing all aspects of the insight value cycle.
Insight is not simply about what the analysts do, but how they do it. Delivering insights to the business and helping colleagues across the organisation understand and use the insight requires more than technical developments. The development of commercial and communication skills within the insight team, the re-engineering of business processes across the organisation to use the increased intelligence and the development of insight driven decision-making are all critical – as described in this model for an effective insight team.
Successful insight teams blend statisticians and strategists to create leaders in the development of customer management throughout the organisation.
However, most external support for insight teams focus on helping address data and technical problems rather than on the development of the organisational ability to realise the benefits from the data they are gathering. We believe leaders should apportion investment in insight capability more effectively by overseeing a balanced plan which impacts on policy, data, technology, people and process, creating a prioritised roadmap to ensure the ability to create and deploy insight.
