Should You Democratize Your Data?
There’s a great urban myth about a toothpaste factory and a problem on its production line.
Some empty cartons were making it into the boxes for shipping. To figure out why, the business followed the normal corporate process: budget and project sponsors allocated, RFP issued and vendors selected. Six months and $8 million later, it had a fantastic solution. The problem was solved using scales that would sound a bell whenever a toothpaste box appeared on the line weighing less than it should. The line would pause while a worker found the defective box, and then start it again.
After three weeks, the CEO received a report saying the number of defects picked up by the scales was zero. It should’ve been picking up at least 20 a day, so the CEO went down to the factory floor and walked up to the part of the line where the scales were installed. A few feet before the scales a $50 desk fan was blowing the empty boxes off of the belt and into a bin. Astonished, the CEO asked one of the workers where it came from.
“Oh, that,” he says. “One of the guys put it there because he was sick of walking over every time the bell rang.”
Getting the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time is a universal factor to business success. If the CEO had known a $50 desk fan would solve an $8 million problem, he might have made his bonus.
In his best-selling book The Economics of Attention, Professor Richard Lanham observes, “Information is not in short supply in the information age. We’re drowning in it. What we lack is the human attention needed to make sense of it all.”
Lanham published his book in 2006, when Twitter had only a thousand users and Facebook just more than 12 million. The explosion in social media platforms, mobile devices and wearable tech are making it possible to collect more data about how customers are buying, using and feeling about products and services than ever before. Unsurprisingly, the incredible growth in the amount of data and information we collect is intensifying.
International Data Corporation forecasts that by 2025 the the sum of all data created, captured and replicated globally will grow to 163 zettabytes (that is a trillion gigabytes). That’s 10 times the 16.1 zettabytes of data generated in 2016.
As market researchers, how does this incredible saturation of information affect us? How do we analyze the right information and know who to give it to and when?
One company doing some interesting work in this area is Ask Nicely, a real-time customer survey software product based in Auckland, New Zealand, whose growth is primarily driven out of the U.S. CEO Aaron Ward believes that well-analyzed information translates into actionable insights.
“A great example of a service that everyone likes to complain about is airline travel,” Ward says. “One bad flight for one passenger can land [an airline] on the front page of the paper. But in today’s business environment, it’s critical you’re delivering for every customer on every experience.” Ward says one of his airline clients deploys an e-mail to every passenger as soon as they get off the plane, allowing them to rate their flight from zero to 10 and leave a comment.
The immediacy of the survey ensures the experience is still fresh in the mind of the customer. In the staff room at the airport, the flight crew can read the responses in real time from a 55-foot plasma screen that has a streaming message board of the comments people are making and a leader board comparing them to other flight crews at other airports. The crew can make adjustments based on the feedback and improve the next flight accordingly.
The really powerful thing about insights like these are the clarity, immediacy and opportunity for action they provide. Having access to information in your business that allows you to accurately understand what your customers are thinking can be a game changer.
Ward says another reason for getting the right information to the right people is about positive feedback. “If you can give positive feedback to people on a daily basis, they will feel good. Because the leaderboard gives the business transparency, it makes them look good. Your staff is motivated to deliver better service for the next customer. … It becomes self-perpetuating. You’re creating a more customer-focused culture where people feel appreciated in their roles.”
Technology is opening incredible opportunities for businesses to gather, understand and act on data and information in ways that were never possible before. The potential of actionable insight to drive everything from sales and profit to the strength of internal culture is profound.
Businesses that understand and embrace these new technologies and approaches to market research analysis and customer insight are going to succeed. They might even find out that a simple device, like a fan, could save them millions.
About the Author | Horst Feldhaeuser
German by birth and Kiwi by choice, Horst Feldhaeuser is group client director at Infotools and leads the global Coca-Cola account. He is passionate about market research and contributes to industry-leading conversations by speaking at global events, writing articles, and participating in industry associations. He is a fellow at the Research Association of New Zealand (RANZ) and is a Qualified Practicing Market Researcher (QPMR).
