In this episode of the CX Leaders Podcast, Sami Nuwar gives some best practice advice on Actionable Insights initiatives. Sami is a senior principal experience consultant in Medallia, supporting customers by providing strategic guidance and sharing best practices for creating evolving experience management programs in large and complex organizations.
Sami started off his presentation by mentioning some of the most common problems that he has faced as first a practitioner and now a consultant. The problem he says, is one about influence thus one gets to interrogate themselves on the following questions: What is their product? What is the thing that they offer? What is the value they offer to the business? He then gets to answer these questions by mentioning that he offers information, and the information he offers is an insight into what the customers are thinking, saying, and feeling to as well as what his employees are thinking, saying, and feeling. He further says that if one can collect that information and make it understandable and easy to digest, then they surely can use that information to influence others which is ultimately what everyone is trying to do, thus to influence their peers and their partners inside the business to take certain actions that they believe are necessary based on the data that they are seeing.
All of the above-mentioned eventually influences actionable insights thus influence people to act. For people to act, Sami says they should be a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data gives one a sense of the magnitude and the severity of the feedback. Whereas the qualitative data helps provide some detail, color, and context. One cannot do one or the other, it has to be both.
Sami goes on to mention that he truly believes that people's behaviors and actions are driven by self-interest in something that they know affects them so therefore they act or behave in a certain way. He (Sami) has always found it interesting that, there's this connection between the metrics that are used to judge performance in a business or in an organization and the behavior that the metric drives.
Furthermore, in his presentation, Sami mentions that the path to sustainable profitability has to be paved. This is to be done through the employees in the organization, as they're the people that make that experience happen. So what is left for leaders in the organization to do, is to make sure that the process and the technology and all the tools are made available for employees to use, so as to make their lives as effective and productive as possible while at work. This makes for a productive and healthy working environment for the employee that in turn will help the employee work harder for the organization and be better-experienced agents for customers.
In conclusion, Sami shined more light on how Organizations can use actionable insights to grow their businesses, Sami gave an eye-opening example using the manufacturing industry. He says in this type of business environment, there's always a problem with warranty and repair claims when manufacturing a product and in delivering the product to the customer. One is dealing with a physical product that has to be, logistically shipped and handled and through multiple touchpoints and ultimately, it has to be delivered to somebody or someplace in working condition.
He says that a manufacturing company had a problem where they just seeing massive warranty claims across all their regions of operation and as a result, they had a very costly operation of dispatching service to the actual site. In bringing a solution to this problem, they collected the data to figure out how often it was happening and which regions it was happening more than others. They used an application called Tether which works more like Skype. This application allowed for the manufacturing company representative to view and diagnose the problem, all from a remote location as if they were there in real-time thus growing the business through actionable insights.