Jane Peacock

In my experience, I have found that coaching and training is a fundamental part of the market research and data journey of a marketing function. So I am speaking from experience when building these skills internally. Ensure that these capabilities have been prioritised as a business. This will help remove silos and ensure collaboration and transparency. Set up a working group accross the organisation that ensures insights regularly flow back through to the team that is going to action the outcomes of the research. This creates a space for feedback and focuses the research on action and impact.

One thing I have found helpful is to ensure the research project has full buy in from the board and executive team. To ensure they are part of the process by co designing the goals and what success will look like. It helps to ensure insights are actioned and given full support in terms of resources and capabilities.

Exceptional customer experience can't happen without collaboration. Build a map of who touches the customer experience and likely that will include marketing, sales, customer service and operational teams. Map the existing customer experience and then work with them to create the vision of what the customer experience could be. Engage the team in that vision and then as a team determine 2-3 experiments that could be run to make improvements and share the data with the team to ensure everyone gains the learning that comes from those experiments. We recommend clients bring their working group together on a regular basis during a transformation and include shared learning in those workshops.

Delivering value at each steps requires two things; understand your unique value and then understand the customers perspective of what value means to them. Use empathy mapping tools to understand and then audit your customer experience to find 2 to 3 steps in that experience where you can run experiments and see how those experiments added or eroded the experience form the customers perspective. Data exists at each step in the customer experience so you can see how those experiences helped move the customer forward or stopped them in their tracks.

The overlooked gem of data science: Start with curiosity, not intimidation from the term 'data science.' Audit all customer data sources - social media, web analytics, ERP. Understand your buying customers deeply. Begin with a hypothesis, work with marketing to uncover what resonates, and refine your segmentation weekly. Your business will thrive. What content are they engaging with? What stories motivate them? What do they care about?

Sharing success is quite easy but to share the failures requires a collaborative, caring and open team culture. Build that from the beginning otherwise 'failure' can be kept hidden. Great tech partners will be transparent but also need to be supported when they are transparent with the failures.