We know that customer insight is not just good for the company, it is essential for long-term survival. Indeed, 70% of severe business failures result from inadequate customer understanding. And yet, according to our own study of business partners, most Research departments have yet to fulfill the strategic role desired by researchers and business partners.

Foundational research competencies like research skills and project execution are not enough to drive business impact.  We’ve found that the biggest opportunity to advance Research’s impact lies in five consultative skills:

1. Insight
2. Business Problem Solving
3. Influence
4. Communication
5. Synthesis

Over the next few weeks I’ll write about each of these skills, starting today with insight.  And to make sure that we’re all on the same page, we define insight as the identification of some relationship or meaning within diverse sets of data that promises significant business impact.

To make sure you are hitting the right insight bar, the theory of insight is not enough.  For example, by providing a simple framework for insight development grounded in customer behavior, Vodafone makes sure researchers know what a great insight looks like and how to go about developing them independently.  MREB members, access the full overview for developing insight skills here.  And stay tuned next week for more on Skills for the Next Generation of Market Researchers.

In a recent HBR post environmental psychologist Sally Augustin outlines ways to make your workspace a place where you can accomplish your best work.  And her recommendations have me thinking I need to make some changes in here:

• Protect your back-you will feel more comfortable if you find a way to sit so that your side rather than your back faces your workspace entry point.
• Remove the red-thanks to teachers using red to grade our childhood papers, the color now inhibits cognitive tasks.
• Seek rounded leaves-people pay attention better when there are leafy plants around.
• Personalize-folks with a workspace that tells a story about who they are find more satisfaction with their jobs.
• Organize and declutter-I would write more here, but I’ve temporarily lost track of my keyboa…

Alright…after a trip to the dumpster and the garden center I’m ready to continue.  The environment that you work in matters, and not just in a physical sense like Sally wrote about above.  When we analyzed what made successful teams more insightful, we found that it’s all about the environment. 

Research can create an environment conducive to insight generation by fostering an open, creative culture.  To boost insight from your team you need to:

• Clarify the Insight Mandate-featuring insight in the mandate of the function is important but not enough—mangers must help researchers internalize commitment to insight and raise the bar of business impact through experiential training.
• Create Team Support for Risk Taking and Creativity-creating an environment where researchers take risks, push for creativity, and encouraging peers to do the same is not as easy as simply encouraging researchers to express creativity and take unlimited risks—there need to be guardrails to prevent time-wasting and inappropriate risk–taking.
• Coach Insight Generation-Using standard manager techniques that help teach process management or presentation skills can shut down creativity and aren’t appropriate for unstructured activities like insight generation.

What do you do to make yourself the best work environment?  Share your tips of the trade in the comments section below.

This blog was written by Lara Ponomareff of the Customer Contact Council, a sister program of the Board serving customer contact professionals.  Some of links below will only be accessible to those at companies that maintain membership with the Council.

Customer voice (VOC) is an extremely powerful tool.  It’s not just the raw customer voice, but the trends and data it can contain.  Anything from a break in a process flow to an emerging customer need for a new product could be just at your fingertips.

And, as customer service moves away from purely an order-taking, transaction-completing, productivity-based role and grows into a function that adds value to customer experiences, the potential of VOC has only grown.  Because, what better way to add value than to supplement market research or R&D and bring customers the next, big thing?

But in reality, all of this can/could/potential business is just that – sure it could happen, but it rarely does.

In fact, while over 96% of customer service’s internal partners say that customer service VOC is important, over 76% of them are not satisfied with the current quality of that VOC.  In fact, one of our members likened his efforts to ‘throwing our VOC into a big black hole – no one is listening to us.’

Service organizations that are successful in their VOC efforts – whose internal partners are not only satisfied with the VOC provided but use it when making business decisions, do two things (and don’t do one thing):

• They do point to the root causes of a problem, not merely the symptoms: Internal partners don’t pay attention to VOC analysis when it lists a bunch of customer complaints or issues, but not the reason behind those issues.  That customers are calling to cancel their warranty on a product is not helpful – but find out why they are cancelling and you’ll have data that your business partners would probably pay you to have.
• They do focus on problems that are important to their internal business partners: Spending your time and resources convincing your business partners that something is a problem is an uphill battle.  Focus on what is within your control and the areas your internal partners care about the most first to get some momentum going. (MREB members, our work on identifying business drivers will help you focus on what’s most important.)
• They don’t allow their VOC scope to creep outside their ‘sweet spot’: In order to have the time to dig into root causes, leading service organizations deliberately narrow the focus of their VOC efforts.  They use VOC for what it is best positioned for – fixing customer-stated problems (since customers are calling to talk about their problems on a daily basis), rather than chasing new product development. (MREB members, this same issue creeps into Research’s use of social media.  Check out our new whitepaper, Unlocking Insight from Social Media, to see the importance of a focused hypothesis)

On that last point – seems to me like we may be seeing a bit of scope creep as customer service’s role has inevitably changed (and grown) over the years.  We were asked to do more, so we did.  But, what actually should customer service to be responsible for – and what should be out of scope?  VOC is one potential example – and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

But, I’m wondering – do you think the roles and responsibilities of the service organization have changed?  And are these new responsibilities reasonable or not?  Do we need to re-define the scope of what service can/cannot do?

Recently, we had a chance to talk to Ian Lewis about the findings from The 2011 Cambiar Future of Research Study. Ian pointed out that by 2020, three in four researchers expects that marketing issues will be addressed by mining existing knowledge rather than initiating a project. We did a quick scan of what could be the possible sources of existing consumer knowledge? No surprise there – social media was an easy candidate. So what’s keeping researchers from drawing insights from social media?

While marketing has moved to more innovative uses of social media, research seems to have lagged behind the curve. Researchers have traditionally found fewer valuable insights from social media data, and to their credit, some technical aspects of social media can be rather confusing for researchers. However, researchers should not give up on social media just yet.

Over the past few months, the Market Research Executive Board interacted extensively with social media experts, and found that research on social media had the potential to supplement and partner with traditional research. Presented below is the key guidance on unlocking insights from social media:

1. Avoid Broad Monitoring: Researchers may think “more is better” and conduct broad-based listening on social media. This is a futile approach, as collecting vast amounts of information will only generate vague “boil the ocean” results.
2. Start with a Focused Hypothesis: Successful analysis relies on narrowing the broad data into relevant information by focusing on the search process. The most important focusing tool is not a piece of software but, as with all research, a strong hypothesis.
3. Partner with Social Media Vendors, Not Their Technology: Social media vendors use similar technology for analyses, but vendors who better understand their clients’ business problems are more likely to deliver relevant research results.

MREB members can now access our whitepaper titled Unlocking Insights from Social Media , which includes learnings from companies like Sony, HP, and Colgate Palmolive.

Andrew O’Connell at HBR recently pulled together a collection of 2011’s (sometimes disturbing) recommendations on how to get ahead in business, and his list proves the old “reality is stranger than fiction” adage.  But many of the studies that Andrew references (even some of those most seemingly from left-field) do correspond with more straightforward, doable action items that you can add to your list of New Year’s resolutions:

• To improve performance, get someone to wish you luck: a German experiment saw a marked improvement in performance time on a dexterity task when participants were wished luck.  We too have found that language and interaction can have a substantial impact on work performance.  For example, avoiding directive management by focusing on Socratic coaching techniques helped one FS company improve creativity on its research team.  And there was, of course, that list of phrases only bad managers say that we shared a few months ago.
• To generate ideas, run electric current through your brain: participants in a University of Sydney study were 3 times more likely to solve a difficult problem if they received electrical stimulation in the anterior temporal lobes.  This recommendation sounds a bit invasive to me…maybe we can start by addressing team environment issues that stifle creativity.  Encouraging calculated risk-taking and specialized roles will probably be more welcome than electro-shock therapy with your colleagues.
• “A-B-D” — always be disagreeable: professors at Cornell, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Western Ontario found that men who are less agreeable than average earn more than those who are more agreeable than average.  I’m not sure about the Research benefits of disagreeing, but we did find that being contrarian—telling them something they don’t know—is the best way to make a difference in a business decision. 
• To enhance your recall, try gazing at a dead cat: an experiment on language retention at Washington University found that those who saw a negative image (like that of a dead cat) were better able to remember a newly learned Swahili word than those who viewed a neutral image.  Our research this year confirms that pulling emotional levers is the best way to get folks to pay attention (just look at how well this bullet title worked).  But to avoid offending our friends at PETA, let’s leave the animal images out of it and focus on other methods to invoke surprise, doubt, wonder, or intrigue from your business partners.

Do you have a New Year’s resolution for moving your career forward?  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.