By Kirsten Robinson

Customer-focused companies significantly out-perform others—and Research should play a big role in focusing the company on the customer. After all, nobody knows more about consumers than the Research department.

But, with limited resources, it’s difficult for Research to get the rest of the organization on the same page. The team must find a way to share their knowledge and get others actively involved in understanding customer insights.

We recently spoke with Paul Eaves, Head of Insight at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and Gina Banns of Oxford Strategic Marketing Group about how HMRC created a strategy to help Research teach line partners how to self-serve to ensure they use deep customer understanding to make their decisions.

Their framework to embed customer understanding has three parts:

1. Laying out the process with a project planning framework
2. Guiding internal partners on execution
3. Using guardrails to ensure customer focus at each stage

MREB members, learn more about HMRC’s line-focused research and hear excerpts from our conversation with Paul and Gina here.

Related resources:

• Case Study: HMRC’s Line-Focused Research Framework
• Event Replay: Line-Focused Research Framework
• Additional Research: Putting Customer Insight at the Heart of the Business

By Anthony Bell

According to an article from acountingweb.com, Just one-third of employees in North America feel engaged in their jobs. Research shows that firms with high employee engagement have 19% higher operating income than their peers. Companies are increasingly elevating staff engagement and retention as key priorities for their recovery plans. The Board’s research shows that almost half of all global finance employees were not committed to their current jobs, and one-third of them were planning to leaving within a year. As liquidity returns to labor markets, CMOs and other C-suite executives are keen to (cost-effectively) mitigate attrition risks and boost engagement levels among high-performing staff.

So How Do the Best Market Research Functions keep team members engaged? Traditional career opportunities fail to accommodate new research roles and profiles. The key to managing performance is to develop role-specific metrics and career opportunities to link incentives to the function’s overall goal of business impact. The approach to performance measurement and career planning is too narrow to accommodate the new researcher. Top companies align performance with business partners’ objectives and develop metrics that link roles to overall function goals. Teams with high-potential researchers who seek faster and higher progression struggle to motivate and retain these valuable employees. Encourage rotation outside of research to lower attrition raters or expand career opportunities to motivate employees and create specialty career tracks for technical versus strategic researchers.

MREB Members, for a deeper look, check out our Staff Management Topic Center.
 

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, recently blogged about why some of the most popular technologies are those that purposely limit individual choice or autonomy.  We all know that consumer will tend to always say that they want more: more bells, more whistles, more independence.  But McAfee points out that too much freedom and choice can be paralyzing, and whether in consumer or business applications, sometimes the best technologies are those that help users find a slot in pre-defined roles.

MREB view: Forced choice models are a staple of consumer research. However research departments spend far less time thinking about choice when it comes to consuming the results of research. Too much choice – the proverbial data dump – actually stops our business partners from seeing the big picture (or even trying to read the volumes of information.) Essentially our business partners are information consumers with the same need for focus as any consumer. Research departments have seen a lot of return on their investments in “guard railed” technology.  Whether dealing with complicated data sets or robust information canons, your entire organization benefits from controlled access: balancing information availability with guidelines and limitations so that information isn’t overwhelming, unusable, or (perhaps worst of all) misused.  Read More »