Dear John, buried treasure and hidden breaches

Whilst busy training customer insight teams, I’ve noticed some interesting Customer Insight content being published by others this week. At the risk of sounding like Gogglebox’s oft repeated “this week we had a lot of great telly“…

Here are some of this week’s great Customer Insight articles:

The first is one that is an overdue warning as to the excessive reliance on PowerPoint for research debriefs. Amusingly set out as a “Dear John” letter to PowerPoint, it makes points many of us will relate to in terms of how we feel the need to move on to a more creative media. It then balances the letter with a challenge to think how you use the tool not blame the tool. Well worth a read.

If you’ve enjoyed the analogy that data mining is like digging for gold in your ocean of data, then you should like this documentary. A 20 minute video tells the fascinating story of how some self proclaimed “data nerds” found a 131 year old sunken treasure ship and its missing gold (once you get past the adverts). This was the largest lost treasure in US history and Bayes theory is how they did it.

Finally, turning from research & analysis to data concerns, a worrying story was shared by DataIQ this week. It shares how little regard most Retail front-line colleagues have for their data protection responsibilities. Research from Daisy Group & OnePoll found that 22% of staff didn’t know if data security was an important issue. More worryingly two thirds of workers said they would not report a DPA breach is they thought it would get a colleague into trouble.

Hopefully they were entertaining, interesting & important issues to raise. Do you still use PowerPoint for all presentations? Have you investigated applications for Bayesian Logic? Are your customer facing colleagues failing to report DPA breaches? Plenty to think about & please do share your thoughts & questions.