August 4, 2014

Poll: Interim results

By Paul Laughlin

SouthwarkFirstly, the normal health warning on these being only interim results. There are not yet sufficient votes with which to draw robust conclusions (hence the metaphor of a deserted Southwark station).

That said, with just over 80 votes now in, the initial results of our “What do you see?” survey of customer insight leaders is showing some interesting results.

With regard to the scope of the term “customer insight” almost all voters view this as covering research, analysis, modelling, segmentation and marketing effectiveness measurement, together with a consultancy service. Only slightly less popular is measurement of a primary customer metric (NPS, Satisfaction or Effort).  The surprise to me is that only just over half would include data management or database marketing. I am writing for the next quarterly publication of DataIQ magazine on the importance to CI leaders of data teams, so it will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Meanwhile, with regard to current organisational design, or which elements of the above currently report into the CI leader, it’s a different story. Less of you voted, so less robust conclusions. But for now, the theme seems to be more CI leaders have responsibility for research, NPS and marketing effectiveness measurement. Far fewer appear to have responsibility for behavioural analysis and customer data management. So, perhaps not as many companies as I hoped have yet seen the benefits of bringing research and analysis together in one function.

It’s encouraging for my new business to see overwhelming interest in external support for CI leaders, with the most popular service being training for their customer insight team. So, time for me to get ready that training material.

Thanks again to those who participated. If you haven’t voted yet, please do and I’ll share final results once votes are high enough to feel more representative of this community.

Finally, do let me know if you’ve a question that you would like ask other customer insight leaders.