Every cloud has a silver lining, and the recent events at United Airlines might just have a big one for the Insights sector. A story on the BBC over weekend led with the headline that “United Airlines to tie executive pay to customer satisfaction” and the article went on to quote a filing United Airlines have made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission financial watchdog. “United’s management and the Board take recent events extremely seriously, and are in the process of developing targeted compensation program design adjustments to ensure that employees’ incentive opportunities for 2017 are directly and meaningfully tied to progress in improving the customer experience.” What a fantastic opportunity for Insights to show not only its value to the business, but also to shareholder value.
Strong ROI from VOC Insights
As part of our on-going ROI from Insights initiative, which we are conducting in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, we are currently conducting a series of qualitative interviews with client-side Insights leaders. One of the key objectives of these in-depth interviews is to examine where ROI is currently being measured, and voice of customer / customer satisfaction / customer experience are indeed areas where some of the companies we have spoken have been able to get a robust measurement on the ROI from Insights. In certain cases, this ROI is in the form of clearly measurable cost savings or revenue growth amongst specific customer segments. In others, the impact is being measured using surrogate measures, rather than direct financial ones, which are then modeled into revenue retention and growth numbers.
Strong ROI from Marcoms Insights
Marcoms is another area where some of the Insights leaders we have spoken to are doing a good job at measuring their ROI and demonstrating their business value. An example of this is the systematic pre-testing of communications leading to measurable savings in both production costs and media spend. Others are using media mix modelling in order to obtaub measurable efficiencies in media spend and increased sales.
Commercial Analytics Integration delivers strong ROI
In many of the companies we have spoken to, Analytics and traditional MR are not integrated into the same team, but whilst this in itself does not stop them from working together to create additional business value, it can make it more difficult and can bring politics into play. What is certain, however, is that value can be added be integrating commercial analytics with traditional market research. The availability and use of this commercial analytics data not only delivers a strong ROI, but makes the measurement of that ROI easier. Other companies we have spoken to are doing a good job at measuring ROI in other processes, such as pricing & promotions, innovation & new product development to name but a couple of them. It is really exciting to be having these discussions and discovering the great work being done by client-side Insights leaders in this area. We will continue with the interviews over the coming weeks and then pull everything together into a report on the key findings, which we intend to issue in June. We are also currently working with BCG on the finalization the questionnaire for the accompanying quantitative research, which will go into field shortly. Watch this space for further news on this initiative. You can make sure you don’t miss out on any insights on the ROI from Insights initiative by subscribing to GRBN News here. If you would like to learn more even more about the initiative or perhaps get involved, please reach out to us.

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