"That Was Really Interesting": 5 Reasons Why Insight Leads to Inaction

Once you've been there, you can never forget. The door opens, and you are invited in. You inspect the withdrawn faces around the table, grey, confused. Some, not all, attempt forced smiles or muster a greeting. The smell in the air is of desperation and fatigue lingers like that cheesy smell on your twenty year old Reebok's.

The lights go dim and the screen flashes blue before revealing the words...

'Monthly Business Review: Insight Pack'.

The monthly reporting of business metrics and performance has become of staple of an insight analysts calendar. However, rather than it being an opportunity to showcase the best of their profession its often a growing source of frustration. Be it failure to cut through on messaging or gain traction on initiatives, the Monthly Insight Pack has become emblematic of the spirit crushing inertia experience by big companies. Below are some tips to zush up your (monthly) date with destiny.

1. Simon Says 'Get The F*** Up'

Every idiot knows body language is 90% of communication but you've got to put it into action. Pharoahe Monch on his seminal 1999 hit 'Simon Says' said 'Get The F*** Up' and I've taken that to heart (whilst ignoring most of the other parts of the song obviously). In most situations, your audience will have sat through hours of presentations before your turn, scintillating oratory exhibitions such as 'Dan from Accounts Profit and Loss Report' and 'Sandra from Scheduling and Real Time' with her 1 hour assessment of why rampant dysentery meant 50% abandonment rates. No matter how highly functioning your leaders are, they do not have the powers of concentration of a chess grand master and many look upon monthly reviews as Diet-Guantanamo's, all the taste of torture-based incarceration but none of the calories.

To combat this, inject some energy into the room with the simple trick of standing up to the side of the screen and pointing to your work. "Yes" you are going to feel exposed at first and "yes" you are going to have to ask Barry from Risk and Compliance to move your slides on but good news... You're a grown up so you can deal with it and you'll instantly feel the energy.

2. Key Performance Ignoramus

Now you are stood up, you've got a massive problem. The presentation you've created has one hundred and fifty THOUSAND metrics over 27 slides ranging from the '% of people that complained about jam-less donuts', to 'the number of days lost in sickness because of dysen...' Ah thanks a f**king bunch, Sandra!

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. KEY Performance Indicator. KEY. You CANNOT have a hundred KPI's otherwise none of them are KEY are they? In many ways, your audience is equally culpable here, executives and management having come to expect data sliced into ever increasing pieces creating a veritable smorgasbord of indigestible bullshit.

However, as an analyst or Insight professional, it is your job to wean people off all of this data. As a start, think of information as a pyramid with the most important indicators (your KPI) on top but with information feeding up to the top of the tree. This is an elegant Segway into my next point...

3. No One Really Gives A Shit About NPS

I'm well aware this is going to be controversial. However, before you get annoyed I want you to consider two things. I'm correct and I don't care what you think.

NPS has become the embodiment of what I dislike about performance tracking. Its utility in today's age must be questioned. What your audience really care about, deep down is Money that's come in, Money that's gone out, Have we risked our reputation. NPS is used as a proxy for sales and was a historic attempt to tie operational performance to a customers lifetime value.

However, YOU don't need a proxy anymore! In many cases, contacts CAN be tied to customers and these results are FAR more accurate and compelling than the 10% (if you are lucky) of feedback survey's you receive from your active customer base. The persistency of NPS and other metrics shows a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to get to the heart of the challenges. Decision makers need metrics on which they can make a decision, not esoteric data they cannot triangulate.

To wrap up this point, where possible make your KPI’s tangible. For example, replace a metric like ‘NPS’ from the top of your KPI tree to something like ‘Rolling 3 month Sales per Contact’. This will enable greater discussion and highlight areas that can be improved upon.

4. Tell them. Then Tell them. Then Tell them

Now you have fewer better metrics, you need to arrange them in a manner that gains maximum impact. There's a huge temptation within PowerPoint to over indulge too much commentary and over facing visuals. Much of this has been propagated by a spate of article and lectures focused on 'telling stories with data'.

Personally, if I wanted a story I'd listed to my Ruth Rendell audio-book or my son's staccato re-imagining of 'The Dinosaur That Pooped A Planet'. Lets be clear... No one in the monthly business review wants a story. Most of them are struggling to even stay awake. What these poor people want is clear, direct messaging using a well practised approach such as:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them...
2. Tell them...
3. Tell them what you told them...

The video below shows walk through on how to get your messaging across using the simple device of Aristotle's Triptych:

Regarding visuals, keep them simple. I use the following:

Line Graphs: Shows them things getting better or worse

Histogram or Bars: Shows range of performance and where opportunities lie

Scatter graph: Especially using a Boston Matrix (Value X Effort)

Finally, for the love of god do your homework. Prior to the meeting, identify which contact types, agent groups or processes are most painful and conduct some call listening or (if you are lucky) speech analytics to provide a qualitative wrapper that can get you to a position where action can take place. 

5. Accountability

You've stood up, you've looked them in the whites of their eyes, you've smashed the messaging, you've nailed the analysis. And then someone mutters this:

"Thanks Jimmy. That was really interesting..."

As I wrote that quote, I developed a twitch in my eye that won't go away. For too long, people have seen data, analytics and insight as "interesting" but don't know how to mobilise on the findings. Either that, or they don't want to be accountable for the findings or the remedy. The tonic for this inertia is quite simple though.

At the end of the meeting, ask for support in diving deeper into 2-3 of your most important findings or testing some new methodologies to fix the problems. As an analyst, you cannot expect to drive all the changes yourself and you now have a captive audience. This is the best time to ask for a business owner to be accountable for each action and for a working group spanning Ops, Transformation/Change, Training & Development etc to make the changes necessary to turn your insight to real change. Once this team is in a groove, and once leaders are on the hook for deliverable's, you'll be surprised how quickly change occurs

This is my 5 steps to gaining action through insight. If you disagree or think I've missed something please leave a comment below...