14.7.05
Consumer insight isn't knowledge management
The Hindu Business Line : Consumer insight isn't knowledge management
: "HOW to use data and market research to get closer to your customer? To answer this question, you may need to get closer to Consumer Insight by Merlin Stone, Alison Bond and Bryan Foss, from Kogan Page (www.vivagroupindia.com) .
First, some insight into insight: Insights are 'flashes of inspiration, or penetrating discoveries that can lead to specific opportunities,' and insight is 'the ability to perceive clearly or deeply.' Consumer insight or 'a deep, embedded knowledge about consumers and markets' to help structure thinking and decision-making, is what companies need today, explain the authors.
Perhaps you are already measuring customer satisfaction in some way, and even tailoring staff performance appraisal based on such measures. In which case, the book can shock you with a bombshell: '`If you can measure it, you can manage it' has spread like a cancer. This has led to large-scale customer satisfaction surveys, targets and league tables %u2014 and a fall in customer loyalty and overall satisfaction.'
The authors give the example of healthcare: 'A health service's reason for being is about helping new humans be born, keeping people as healthy as possible, and, where this fails, healing and sustaining them and, in the end, helping them die with dignity and minimum pain.' Disappointingly, measures for many health workers aren't related to these goals, point out the authors. 'Rather, measures are process and transaction-based, counting beds, people on trolleys, queue lengths, waiting times and costs to serve, all important in achieving efficiencies, but not delivering the service people need.' Healthy thought, that is.
Is consumer insight the same as knowledge management? No, it is just the opposite, explains the book. KM aims to make tacit knowledge explicit, 'helping organisations capture and secure as an asset knowledge in the heads of their people.' The emphasis in consumer insight is the other way round. 'Most information is explicit already %u2014 in the form of research reports, statistics, and presentations %u2014 and the issue is that of making it tacit. The goal is to communicate it widely and to get it into the heads of all those who should be using it.'
The book has an elaborate discussion of `database marketing' - defined as the planned implementation, recording, analysis and tracking of consumers' direct response behaviour over time to derive future marketing strategies, for developing long-term consumer loyalty and ensuring continued business growth. You'd also learn how database marketers use consumer insight, and the meaning of `customer care.'
If, as a customer, CRM has been a bugbear for you, the authors suggest how companies can describe CRM to consumers: 'CRM is how we find you, get to know you, keep in touch with you, try to ensure that you get what you want from us in every aspect of our dealings with you, and check that you are getting what we promised you.' But CRM can act as a mask for problems, caution the authors. 'Many businesses feel that as long as they retain enough customers, they must be doing something right. However, a retention statistic might conceal consumers who are gradually finding the company's proposition less appropriate, because it is moving away from their `halo'.'
View consumers as longer-term valuable assets, and not just as prospects for the next contact list from which to make the next sale, exhort the authors in a chapter titled `analysing computer data to get insight.' This, I'd suggest you to read jointly with your systems chap, because of the emphasis on data mining. Another such chapter is `consumer insight systems' where the authors state that warehousing (coupled with mining of consumer data) is most effective 'when it is enterprise-wide, along the company to gain a single view of the consumer and business profitability.'
Incites interest in insight!" ¶ 07:35
The Hindu Business Line : Consumer insight isn't knowledge management
: "HOW to use data and market research to get closer to your customer? To answer this question, you may need to get closer to Consumer Insight by Merlin Stone, Alison Bond and Bryan Foss, from Kogan Page (www.vivagroupindia.com) .
First, some insight into insight: Insights are 'flashes of inspiration, or penetrating discoveries that can lead to specific opportunities,' and insight is 'the ability to perceive clearly or deeply.' Consumer insight or 'a deep, embedded knowledge about consumers and markets' to help structure thinking and decision-making, is what companies need today, explain the authors.
Perhaps you are already measuring customer satisfaction in some way, and even tailoring staff performance appraisal based on such measures. In which case, the book can shock you with a bombshell: '`If you can measure it, you can manage it' has spread like a cancer. This has led to large-scale customer satisfaction surveys, targets and league tables %u2014 and a fall in customer loyalty and overall satisfaction.'
The authors give the example of healthcare: 'A health service's reason for being is about helping new humans be born, keeping people as healthy as possible, and, where this fails, healing and sustaining them and, in the end, helping them die with dignity and minimum pain.' Disappointingly, measures for many health workers aren't related to these goals, point out the authors. 'Rather, measures are process and transaction-based, counting beds, people on trolleys, queue lengths, waiting times and costs to serve, all important in achieving efficiencies, but not delivering the service people need.' Healthy thought, that is.
Is consumer insight the same as knowledge management? No, it is just the opposite, explains the book. KM aims to make tacit knowledge explicit, 'helping organisations capture and secure as an asset knowledge in the heads of their people.' The emphasis in consumer insight is the other way round. 'Most information is explicit already %u2014 in the form of research reports, statistics, and presentations %u2014 and the issue is that of making it tacit. The goal is to communicate it widely and to get it into the heads of all those who should be using it.'
The book has an elaborate discussion of `database marketing' - defined as the planned implementation, recording, analysis and tracking of consumers' direct response behaviour over time to derive future marketing strategies, for developing long-term consumer loyalty and ensuring continued business growth. You'd also learn how database marketers use consumer insight, and the meaning of `customer care.'
If, as a customer, CRM has been a bugbear for you, the authors suggest how companies can describe CRM to consumers: 'CRM is how we find you, get to know you, keep in touch with you, try to ensure that you get what you want from us in every aspect of our dealings with you, and check that you are getting what we promised you.' But CRM can act as a mask for problems, caution the authors. 'Many businesses feel that as long as they retain enough customers, they must be doing something right. However, a retention statistic might conceal consumers who are gradually finding the company's proposition less appropriate, because it is moving away from their `halo'.'
View consumers as longer-term valuable assets, and not just as prospects for the next contact list from which to make the next sale, exhort the authors in a chapter titled `analysing computer data to get insight.' This, I'd suggest you to read jointly with your systems chap, because of the emphasis on data mining. Another such chapter is `consumer insight systems' where the authors state that warehousing (coupled with mining of consumer data) is most effective 'when it is enterprise-wide, along the company to gain a single view of the consumer and business profitability.'
Incites interest in insight!" ¶ 07:35
