Some marketing managers in Great Britain are currently doing somersaults better than McKayla Maroney. Champagne sales went up 12 percent in the last week of the London Olympics and some of it is down to those people who are bonused on brand customer satisfaction scores. The feel-good factor in the country drove increases in CSAT scores. I know because I’ve seen the data for a number of well-known U.K. brands and there is a significant leap thanks to Jess Ennis and her teammates.

In my last column, I was getting overexcited about the imminent start of London 2012. I live a couple of miles from the main site and have to say that it was the most fun couple of weeks in London I can remember. But now, although it’s back to the day job, I’ve still been thinking of Olympics lessons about datasets, visualizations, and analysis. So as well as analyzing the impact of the Games on my clients’ satisfaction scores, I’ve also been looking for great data analysis ideas to help me in future projects. Here are a few thoughts

Standard Metrics Only Tell Half the Story

If you followed London 2012, you will have seen the medal table every day. But was that a fair reflection on achievements by each country? Were there other bits of data that added that extra dimension for insight? The Guardian’s data blog in the U.K. and The Wall Street Journal both analyzed medal performance, not just on overall numbers but also against country population, GDP, and team size.

So let’s call out Grenada as the country that was actually the most impressive in the Games. They smashed both the U.S. and Great Britain in terms of medals per head of population. And as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, how about all those failures on the Great Britain team as well the gold medals? Maybe a net win/loss tally wouldn’t have had Great Britain so high up the table.

What’s great about these sites is that they think about extra (and free) sources of data that complement the initial analysis. It’s the equivalent of mashing two sets of data together – say web analytics and customer complaints data – to get a fuller view of performance. And as The Wall Street Journal proved, it’s important to look at both ends of performance, analyzing differences in behavior between your best customers and your detractors.

Having Fun Ways of Presenting Data Is Always Important

If you love data go and have a play here and here and take inspiration for your own infographics.

Lots of other sites I’ve seen highlighted the quirky nature of the data and showed how it related to people’s behaviors and emotions. This BBC site is a great example. I think the lesson for us when presenting data is to make a story about people’s behaviors – your conversion analysis isn’t just a stack of numbers in a funnel, but a story about people’s frustrations, wants, and desires. That’s a lot more inspiring to a website designer than just telling him his conversion rate sucks.

The Big Analytics Question – Was It All Worth It? What’s the ROI?

There’s been a fair few soul-searching articles in the U.K. press that try and analyze the hard numbers and the perceived uplifts. Mark Ritson’s cynical article is a great example. So I did some really simple analysis myself.

We’re told that the cost of the Games to the British taxpayer was £9 billion. There are around 26 million taxpayers in Britain so that equates to about £350 (or $550) each. I did a straw poll of my mates in the pub on the weekend and most people would actually happily pay that again next year just to have the world’s biggest party come back. Of course, a pensioner in the Northern Isles of Scotland is likely to have a different perspective. But my point is that my analysis begins to tell a personal story, as does the impact on brand CSAT scores I talked about earlier. Classic ROI isn’t always possible to measure the impact of a big event, or a new website launch, or even a big advertising campaign. So the challenge for the analyst is to find available data and metrics that anyone can understand.

So was it all worth it? The picture at the top of this column is one I took of Usain Bolt about five minutes after he’d won the 100 meters gold medal. Persistence pays off and on the day of the 100 meters I fluked a ticket from the much maligned London 2012 website and was one of the lucky 80,000 to see the fastest man ever to walk this earth. Now, that’s one of the best success metrics I’ve ever heard of.

Walk through my company’s headquarters, open the fire escape in our CEO’s office, lean out on tippy toes, and, if you are taller than six feet, you can see the London 2012 Olympic Stadium glistening in the rain.

We are now a couple of days away from the greatest show on earth kicking off in my home town and I’m genuinely excited about welcoming the world to my neighborhood and seeing if the eighth laziest nation in the world can pull off the greatest of sporting spectacles.

As a data guy, one of the things that excites me, in addition to Usain Bolt or the Norwegian women’s volleyball team, is to see what uses of data athletes, broadcasters, and sponsors will come up with.

After the games we may find out what the Kaizen-style data analysis secrets are of the Team GB cycling team and I’m hoping for some great data visualizations by broadcasters, like IBM did for this year’s Wimbledon.

Here’s a great start – check out this picture of the biggest data dashboard in London (is there one bigger in the world?), which uses Twitter sentiment analysis to light up a great city landmark, the London Eye, and gauge Londoner’s enthusiasm for the games.

But it is the sponsors who are already out there, using interest in the games and associated social events to harvest customer data. I took a look this week at some of the ways the main London 2012 sponsors are utilizing data to help them understand if their media spend is working. I’m hoping most of them are keeping their powder dry until the starting gun sounds because only Coca-Cola seems to be utilizing the games to gather more customer data, gaining the potential to learn more about its customers and find out which advertising has been most effective.

Coca-Cola is utilizing its fan Coke Zone website as the hub of its social Olympics marketing. You sign up through Facebook or provide mobile and email details and in return get a chance to win local concert and Games tickets. I can tell you from personal experience that getting ahold of tickets has been a nightmare so to be able to use a ticket competition is a great attraction for a brand right now. As a loyalty program it also encourages multi-channel data collection by linking voucher codes on your Coke can to your online profile.

The site runs polls to give free points but right now it seems to be more about engagement than great insight questions that would help Coca-Cola improve its marketing.

So how should Coke be using this rich source of data? I’d expect the company to be beavering away on the following areas:

• You have the data from the Facebook API and have linked that to your own loyalty database. So how about answering the question of the decade – what is the value of a Facebook fan? And has the Olympic sponsorship increased fan value? You have claimed purchases and also redeemed points, so a fairly simple value analysis should be possible.
• In the information age, is your Coke Zone site providing the content that people want? What were the most popular content pages and which of these did your high-value fans use?
• I bet you’ve seen a spike in membership in the last few weeks, so you can use this to turn your fan base into a customer research and insight panel. Contact them with further polls to help you research how your advertising is working and what offers and products are going to engage people during the games.
• Did localized content at an Olympic venue encourage purchase? I’m expecting to be targeted when they geo-locate me on The Mall watching beach volleyball.
• Remember that to do all this you need analytics tools that are fit for the purpose (and the Coke Zone website tracking looks a bit basic, by the way).

So all the prep and talk is done, but for data analysts, rather than this being the final sprint, this is where the hard work should be beginning to show if this marketing spend is going to be worth it.

I really hope it’s a brilliant six weeks. Welcome to London, but do bring a brolly!

London Eye in Night image via Karol Kozlowski / Shutterstock.com.

• the kind of data you have
• the quality of data
• Your insight goals

If you want to measure performance of your online offering you can conduct a user experience evaluation, user test or expert review to provide you with qualitative data which you will be able to convert into results; this in turn will help you improve your product. Depending on how you run your user testing, you may also be able to obtain some quantitative data from your users. This quantitative data may help you support some of your findings to a certain degree, but it will not be statistically significant due to the small sample so it will not help you see the bigger picture. Additionally, using data from user testing session in isolation will not provide the same insight you would get if you added statistically significant quantitative data from different sources.

If you gather customer experience data, like Voice of Customer (VOC) or web analytics, you will be able to use it throughout the evaluation process and it will allow you to extract additional insight from gathered qualitative testing data. This will not only give you the opportunity to squeeze out as much as possible from the evaluation, but also give you invaluable insight and help you create an extensive customer experience profile of your product

Use quantitative research to devise early hypotheses

How can quantitative data help you before you begin a UX evaluation? Firstly, data like VOC and web analytics can guide you in finding the areas of your product that are problematic and are causing drops in conversion. Testing rightly performing areas and improving them can be beneficial, but finding and putting problematic (and important) areas under the microscope might have a larger impact on the overall performance and user experience.

Web analytics and VOC are great for finding out where the problem lies and how big it is. Analytics data can show you where the conversion rate, bounce rate or exit rates are off target and VOC can uncover details about what is not working and, to a large extent, why your product is not meeting customers’ expectations. VOC will specifically present you with data submitted by customers, for example:

• goal achievement
• level of satisfaction
• likeliness to recommend your product or company to their  friends or family
• comments describing how they feel and what they think is wrong

This will, however, depend on how your VOC programme is set up and on the kind of questions you are asking your customers. It is also important to remember that VOC has its limitations and is not bias-free.

Bringing findings from web analytics and VOC together can help you make better decisions about what needs to be tested first, specifically it will guide you when creating a user testing research plan through helping you concentrate on the most important areas and also allow you to test your hypothesis.

Make data driven decisions
After UX testing you will be able to combine this data with previously gathered web analytics and VOC to confirm your hypothesis and back up your findings. This will help you ensure that when you are presenting the deliverable to your stakeholders it will make your arguments look less opinion-based and more data-driven, and will also show the impact of your findings on both user experience and conversion. This will also increase the argument of your recommendations being taken forward to the developmental cycle, as they will be backed up with invaluable data.

Track effects of changes
After your recommendations are implemented, monitoring analytics and VOC can be very helpful as it will allow you to see what impact the changes had on the product. It will also allow you to analyse the ROI from your UX evaluation. This will help you show the stakeholders the importance of data driven decisions in UX evaluations and audits.

In conclusion…
Analytics and VOC data can guide a UX evaluation of your digital offering, mainly by helping you to concentrate on the right things (not things you, or other stakeholders, think are right), back up your findings and recommendations, and track their impact on business performance of the product.
Using this data and integrating it with your UX programme should be an imperative part of your user-centred processes and incorporated in every decision you make about evaluation or changes to your online offering.

By Tomasz Kolecki

Here in London, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee dominated our hearts and minds this month. We’ve just about recovered from a week of sore heads from all the forelock tugging, aching knees from a weekend of genuflecting, and cricked backs from hanging up all the bunting. It’s been a wonderful festival of regal majesty that the people of the U.K. have celebrated by going on a massive four-day bender.

Waking up after all the street parties, 9,500 across our tiny island, the analyst in me paid some attention not just to all the mind-boggling stats and data about Queen Elizabeth II but also about the success she’s turned her monarchy into.

After a near revolution just over a decade ago, Her Maj is hugely popular these days, more so than any elected politician has been in my lifetime. Consider these facts:

• 25 percent of the country watched a celebratory concert on TV at the start of June
• 4,200 celebratory beacons were lit across the U.K., a significantly higher number than the hundreds lit in the UK urban riots last year
• Queen Elizabeth II has a positive net (fire) rating score
• She’s head of state for 15 countries in addition to the U.K.
• She’s outlasted 12 prime ministers
• A staggering 2 percent of the U.K. population went to see this – not watched it on the telly – but attended. That’s loyalty! She must have some rockin’ CRM program.

So what is driving her success? Are there any learnings behind all of this over excitement and recession-busting financial splurge that your business can learn from? Well here are some to think about:

Reward your customers. Liz does this in a few ways. She treats her most valuable followers with a special reward program or “knighthood” as it’s known but she doesn’t forget the long tail. We all got a day off work to celebrate her reign – amazing how the popularity and support for an organization rockets when they give something back. In the last two years the subjects of Queen Liz have been given extra national holidays twice, once for her grandson’s wedding 12 months ago and this year to show our support for her jubilee. A gift to say thanks really works!

Be responsive to change. Even Elizabeth II has a digital media presence and she sent the first ever email in the U.K. don’t you know.

Bring in new team members to innovate and ensure you are using the latest methodologies. We were getting pretty bored by her children and everyone loves a nice wedding.

Every organization needs great leadership. And organizations need to be able to rally around a figurehead who can drive a philosophy and lead people to success – she’s the Jim Sterne of monarchies.

Wear a nice hat. I couldn’t find any significant correlation in the data for this recommendation but wouldn’t want to rule it out.

And how do we know that all of the above delivers value, success, and improved customer perception? Well there are many studies run in the U.K. every month that ask us our opinions, querying our views of the future of the monarchy, its current performance and how we think it should be shaped in the future. Wow! She has a great voice-of-the-customer program and uses that to drive her strategy, communications, and branding.

My not altogether serious analysis may seem a little flippant and you may not be running to the financial director to get a budget for a monarchy program kicked off. But think about this. How many companies have you worked for will still be successful in another 60 years? How many of your CEOs do you think will still be in place in five years? Maybe there are some things to think about here on how successful organizations behave, how to lead, how to engage, and how to change. I’m not taking down my bunting just yet. God bless ‘er.

On the basket page I could choose to change the delivery address from the default, taking me to the address book page in my account. Here I could choose a pick up location –a search link took me to the very bottom of the page, where I could search for a locker by landmark, address or postcode.

Here is where it gets interesting: I entered my postcode…and the locker was not there. Oops. I tried the street address, same thing. There is a list, a helpful map, but the locker I have photographed in my local Coop’s window is simply not there.

I can only imagine that it is so new they have not yet updated their list (it has been there a few days though…?) and to be fair, the locker is a new thing, it is not advertised on the home page. I had to search for “locker” on the site to get the information on adding a locker as a delivery address…but still, this shows lack of attention to the user experience which I had not expected from amazon.

Conclusion: being a member of prime, I reverted to using the next day delivery option.

Dashboards, infographics, and visualisations have been on my mind a lot this year. I’ve always loved turning data into pretty colors and patterns, which is great as the number of dashboard projects for consultants like me has gone through the roof in the past couple of years.

The projects I’ve worked on, even just in 2012, have been at times affirming as an analyst, have driven some key business relationships, but sometimes have been very frustrating. I’ve been made to feel like Leonardo da Vinci when in one project I simply merged two data sets with a customer ID, drew a two axis line chart, and saw the client nearly fall off their chair in amazement. But I’ve also been involved in projects that made me feel like Leonardo the Turtle, wading through a sewer of data and misunderstood objectives.

It’s made me think a lot this year about the responsibilities and checklists from both a client and agency perspective. To get the best out of your dashboard project, whether it has two data sources or 202, here are a few key learnings and things to think about for both sides.

For agencies or those internals teams tasked with building the tool:

• Be a Doubting Thomas and don’t scope out your project until you physically see the data.
  Clients love to say to you, “Here’s my data, I just want you to pop that in a beautifully visualized set of charts.” But under the bonnet of any tool, web analytics, sales, or customer relationship management (CRM) could be a whole mess of data that will take weeks to get to a point where you can easily visualise. This is particularly true of multi-data source dashboards, say ad serving and web analytics data. If you don’t have a long-term relationship with your client and they want you to scope without seeing the data then walk away now.
• Deliver a data audit.
  This should include profiling the data you receive so that you can understand underlying data distributions and also a quality assurance review of calculated metrics. Too often clients believe their data house is in order and when resulting visualisations don’t look the way they want, the person building the dashboard gets blamed.
• Visualisation is less important than data structure.
  Did I really just say that? Stop scratching your head deciding if you agree with Stephen Few about pie charts and start thinking about the database or data tables you are storing your data in. Does it need to be based on a data cube? Are you likely to have to build a gazillion summary tables? Will your dashboard have to read new data sources in the future and is your data layer flexible enough to do that quickly?

Learnings for clients or the teams, like marketing, who are going to be using the tool:

• Beware the funky white elephant.
  “Sex sells” and you want a bit of wow factor to impress your boss. But your company is already littered with reporting packages. Ensure that the visualisation tool that you use can be shared across a number of users and that internal security settings won’t mess up everyone being able to view the pretty Flash charts. To be frank, if you are impressed by a moving chart, then you shouldn’t be the person deciding what software to use.
• The value of the data layer is probably 10 times the value of the dashboard.
  If you are merging multiple data sets and building a multi-channel dashboard, you are very likely to be pooling data that has previously been sat in disparate data silos. If this is the case, the data layer you get built for you, say a SQL database or even a set of Excel workbooks, is going to contain data over and above that which is summarised in your visual layer. You must get ready to mine this data like you would have mined each data source separately. Do you have the people in place to do that?
• Cost of ownership is likely to be way more than cost of development.
  If you haven’t thought yet about who is going to own, run, and analyse your dashboard then stop now.

I haven’t even begun to talk about which is the right visualisation tool or what metrics are the right ones to include. From a structural perspective, data is a messy plate of spaghetti. But if you are prepared to audit properly, spend time developing the right metrics, and ensure there is an after-life for your dashboards then the visual impact will be dwarfed by the business impact from all your hard work.

The other day as I walked past my local Coop, my eyes were drawn to a big orange machine set back from the window – that said “Amazon locker”. Having recently been looking at articles about kiosks and self-service, and having also recently missed several Amazon deliveries because no-one was home, I thought I’d look it up.

It turns out Amazon now has a number of “Amazon Lockers” in London (and Seattle and NYC) which are basically self-service delivery kiosks. When you order from Amazon, you choose a locker instead of your home or office address. Amazon emails you a unique code when your parcel has been delivered. You then enter it on the kiosk, and that opens the door to the locker that contains your parcel. The locker location works like any other address in your address book; you can search by postcode, address, or landmark to find the closest one to you at home or at work. Delivery options to a locker are First Class or One-Day delivery (if you are a Prime customer.)

Obviously not all items can go into a locker, and if you have an order that only contains some items that are eligible you will not be able to get that order delivered to your locker (so you’d have to place two orders – which if you are a Prime customer makes no difference in terms of cost, and if you are ordering over a certain amount delivery is free anyway). But overall, this is a godsend: no more trekking to the post office collection office on a Saturday morning to retrieve parcels. No more red “we missed you” cards. Clearly Amazon has been listening to its urban customers, who are often not at home, don’t have a suitable “safe place” where the mailman can leave parcels and who may not be able to receive personal deliveries at work – and yet still want to use Amazon for the convenience, time- and money-saving, breadth of products on offer and so on. I know people who have not been using Amazon precisely because delivery was an issue and who now will do so because the “last mile” has been (at least partially) solved.

My guess is that soon, you will be able to select items from a single order for delivery to different delivery locations including lockers (this is already possible with regular addresses) and use Amazon Lockers for returns…

Great example of customer-centric approach

UPDATE Blog: Perhaps it’s not really Solved after all!

This was a useful reminder that much of our lives revolve around telling a story and that shopping is no exception. Here’s a brief overview of the concept in a digital environment.

First you have a landing page (whether online, mobile, or an interactive kiosk): the ‘overture’ for this particular play, as opposed to your brand or organisation. After all, many people would already be familiar with it through other means – previous purchase, reviews, talking to friends, advertising and so on. But there’s no room for complacency: I may have liked Julius Caesar but there’s no guarantee I will like The Tempest – so first impressions still matter. You need that initial vision of the landing page to work for you, to represent your voice, be consistent with your other physical and/or virtual stores and make your products seem exciting, even if familiar (as in “I’ve seen Shakespeare plays before.”)

At the theatre you might buy a programme that describes the plot, the cast, the director: think of your interaction design as the programme. The navigation needs to be clean, the architecture logical, with signposting to special offers, major categories, company info – whatever your customers expect. Think of each area as a scene and offer related content. Each product page is a “star of the show”. It should reflect your understanding of the customer (that you have acquired by doing research into digital behaviour and analysing web analytics) and elements such as customer lifestyle, attitude, requirements and desires. There needs be consistency across the store: this is the story you are telling. It is easier for certain categories of products and services, of course, and some brands take this further than others (here’s a couple of great examples, JPeterman and Pedlars) but many of the most successful organisations today have taken this approach, to the extent that just seeing the name will evoke some sort of emotional response to the implicit story. What comes into your mind when you read the following: Nike, L’Oreal or Tesco? (*)

Ultimately, just as you would expect of the experience at the theatre, it should be easy to find the product, see the product, explore the details of the product, co-ordinate with other products if relevant and of course, buy the product. That includes offering great delivery options, packaging, ease of returns and little extras – things like free fabric shopping bags for orders over a certain amount (they will be seen on the street, on buses, trains or wherever and add to brand awareness), promotion on your next order, post cards, gifts for referring a friend – all equally useful “post-sale” mementoes. Not only do you want (virtual) applause, but you want your audience to come to your next play and recommend it to others – just as you would if you were William Shakespeare.

(*) “Just do it”, “Because I’m worth it”, “Every little counts” !

As a specialist in data extraction, manipulation and visualisation, that’s where I come in. Recently I’ve been thinking about the whole journey from commissioning an information dashboard to signing off the design; a journey which client and consultant undertake together. Until now, I’ve always asked: “What story do you want your dashboard to tell?” Most people have an idea of what data is available and how they already use it. But ask someone: “What is a dashboard?” and it becomes much harder for them to answer. To be honest, while I could produce almost a dozen examples that I have created, I think I would still struggle to rattle off a concise definition.

Is a dashboard the same as a business scorecard, or a Business Intelligence (BI) system? Well, we generally think of a business scorecard as a huge TV up on the wall of a call centre, showing the number of waiting calls and the average queue times. Or we imagine a jagged line charting the rise and fall of shares on a market trader’s monitor. What these two images have in common is that they both provide information but are not interactive. The information on the screens updates in real-time rather than when the user wants. Conversely, BI systems are at the other end of the interactivity scale. They structure access to underlying data, giving users a toolset with which to ask questions. One of these tools will be a series of visualisations that can be combined into a dashboard and will usually be the part of the system that most people see. But those visualisations are incredibly flexible because there is a whole system behind them dedicated to enable end-users (or possibly end-users’ analysts) to slice and dice the data just so.

Certainly, if your dashboard isn’t interactive, I would call it a scorecard instead. A good dashboard will make the best use of available data and enable the user to make connections, gain insights and take operational decisions. It needs to allow the user to ask their questions as well as to interact with the visualisations. But sometimes the limitation of the dashboard might allow those users to ask only those questions that the designer of the dashboard has anticipated. To enable end-users to explore data, they do need a full BI system (and the deep pockets to go with that).

A dashboard is therefore a high-value, low-cost alternative with many business benefits, as long as it has been designed and tailored intelligently. The value in a quality dashboard is baked in during the design process. That’s why it’s my job as a specialist consultant to bring the technical expertise that delivers a dashboard that truly empowers our clients to ask questions they need answers to.

Of course, ensuring our clients understand what a dashboard is (and perhaps just as importantly, what it isn’t) is an important step towards persuading them to invest the time and effort necessary to work with us in ensuring our development yields the high-quality, built-for-purpose dashboard they hope for and that their business will trust.

]]> http://www.foviance.com/what-we-think/defining-desirable-dashboards/feed/ 0 http://www.foviance.com/what-we-think/defining-desirable-dashboards/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FovianceBlog/~3/a8uQm32fsHg/ http://www.foviance.com/what-we-think/twitter-customer-service/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:14:08 +0000 Foviance http://www.foviance.com/?p=18345 Following our recent article about customer service using Twitter, here are some key points to have in mind when setting up your account.

• Speed. Customers using Twitter do so to get a quasi-instant response, so that you must have a team in place that is equipped to do so.
• Human. If the customer is complaining about an issue, the reresentatives must be good at empathising and apologising.
• Connect. Some issues will need another channel to be resolved, so providing other contact methods such as phone or email in the bio or elsewhere on the Twitter page is a good idea
• Efficient. A customer care team needs to be in a position to do something about the issues people have (so you need to know what those are – hence analytics)
• Committed. Customers expect follow-up – so if the representative says they will get back to a customer, they need to act on it.
• Real. Customers take to Twitter rather than FAQs because they want to interact with a human being, not a bot. No jargon allowed.
• Go the extra mile. Make the interaction so good that customers will want to use your products and services again rather than switch to a competitor.

Whitepaper: Social media for customer care. Where’s your Twitter team?