Creating a measurement plan tied to the customer journey improves customer experience and staff workflow. And better analytics insights!
Have you ever had one of those moments where a quiet voice says – I disagree? But then because of social convention you don’t push your point too hard.
I had one of those during a networking conversation. And because I still think of it, it’s probably a core belief of mine.
The person posed the question – what is the biggest problem a company encounters when generating analytics reports from Salesforce? Before I really said anything, she responded with what she thought was the answer. Her opinion was making sure the data was accurate. And the solution was doing tons of data cleansing work and jumping on staff to make sure the data was entered correctly.
I disagreed.
I felt it was a technocrat answer. From someone who’s role had been focused on doing what she recommended. Rolling out technical solutions with a measurement plan. Chasing that people used them properly. Trolling over usage reports to pick out the people who were resistant to using the new system. Developing ways to clean the data.
I don’t totally disagree with the drawbacks of garbage in / garbage out. Yet, I am someone that believes strongly that we should be a master of our technology rather than a slave. If all our time and effort is spent making sure the technology is working in the way you think it should, then you sometimes miss out on the benefits of using it.
Maybe that’s why senior leaders pay people to do the data clean up tasks – while they focus more on the insights they can glean from the reports. They do have to have a level of trust in the data. They don’t drown in the details of the data.
Rather then focusing on cleanup and take up, I believe the most critical thing is to decide what insights you want to gain from the data. Insights tied to strategic goals. Then invest in measurement design to make sure that you get the data that can help steer achieving those goals.
Consider this simple example. What if you were pushing your people to enter full addresses of prospects. When you only need the full address when you ship the product. A waste of time and effort. Instead, consider the minimum you need to segment the prospect. Maybe it’s something that identifies the region they are from – city, province/state, country. However, you cut regions. It does mean you will need to double back and get that filled out deeper in the buyer’s journey.
I believe a customer journey map should either include or have as a companion a measurement plan. That when you decide when in the buyer’s journey is it best to collect data. When it’s less intrusive on the buyer. A plan of what data is needed at that point in the customer journey to support what is happening.
Both to help facilitate a great experience and to help your team execute the workflow. And to help with your analytics as to how things are performaning and to gain insight on that point in the customer journey.
It might mean tolerating some bad data along the way. It might mean reversing instructions you give people if you uncover that some data point is more important than you initially thought.
But it might also make everyone’s life a little bit easier. The customer and your staff!
