Preserving institutional memory
Editor's note: Nick Freiling is the director of InsightsHub at QuestionPro. He can be reached at nick.freiling@questionpro.com.
The Great Resignation. The Great Reshuffle. The Big Shift.
Whatever you call it, the reality is this: Turnover on insights teams has probably never been higher. More researchers on more insights teams have spent more hours onboarding this year than ever before.
And while fresh perspectives can add immense value to research efforts, this new turnover era also ushers in a host of new challenges.
How can brands maintain a continuous research program while their insights team roster is in constant flux? What does longitudinal research look like when tools and methodologies shift (even if only slightly) with every new onboard? And how can insights managers cultivate buy-in from team members who are used to doing things differently?
For CX teams, especially, this can be uniquely challenging. CX is organization-specific – there is no syndicated solution for accessing or measuring your brand’s key CX performance metrics. And without strong institutional context on how CSAT patterns have shifted in recent years, CX teams can struggle to add value without duplicating research and results.
The fact is: CX teams – and all insights teams – need to become storykeepers. And this is never more important than in high-turnover environments.
No matter how many new names may be on the HR rosters, a brand’s customers are part of a long, extended story. What happened to a customer last year matters today. What happened to them pre-pandemic still matters now. And without a strong grasp of how their customers’ story started, CX and insights researchers can’t point their organization in the right direction today.
Good insights is about storykeeping. Integrating story-friendly methodologies and solutions into your CX workflows will help make sure you maximize the value of your historical research and move forward in a data-driven manner.
Change with the times
“I don’t care how my predecessor did things. This is how I do things.” We’ve all heard that – if not in so blatant of terms, then couched in more polite jargon. Level-set. Recalibrate. You get the idea. And in many ways, recalibration – especially on an insights team – can have a cleansing effect. What adds value today, of course, might not be what added value in the past. Research methods and tools can and should change with the times. And innovation in research technology (ResTech) tools makes it easy for insights teams to level-up their toolkit quickly.
But insights, especially CX, is bigger than the tools used to create them. And it’s not something that’s easy to start from scratch.
While a new ResTech app might mean researchers can move quicker, it doesn’t ensure that insights are being stored, interpreted and distributed in a way that adds value to the insights bottom line – that is, the impact that an insights team’s deliverables has on your NPS or CSAT. Because it’s ultimately researchers, not apps, that know what parts of their customers’ story matters most.
Further, while ResTech makes it easy to dive deeper than ever before into customers’ perceptions, it can also distract from the deeper work of integrating that data into your brand’s CX story. It’s no secret that most insights teams are awash in more data than they know what to do with. Nor is it a secret that innovation in ResTech has, in recent years, been more focused on data-gathering than on storing and story-fying that data.
Long story short: Enhancing your insights team’s ResTech and data-gathering capabilities doesn’t necessarily add value to your insights bottom line. And worse, certain kinds of ResTech can distract researchers from storykeeping – that is, the content brands depend on to ensure a consistent and progressive CX research program across researcher (and customer) generations.
Shouldn’t be a chore
What does insights storykeeping look like, day-to-day? How can today’s in-flux insights teams keep and tell stories whilst so many members of their team come and go? The first thing to remember is that this shouldn’t be a chore. An effective insights storykeeping system – aided by the right technology – should work in line with the research your insights team is already doing. No going back to document, map or narrative-craft on top of insights your CX team is already generating.
Here are some tips to ensure stories are always integrated into your insights workflows.
First: Adopt consistent research methodologies at the highest level of your organization.
This doesn’t just mean executives who embrace the idea of insights. It means having a C-suite that is in-the-know about how your organization is measuring, calculating and interpreting your customer experience KPI metrics and who can help keep the insights story alive.
A quick anecdote…
We recently worked with a CPG branding consultancy with an executive team of eight that had turned over 50% in the prior year. Four members of this team had been hired within the prior 18 months.
Understandably, catching them up on the terms and tools of their CX product suite was a high-priority item. We laid out how their predecessors had used technology to measure CSAT over time and how recent changes to their product and branding had influenced CSAT scores.
Right away, eyes glazed over.
This was a lot of information but there really was no way around it. But rather than integrate their expertise into what had already been done, this team decided to level-set. It’s easier to start fresh, they said, than to try and understand what had been done before.
This was painful to watch. What’s lost with this approach is invaluable. CSAT is a story and stories can’t be restarted. What happened in the past matters today and the future will always incorporate what happened before – there’s just no way around it. Storykeeping is essential.
Without a C-suite that is both educated about and committed to a story-driven CX research methodology, you can expect slow progress toward boosting CSAT.
Second: Embrace an insights-specific repository application to ensure every insight is recorded, operationalized and searchable.
Admittedly, this has not, to date, been easy for insights teams. Most attempts to solve the problem of functional, value-adding insights repositories have cut corners and failed to account for the unique nuances in UX, CX and market research workflows. Coupled with the fast pace of innovation in other insights technology, this has made it hard for repository applications to keep pace. Platform rigidity and (ironically) poor UI/UX have presented repository developers with significant challenges in persuading insights managers of the value of investing resources (including their time) into maintaining a clean insights repository that is up-to-date with their research.
Fortunately, this is changing. Innovation in knowledge management applications has accelerated in recent years as a response to the proliferation of data-harvesting technologies. Further, insights-specific repositories are a brand-new class of applications, usually designed by insights professionals (including researchers) and built with the unique needs of insights teams at top-of-mind.
At the highest level, an insights repository supplies the content for the stories that undergird any serious CX program (Figure 1). And by nature, this content survives across research teams and generations.
Insights repositories are an insights team’s storykeeping engine.
Third: Take distribution seriously and get creative while doing it.
There’s no law that says insights deliverables have to be wonky. While insights jargon can be hard to avoid, “inside baseball” isn’t something to strive for when distributing insights.
The fact is, insights are valuable only insofar as they are distributed, understood and operationalized. Insights storykeeping is about putting insights into context and creating a system whereby new insights are, by default, interpreted as part of a progressive research program – not a series of isolated snapshots. Aided by an accessible insights repository, insights distribution (for CX, in particular) should create the next chapters in your brand’s experience improvement story such that any team member can get up-to-date quickly, even in times of high-turnover.
What does this look like?
At the least, it means a repository of insights that is accessible organization-wide. No silos. No barriers between insights consumers (marketing, product, executives) and insights producers.
And it means an intuitive taxonomy of insights content that’s built into your insights team workflows. This does not mean requiring researchers to go back and craft a narrative about what they did and how they did it. It does mean aligning insights workflows with insights distribution such that the insights story emerges by default and so any consumer has full transparency into the research tools, methods, source documents and raw data used to compose the key findings that matter to them.
Easy to appear productive
The bottom line is this: Good insights are about stories, not data.
That’s no secret, of course, to the best insights professionals. But when turnover on insights teams is high, the temptation to overemphasize data procurement is strong. New ResTech makes it easy to appear productive, even while your insights team may not be plugged in to your brand’s ongoing CX narrative.
But simply gathering more data when your team is already swimming around in more of it than they can possibly interpret is inefficient at best and a total waste of resources at worst. It’s precisely in times of change that storykeeping is most important.