As Lockdown took hold across Europe in March, there was never a question that understanding how people’s viewing trends and spending patterns were evolving would need to be tracked. But when a business is in crisis mode and research spend is paused, how do we keep customer insight front and centre?
The answer is to continue digging deeply into what makes people tick. Over the last few months we’ve seen how the groundwork we put in to developing the communication of insight has paid dividends in strengthening our reputation across Sky as the experts in customer behaviour.
Understanding what’s important to the business
Insight teams have always been valued as trusted advisors – but maintaining such relationships during Lockdown has presented some challenges. Key to keeping insight top of mind across the business has been based on:
- Deepening relationships. We’ve been able to capitalise on strong relationships with stakeholders through regular conversations and an existing understanding of their priorities to ensure we instinctively know what new insight they need
- Proactive solutions. Not waiting to be asked, but jumping in with solutions to help business areas understand key questions takes stress away from colleagues, as well as cementing our position as business partner
- Curiosity. Another integral mainstay for insight professionals, where the voracious reading of external publications, industry trends and internal resources ladder up to a holistic understanding of what’s happening, lessening the need to spend additional budget
Delivering with agility and pace
With the constantly changing macro environment, being able to disseminate and share insight quickly, while it was still relevant to the unfolding situation, was critical. We were able to mine external resources, with a wealth of resources from a multitude of suppliers, but we also continued to utilize our agile internal capabilities. Central to this was our qualitative online community, comprised of 120 respondents, which provided us with an invaluable lens to dig into how the pandemic was directly impacting viewing behaviour and spending patterns.
Having real time, in-depth insight to help the business understand what Sky customers were looking for meant that we had a direct line to the consumer to then feed into marketing decisions. These included commercial strategy for supporting vulnerable customers, as well as informing which content to merchandise. Decisions were customer-led and actioned at pace.
Making insight accessible and easy to digest
We make insight available through two channels: i) In depth analysis and data is shared with a weekly digest of key findings for the most senior 150 Sky UK leaders, and ii) light-touch customer videos/verbatim heavy summaries collated on our Customer Closeness internet site with weekly email drivers to boost viewing.
We’ve seen that engagement with both these sources has increased throughout Lockdown, which we attribute to three drivers:
- Cadence. Maintaining a regular delivery slot (we publish on Friday afternoons) so that people know when to expect delivery and it becomes part of discussion in other team meetings.
- Streamlining content. We have a rigorous editorial process to ensure we are strict about only sharing the most interesting and impactful insight to ensure it’s easy to digest, but with a variety that covers multiple business areas
- Measurement. We continue to evolve the way we measure engagement. We’ve just built a new app with more sophisticated reporting capability and we report page/article views on a weekly basis to better understand what’s driving usage.
The culmination of the communications channels has resulted in more departments asking us to present our insight decks to their teams and strengthening our role as experts across the broader business. Linking back to the first point, in helping us to be present for the important conversations, we understand what the business needs and how best to satisfy that need.
It remains to be seen what the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be, but what is certain is we will continue to see the increasing challenge on insight professionals to stay relevant and timely with their input and outputs. When operating in crisis mode, it’s not about being perfect, but about being timely, to help inform better decisions. One thing we’ve learned as a team is that by reaching out to stakeholders with an opinion, regularly communicating consumer trends and adapting approaches has ensured we’ve remained critical in the planning phase.
Regardless of what the future holds in terms of what projects will be commissioned, at least we know we will continue to be part of the conversation and valued for our input.
