When it comes to strategic understanding, data insights are not only all the rave, but also the fundamental foundation to building an evidential intelligence for the organisation to follow. Whilst most brands understand the value of data, many are unsure of the various dimensions of value that it can deliver across their end-to-end operations.
In the 1960 American Western, The Magnificent Seven, a group of seven gunfighters are hired to protect a small village. The seven share traits, but are all different and work best together, so too, when combined, the “Seven Data Dimensions” can protect and empower your brand.
This series has provided an overview of the magnificent seven datasets that most brands have access to and that can be leveraged to gain insight and understanding to design strategies, develop tactics, deliver experiences and drive innovation. Working with the global mTab network and other industry experts this series has pulled out examples, and top tips, from across the globe demonstrating where brands have most effectively harvested and deployed data.
Frontline Focus
Previously, we reviewed social media channels, online reviews, customer feedback, purchase, customer service and search data streams. The final data source we explore is employee feedback data from those who make the companies operate and succeed. Many leading brands consistently listed among the ‘World’s Best Employers’ like Samsung, Microsoft, Apple and Adidas, focus heavily on using employee feedback data to direct them and innovation programs. This is largely due to the frontline perspective employees have on the brand’s products and services, but more importantly the engagement of customers.
Vanessa Oshima, has worked on several leading global brands in Asia including Coca-Cola and Nike and currently serves as Head of Marketing for Starbucks Coffee Japan. As she explains:
“Spoiler alert – a great product and marketing can fall flat if you are missing the secret ingredient – employees. This is the secret sauce to achieving customer centricity, brand love and customers connections. Employees that interact with customers are the greatest marketing and messaging asset that a brand has. When they understand the goals and vision, love and take pride in the company and believe in the product and service, the brand interaction is changed from “product to experience” and from “functional connection to emotional relationship.”
Having an open environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions is critical to gaining genuine employee insight. This, unlike many of the data sources we’ve reviewed, relies heavily on the company’s culture and management philosophy. So, whilst it takes commitment to solicit and analyse this information, it fundamentally begins with the company embracing criticism from its employees without them fearing retribution. This ensures participation, quality and veracity of feedback that gains insights that can be acted upon.
Like customer feedback and social media insight, the information related to employee feedback can be more subjective and open to individuals’ personal perspectives. Therefore, at times, it can lack genuine objectivity.
However, it can also be quantified, measured and analysed for trends. Given this data’s quantitative and qualitative nature, reviewing employee feedback often requires more interpretation and analysis given the unstructured and subjectivity of the information. But when done well, this information’s value can be useful across dimensions including service quality, product functionality, brand value and employee satisfaction.
James Endersby, Chief Executive Officer of Opinium, points to another important employee satisfaction dimension, explaining,
“McKinsey points to consumers paying extra close attention to how brands are treating their employees during COVID. Many say this is a significant factor in them weighing their purchase decisions. This is an important reason as to why businesses should measure employee satisfaction. Plus, given the economic pressures on businesses, reducing turnover and hiring and training costs can be critical to the businesses success.”
Having a solid, consistent understanding of the dimensions of employee perspectives and feedback through their customer engagements is important in identifying and fortifying the points of strength across specific products, services, channels and promotions – and more importantly – pinpointing and addressing the points of weakness that need addressing.
There’s significant value in understanding how consumers engage and respond to a brand through the eyes of third party employees. This is like the qualitative insight from sources such as social media and online reviews. However, the ability to have first-hand interpretation provides added value to the information.
Getting Inside Insight
Like many valuable datasets, the complexity of employee feedback data can be significant given its unstructured nature which requires tools and time to extract the insight. Therefore, employee feedback data can require technology to synthesise, analyse, manage and respond to the flow of information, particularly if the brand opts to create a continual flow of this insight from its employees. It also generally requires the need to analyse and translate trends into actionable responses by the appropriate teams.
The key is also to know from which employees to solicit feedback to ensure you gain robust and relevant perspectives and actionable insight that can impact and enhance the company.
As Oshima explains,
“ In my experience as a researcher, my first call is always to employees and in particular the front line employees – the ones working and serving our customers every day – they know what is working now, what is not, as well as what has changed and what they wish they had more of. They also know what they would change to enhance the customer’s experience. These employees will typically tell us all of this and more, if we make the time to listen. I really find value in making time for a coffee (Double Tall Latte please!) to “chat with employees” in order to unlock the fantastic perspective they have.”
Committing to this type of approach is a win-win for brands that do it correctly. First, it can deliver first-hand, inside insights that can deliver enhanced quality and elevated experiences for customers. Second, the process can create significant “goodwill” amongst the employees who are engaged since it conveys their importance to the company and the leadership.
Making a Commitment
The commitment to solicit employee feedback doesn’t stop with the question, or even the answer. If a company wants to extract the genuine value of the process, it requires it to follow-through on the feedback and make changes to areas employees identify as both strengths and weaknesses. Ignoring, or appearing to ignore, the feedback can ultimately do more harm than good if there are no visible follow-through results.
According to Endersby,
“Employees are the frontline connection to your customers, so understanding their perceptions of your brand and attitudes towards your operations are critical. This is not only important in measuring their satisfaction and happiness in working for our company, but also ensuring that their customer interactions on behalf of the brand are exceptional and consistent. Beyond this, employees have a fantastic perspective in what works and doesn’t work with the customer experience. Customers evolve over time, so having a view into this helps determine how the experience should evolve as well.”
The frequency of employee feedback is also important given the continual evolution of today’s markets. Customers can change how they interact with a business regularly. This is largely why some companies build up employee trust to a level that employees can proactively provide feedback. Achieving this relies heavily on trust built by the brand committing to providing enhancements based on the employees’ feedback. Again, if employees finds that their comments simply go into a “black hole,” this feedback channel will dry up quickly.
Addressing the Issues
With most data channels we’ve reviewed in this series, it’s important to note that spikes in employee feedback data can relate to elements like press, promotions, offers, product launches and even controversies. This can be related to anything from bad press to inadequate inventory levels.
It’s important to anticipate and note how these types of events and factors will impact both the customers and the resulting pressure it creates on employee who must field the difficult questions and receive the unpleasant responses.
As Mark Harrington, Chief Marketing Officer for mTab explains,
“Employees are the frontline and the face to every business. Their interaction with customers conveys the culture and values of the company. So, understanding the sentiment and satisfaction of employees is essential. This requires proactive solicitation of feedback and engagement of ideas. It also requires understanding, but more importantly responding to and rectifying company issues that create customer anger or animosity that is unintentionally directed towards these frontline employees.”
Few things will deteriorate employee satisfaction faster than frontline employees taking the brunt of abuse for management’s decisions, whether its long wait times or getting rid of a favourite flavor. Addressing these issues to remove the pressure from employees is essential.
Getting Started
The first step in getting a handle on employee data streams is to establish the audience to track and the desired frequency of feedback. Developing the process to capture these data sources, whether online, via the POS, surveying system, or some other approach is key. However, it should be non-intrusive to the process the employee goes through to service the customer.
As with other datasets, employee data should have an identified centralised owner. All too often the ownership of employee data, like many of the Magnificent Seven datasets, becomes a topic for political infighting with different groups (typically Marketing, Product or even Human Resources) all competing for ownership. Often it makes sense given that it is coming from employees, for this information to be owned by Human Resources. The key is to have them democratise the data for the items beyond employee satisfaction to be addressed adequately.
As the data is reviewed, there should be a focus on identifying input and result trends. This will identify and isolate issues and opportunities. From here, there should be point owners across every team, including Operations, Sales, Product and Technology, given the array of feedback that can be expected which can impact any of these, or other teams in the organisation.
When a trend or spike emerges pointing to an issue or opportunity, these individuals should work congruently to quickly determine the scope of the issue or opportunity, the impact on the company and the response in terms of operation and communication. There should also be an understanding of the potential root cause of the change, whether a promotion, news story, announcement, product launch or some other factor. This will help understand what may be ‘moving the needle’ in order to address or replicate it.
With each data source, the key is to strategically set a plan in order to identify, collect, analyse and democratise the intelligence as effectively as possible. There also has to be ownership of decisions in terms of assessment, response and reaction. From there, it’s a matter of creating a habit of returning to the data to identify and understand shifts and evolutions to design strategies, develop tactics, deliver experiences and drive innovation.
Whilst daunting in scope and nature, employee data is just one of these ‘Magnificent Seven’ datasets that can empower your brand, and although it is amongst the most complex, it also can deliver significant value.
As Harrington explains,
“While many successful businesses are focusing on being customer-centric, the ones that are employee-centric create a culture of success that can breed customer loyalty, because employees who feel valued tend to be more invested in the business and go above and beyond for the customer.”
Back in 1998 the Harvard Business Review published an article titled “The Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears” demonstrating the link between happy employees, happy customers and profits – this holds true today and collecting employee data remains critical.
To conclude this series, I return to the beginning by noting that whilst different data dimensions can prove more powerful in different scenarios (or when used to meet different objectives) it is typically true that the best, evidenced based, decisions are made when all available data is considered in tandem with the analyst mindful of any gaps, limitations or biais. Data is not always perfect, and the lack of perfect information should not always prevent a decision being taken … just be mindful of the potential risks and their relevance to each scenario.
So closing with our Magnificent Seven analogy, using seven gunslingers to shoot at a target is more likely to get a direct hit than one …
