Beyond Insight & Optimisation

I have been fevering over an intuitive discomfort with present day concepts of ‘insight’ and ‘optimisation’. Here I try to explain why these concepts are bothering me and what I feel we can look to for a more meaningful approach to driving customer experience. Kill me in the comments.

there is something wrong with the pursuit of understanding without an expediency to act

Understanding why things happen can be valuable but it is not an end in itself. We live in a world which is constantly being assaulted by 'post-reason' merchants and whilst the last thing I want to do is add my voice to them there is something wrong with the pursuit of understanding without an expediency to act. In the field of data driven customer insight I feel we have a responsibility to go beyond the cycles of 'insight and action' which have been the archetypal behaviour for organisations hoping to be data driven.

Deep-dive analysis and insight presentations abound in the modern organisation but how much of it results in improvements to customer experience? In the case that insight leads to a change in experience it is often on a macro level, perhaps fixing a process or improving a journey. Undoubtedly there is value here but there is an opportunity to operationalise the outcomes of the analysis that remain untapped.

What do we so often find in our analysis? Largely that customers, people, are different & varied from each other. They are not only different in a diversity, individual beautiful snowflake way, but they are different depending on their context, mood, relationship, point in time.

our platforms and communications are insensitive to this reality

Largely I think we find that our platforms and communications are insensitive to this reality; one size cannot fit all. Customers are diverse, vanilla is always wrong.

Optimisation never stopped a bad experience being bad

Where do we go from here? I suggest we look beyond concepts of ‘insight’ which try to find neat answers to multi-faceted challenges. I also suggest we stop asking concepts such as ‘optimisation’ to solve for these problems. Our aim should not be to find a solution which broadly improves the experience for all. Optimisation never stopped a bad experience being bad.

Time to offer some solutions or at least some hope.

The rich powerful data from which insight is developed should be operationalised, bring it closer to where customer experience happens. Enable channels to act directly from that rich seam of customer intelligence, if it is good enough for a PowerPoint slide it is definitely good enough for delivering a relevant experience.

Think about this all in a more human way, imagine I know something about you, maybe that you have a family and just moved house. If I knew this information about you I would use is it to bring relevance to my conversation with you. Further, you would hope that I would use the information I had! How could experiences be improved by being reactive to this type of intelligence? Too often this intelligence is used in the retrospective, we need to bring it into the present. We need to get to a place where we look back on history and say how ridiculous it was we would analyse what happened without affecting the now and future.

our organisations and customers are ready for the age of ‘API Marketing’

And this won’t be achieved by optimising what currently exists. We need to rethink our platforms and communications to be empty vacuums, ready for an infusion of customer specific intelligence to which it will interpret and do as it sees fit. The answers to this lie in the fundamentals of marketing technology as you already know it, APIs are the key. Enabling platforms and communications to call back to customer data in real-time, receiving back the necessary information and decisions to drive desired outcomes. If having knowledge of the customer is the starting point of an interaction, the rules of experience change.

Our organisations and customers are ready for the age of ‘API Marketing’.