Interesting Versus Actionable

The Reporting Creep Problem

One of the key principles that I've tried to adhere to across my support experiences at IBM, Cadence, HomeAway, and now Spredfast, is to only report data that is actionable.

Support has a huge benefit within the corporate world in that it is one of the most data driven functions in a company. Thanks to the capabilities of modern incident tracking tools (usually within a CRM solution) and the need to manage support as a closed loop process, customer support typically has huge warehouses of data on every step and every aspect of the customer support process. This enables the support executive to manage and report all aspects of their operations fairly easily. This window into customer behavior and issues is also a huge, sometimes unleveraged window into the marketplace.

But the downside of all this data is that it becomes easy to get caught up in it when you shouldn't be. Let me play out a typical example:

• The Support team for a particular product area is presenting a report on the post-sales issues, bugs, and quality experience of customers for that product to an R&D team.
• The R&D team members are fascinated by all the real life customer data available.
• One of the first responses is - "Could you show us the number of bugs by region by customer type? That would be really interesting..."
• What follows is a series of requests for additional slices or views of the data. Followed by a request for a follow-up discussion once that is available.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to understand the customer situation better. But I've found that some simple questions in response to the request for another chart keeps everyone focused - "If we show that data, what action will you take? What will you do differently?" All too often the answer is "Nothing, it would just be interesting to see it."

That's where my teams will typically draw the line. We are not in the business of providing interesting tidbits. We are in the business of driving action in the company that improves the customer experience or drives profitability. So if you want data from us, then you need to commit to do something with that data - other than saying "Hmmm" or "I didn't know that." Now if anyone in the company wants to explore the data for the purpose of learning or "fishing", I am always completely transparent. Anyone can get access to the data warehouse and run queries to their heart's content. But my team's reporting focus will remain on actionable reporting.

If you, as a leader, don't draw the line, then human nature takes over and you end up in an escalating series of meetings with more and more "one-of" PowerPoint slides with more and more data cuts - and yet no one actually takes any steps to make anything better.

By the way the same scenario holds true within your own organization. How many of your own reports are "Interesting but not actionable." We review our ops charts regularly and ask ourselves the same question. I've even eliminated some fundamental charts from monthly Ops Metrics decks because we found that there was no variation in the data, and even if there was, we wouldn't actually do anything differently.

Think about the all reporting your team is doing. Is it interesting? Or is it actionable?

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