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Category Archives: Big Data

Knowledge is Power!

12 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by BPH in Big Data, customer service, customers, knowledge

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When data drives positive change, pain-points disappear.

{A Note to Readers: This is another in a series of guest blogs focused on Customer Experience from the amazing Katy Wild. Working with Katy, I can always expect to learn something; I trust you will, too. ~ bph}

Our Freeman family is widely known for the outstanding service we provide our customers.  It’s our culture, it’s in our DNA, and it’s what we do!  But we also know that we can always improve our performance.  Bill Gates, business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist, had a quotation that I refer to often – “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Freeman, with the help of IPSOS, a global leader in customer research, recently went through an amazing educational process known as customer journey mapping.  This mapping experience included customers across our diverse business units and gave us tremendous insights into areas where we excel and where we can still improve.  When our employees listened to some of the verbatim customer comments, you could see the surprised expressions on their faces, followed by such remarks as: “Don’t they know we can do that?”; “How do they not know that’s not our service?”; “Where did they get that idea?”; and maybe most important, “I had no idea that was such a big problem.”

We were all surprised at a few areas identified as our biggest pain points – while others were simply confirmation of weaknesses we were aware of and already working on.  Additionally, we surfaced some issues that weren’t really service gaps, but simply gaps in customer education, requiring us to communicate proactively. With the tremendous knowledge base in the Freeman enterprise, we know we can look forward to solutions from the vast experience of our specialists to address these issues.  Fortunately, we were also pleasantly surprised in a good way – where customers assured us that some of the services we questioned ourselves are ones they said they couldn’t live without!  Who knew?

Bottom line – knowledge IS power! And we have the power to implement change. Our clients know we care enough to ask what they love about Freeman… and what they don’t.  We have already made a number of process improvements to remedy these service bumps.  Some of the stumbling blocks are easy to resolve and some will take more time. We’ll tackle them by applying our design-thinking methodology to produce just the right solutions for our customers.  We can do this!

The little problem of designing for Big Data

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by BPH in Big Data

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Big Data, personal engagement

Are you tired of talking about Big Data yet? I suspect we all are, but it can’t be helped. We have virtual silos full of data, and until we get better at milling this glut of information down into tiny, relevant grains of truth, it won’t go away. The future of our business relies on making connections that are meaningful, memorable and important.

Big Data

We are in the middle of a market disruption that has already been dubbed “The 4th Industrial Revolution.” It’s an era being driven by data and what it can tell us about how we go to business. In our industry, we need to better analyze and understand the data in order to design curated experiences that speak to individuals—not the masses.

It’s a daunting challenge, but frankly, it’s not the technology that worries me. We have apps that can slice and dice the data, and we learn more every day. We’ve gotten pretty good at speaking to communities of like-minded groups. We can make generalizations about Pet Owners and Organic Tea Drinkers and Readers of Fiction. But this is still squishy; it’s not a truly personal engagement.

I suspect that we sometimes get the formula backwards. After all, do we really care what Big Data can tell us? A better approach, I believe, is to start with the user’s experience at specific points of engagement, and think about how to make that more personally relevant. Once we know what we’re looking for, we can sort the data accordingly. With predictive customization, we can help people connect in a personal way.

A writer joked once that all the words of his story were already in the dictionary; he just had to get rid of the ones he didn’t need. We are all in the business of curating stories for the people who engage with our shows, conferences, expos and related websites. We have a lot of information about these people; now we need the imagination to find the parts that are relevant… and make it personal.

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