Where's your data hiding?

As professional services firms seek to collect more feedback from more clients more often, they are running into a problem. The data is all over the place.

According to our 'Future of Client Listening' research, the feedback is most likely to end up in:

• Individual reports
• People's heads and notebooks
• Shared folders

In all 3 cases, the insights are difficult to track down and hard to combine. As a result, teams have different data and different assumptions about client needs and expectations. This makes coordinated action hard.

Centralise the data

The 2nd step on the feedback flywheel is centralise the data. But this isn't a problem you solve after you've scaled up your client listening. It is tempting to think sequentially. First we'll get more data. Then we can justify getting a centralised database and better analytics.

The problem with this approach is that there's no incentive to get the flywheel moving. Why collect more feedback when there's nowhere to put it and no easy way to make use of it? You end up like the firms still waiting for "better data" before implementing a CRM system.

Traditional client listening processes have encouraged data siloes. It's been a combination of disrete research projects and in-house processes. Annual client interviews generate seperate transcripts of each conversation plus a PowerPoint summary. Annual surveys create separate spreadsheets of data. Complaints, testimonials and events get handled as stand-alone processes.

Then there's all the informal feedback. The everyday conversations in person, on calls and via email or client portals. Informal feedback trumps it's formal cousin in both volume and impact.

Formal feedback gets presented once and then filed away. Informal feedback keeps swirling around. Clients repeatedly share the same view, and staff swap notes. As a result, informal feedback drives the perception of client needs and expectations - and hence it drives decision-making.

Discover the assumptions

Wouldn't you like to know what assumptions are driving decision-making?

The first step is to create a central place where all the feedback can go. A simple answer to the question "a client just told me X, where should I put this"? The answer can't keep being "email it to someone in BD" or "I don't know".

Once you have all the formal and informal feedback in one place, you can start identifying the assumptions. What do people think they're hearing (informal) and how does it compare to what clients are actually saying (formal).

It's only by combining formal and informal feedback that you get the complete picture of what clients are saying and how your people are responding.

Create a single source of truth

A single source of truth for client feedback and insights requires the ability to:

• Handle different data formats. Feedback is a combination of numeric ratings, multiple-choice responses and open text comments
• Analyse unstructured text data. Text data needs to be stored in a way that makes it easy to see across clients
• Adapt to new fields and formats. Over time questions and insights requirements change

So what type of system can centralise all your feedback data? Most firms naturally start by looking at their existing systems. CRMs, PMSs, Sharepoint, Teams - systems designed to centralise certain types of data.

Unfortunately these systems are designed for different use cases. For example, CRMs are great for storing and reporting on quantitative data. It's easy to get a view of last contact dates or NPS scores across many clients. But text comments just sit in notes fields. They can't be identified by topic or context and can't be rolled up across clients or use cases.

Sharepoint, Teams, Slack all have a similar problem. While they're designed to work with text data, they're predominantly a fire hose. People have to read all the comments and then make their own mind up about what they mean.

The answer is to make use of modern databases designed specifically to make sense of text data. NoSQL databases, like the ones used by MyCustomerLens, enable you to:

• Store different data formats
• Roll up text comments by question, context, clients etc
• Effortlessly add new data sources down the line

With all your structured and unstructured feedback in one central place, you can then set-up consistent and automated ways to analyse the data. In the next post, I'll look at how you can automate the analysis - step 3 on the Feedback Flywheel.