A Christmas Rant - Who Needs Data Quality in Marketing?

A few days before Christmas my family received a Christmas card in the mail from the real estate agent who handled the sale of the house we bought about 18 months ago. It read:

"Dear Scott, Louise and family, hope you are enjoying the big house. Thanks again and warm regards...."

No doubt it was part of a campaign to have us keep the agent top of mind next time we choose to sell a house, but a nice touch nonetheless. Or at least it would have been had my wife's name been Louise!

What's more the "big house" reference was odd as we had down-sized when we bought this house in order to get a property closer to the city. Something the agent should have known only too well as it had come up in conversation on a number of occasions.

Whilst I found the use of the wrong name a little amusing and the reference to the size of the house didn't bother me, my wife was less than happy. It's a safe bet that when we do choose to sell this house this agent will indeed be top of mind - as someone we will definitely not be using.

For less emotive reasons, I'd actually arrived at the same conclusion as my wife. When I sell a house I want the agent acting for me to employ numerous tools to ensure the fastest sale for the best possible price. One of the tools I expect him to use is a database of potential purchasers which he or she has compiled and curated over time. Now, if the agent in question is unable to get basic details right (such as the name of a purchaser and the size of houses they have lived in) then what faith can I have that any of the other details he has will be accurate. Chances are that all he has is a list of names and a collections of facts which may or may not be right. the marketing campaign he'll conduct on my property may well be targeted incorrectly, either missing an obvious potential buyer or having me waste funds marketing to those who have no interest in my property.

So, he's lost a potential future client. So what? Does that really matter, he hasn't really lost any money, has he? Well, I think he has. If you consider the standard fee for an agent (where I live at least) is 4.25% of the sale price and my house might sell for around half a million dollars then he'll actually miss out on the chance of around $21,000. What's more, if my wife tells 10 of her friends that number balloons out to close to a quarter of a million dollars. Sure, not all of those would have been in the market to sell, nor might he have been one of their considerations for a listing agent, but the point is that there is indeed a cost to what at first glance seems like an almost irrelevant data quality issue.

You don't need to work in real estate to be subject to cost stemming from data quality problems. I'm sure that something of the same ilk could happen in many industries. So next time you're faced with what seems like a data quality issue too trivial to worry about just remember John* and his lost income.

* Name changed to protect the not so innocent.

The Second Most Important Question in the World

There’s a lot to be said for business intelligence practitioners being responsive and being able to deliver to and meet the needs of their clients quickly and much has been written about the benefits of BI teams partnering with their business colleagues in order to provide the best outcomes and value.

But doing so shouldn’t just be interpreted as giving business users everything they ask for as fast as humanly possible. Across my career I’ve found one simple two word question very powerful. That question is: “so what?”

The value of asking "so what" comes partly from asking the “how will you use this data?”, “what decisions will it inform?”  type questions, but it is even more powerful when turned around. Ask the question: “If I didn't have that data available to me - so what?" If the answer is something along the lines of: “I wouldn't know that we had a preventable problem and in 5 minutes there'd be raw sewage running down the main street” then it's worth doing something about. Write that report, enable those analytics – and do it quickly. However, if the answer sounds more like: “I might need that extra piece of information one day”, then perhaps let's wait for one day to come before we spend the effort, time and money.

In today's climate funding and resourcing are not what they once were in BI. There are few open cheque books left and those of us managing the function have to work with other leaders in our organisations to prioritise. Not only does working on low value things demoralise the members of the BI team, it's also an opportunity cost to the organisation. Working on a low value or low impact requests means that something else, something that may have enabled a better decision, led to time saved, a lower cost to serve or a customer prevented from churning was pushed aside and missed.

The “so what?” question is a powerful one. Just be careful how you ask it, and never presume to know the answer or to be able to second-guess your business colleagues!

And, as to the matter of the [first] most important question in the world. Having just spent two weeks travelling long distances on planes and in cars whilst on holiday with my kids I can assure you that the most important question in the world is “ARE WE THERE YET?”

What To Do When Your Client Wants Sizzle Not Sausage

I love a good dashboard- really I do. So, you'd think I'd be pleased that a trend seems to be emerging that has more business folks becoming aware of dashboards and, by extension wanting to make use of them. But I'm not. Sure, I'm all for the opportunity to provide insight and a better means of managing business operations with an effective dashboard, but the trouble is far too many of the dashboards I've seen built don't do that. Sure, they're flashy, with widgets and gauges galore and often even visually appealing at first glance, but they're simply not designed to give the right sort of insight, or provide that insight in a way that allows them to be used effectively and efficiently. Now that's often not the fault of the person charged with designing the dashboard it may stem all the way back to the client - the person requesting the dashboard.

Unless you have a long standing relationship with your client, excellent rapport and tremendous trust it's unlikely that you'll have carte blanche to determine how they dashboard should look. In the majority of cases they will have come to you with a design already in mind. Chances are that that design will have been influenced by what they've seen elsewhere - be it in other dashboards, or in advertising from dashboard vendors or implementation consulting firms, many of whom seem to promote [just] the eye-catching nature of dashboards, showing off the latest and greatest controls and visual capabilities. And here's the hard pill to swallow, no matter how many of Few's books you've read, no matter how many industry awards you may have won for your prior dashboards, no matter if you have a PhD with a thesis written on visual cues and how people respond to them, your client is still likely to look at your with a mixture of confusion and disappointment if you suggest alternative design and layout options which are too far apart from their own ideas. If you just build and present him or her with what you believe is the better option then 8 or 9 times out of 10 he'll say it's not what he asked for or wants. Push the issue, spouting all of the theory you like, and you'll do little more than back him into a corner. He'll still want the same design, you'll still need to build it, and the company will have an ineffective dashboard - no-one wins in this situation.

So, what's the answer? Why not build prototypes for both - build him his, but also build what you think will work. Give your client what he wants and you may in turn get what you want, either through the chance to explain why you believe you dashboard layout is more effective, or he may just see it for himself and have a eureka moment. At the very least you will have opened the door for a discussion and now be better placed to have a conversation about the things you really need to know - what's the core aim of the dashboard, who will its audience be and what behaviour is it trying to produce, etc.  And, who knows, the same may happen in reverse, having seen your client's option made real you might have a similar moment and realise that it does in fact work more effectively than your own concept. That's not a bad thing, the company will have a usable and useful dashboard and you'll have discovered another design pattern that you can store away to be leveraged later.