Tag Archives: Vital
Quantitative and Qualitative Data: A Vital Combination
We live in a world of data: There’s more of it than ever before, in a ceaselessly expanding array of forms and locations. Dealing with Data is your window into the ways organizations and data teams tackle the challenges of this new world to help their companies and their customers thrive.
Almost every modern organization is now a data-generating machine. As soon as a company’s systems are computerized, the data-generation engine starts up. When these systems connect with external groups — customers, subscribers, shareholders, stakeholders — even more data is generated, collected, and exchanged. And, as industrial, business, domestic, and personal Internet of Things devices become increasingly intelligent, they communicate with each other and share data to help calibrate performance and maximize efficiency. The result, as Sisense CEO Amir Orad wrote, is that every company is now a data company.
Smart use of your data can be the key to optimizing processes, identifying new opportunities, and gaining or keeping a competitive edge. But are you paying attention to all of your data? Do you have the means to handle every kind of data? And can you take full advantage of the insights it can reveal? Your answers will depend on whether you can gather and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. Let’s consider the differences between the two, and why they’re both important to the success of data-driven organizations.
Digging into quantitative data
Most commonly, we think of data as numbers that show information such as sales figures, marketing data, payroll totals, financial statistics, and other data that can be counted and measured objectively.
This is quantitative data. It’s “hard,” structured data that answers questions such as “how many?” or “how often?” It’s in an organized format, usually rows and columns, and is stored as a relational database, in which there are relationships among these rows and columns.
All descriptive statistics can be calculated using quantitative data. It’s analyzed through numerical comparisons and statistical inferences and is reported through statistical analyses.
As quantitative data is always numeric, it’s relatively straightforward to put it in order, manage it, analyze it, visualize it, and do calculations with it. Spreadsheet software like Excel, Google Sheets, or traditional database management systems all mainly deal with quantitative data. These programs and systems are great at generating basic visualizations like graphs and charts from static data. The challenge comes when the data becomes huge and fast-changing.
Why is quantitative data important?
Quantitative data is often viewed as the bedrock of your business intelligence and analytics program because it can reveal valuable insights for your organization. These numbers show performance, efficiency, reach, market share, revenue in, and expenses out. This is fundamental information when it comes to understanding how your organization is doing.
Additionally, quantitative data forms the basis on which you can confidently infer, estimate, and project future performance, using techniques such as regression analysis, hypothesis testing, and Monte Carlo simulations.
These techniques allow you to:
- See trends and relationships among factors so you can identify operational areas that can be optimized
- Compare your data against hypotheses and assumptions to show how decisions might affect your organization
- Anticipate risk and uncertainty via mathematically modeling
Consequently, using quantitative data, you can make strategic and tactical decisions that will benefit your organization and drive growth.
What are the problems with quantitative data?
Despite its many uses, quantitative data presents two main challenges for a data-driven organization.
First, data isn’t created in a uniform, consistent format. It’s generated by a host of sources in different ways. To access it effectively, you need to organize it and clean it to avoid mistakes, oversights, and repetitions that could compromise the integrity of your data and, by extension, the accuracy of your insights.
The solution to this problem is to ensure that your BI and analytics platform can handle as many sources and forms of data as possible, both on-premises and on the cloud, so that you don’t neglect or miss any of it.
Second, and more challenging, is the fact that not all the information you generate and collect is structured, quantitative data. As data is produced from a growing array of sources, quantitative data may be as little as 20% of all the data available to most organizations. If you focus your efforts entirely on quantitative data, you’ll overlook a huge amount of valuable information, and your insights and decision-making could become distorted as a result. You need a solution that can access and analyze the other 80%: qualitative data.
Exploring qualitative data
Qualitative data is unstructured, meaning it’s not in a predefined format. In its raw state, it comes in a variety of forms: text, social media comments, phone call transcripts, various logs files, images, audio, video, and more.
Often, the information in qualitative data is a categorical variable. This means it describes the characteristics or qualities of data units, such as “what type,” “which category,” “who” (or “which persona”). These create a picture of the context and environment in which the data can help build an understanding of feelings, opinions, and intentions. That’s because qualitative data is concerned with understanding the perspective of customers, users, or stakeholders. This type of data is often collected through less rigid, measurable means than quantitative data. Examples include comments, recordings, interviews, focus group reports, and more, typically received in the natural language of the informants.
Qualitative data is much more subjective, “soft” information than quantitative data. However, advanced analytics can now identify and classify this information and transform it into findings that lead to game-changing insights for organizations.
As the sources of data continue to proliferate, an increasing proportion of it is unstructured and qualitative. It’s more complex, and it requires more storage. Traditional methods of gathering and organizing data can’t organize, filter, and analyze this kind of data effectively. Advanced technology and new approaches are needed. What seem at first to be very random, disparate forms of qualitative data require the capacity of data warehouses, data lakes, and NoSQL databases to store and manage them.
Qualitative data benefits: Unlocking understanding
Qualitative data can go where quantitative data can’t. For example, it’s the gateway to sentiment analysis — understanding how users, customers, and stakeholders think and feel, as well as what they do. Techniques that focus on qualitative data, such as content analysis and narrative analysis, enable you to:
- Analyze text to find the most common themes in open-ended data such as user feedback, interview transcripts, and surveys, so you can pinpoint the most important focus areas
- Better interpret feelings or perceptions about your organization, product, services, processes, or brand, to help identify what changes or innovations would be most effective
Having access to this information gives you a new dimension of insights on which to base decisions and determine the tactical and strategic direction of your organization. With qualitative data, you can understand intention as well as behavior, thereby making predictive analytics more accurate and giving you fuller insights. You can analyze and learn from the large volume of unstructured data to ensure that your data-driven decisions are as solid as possible.
For example, Skullcandy, the manufacturer of headphones, earbuds, and other audio and wireless products, uses predictive and sentiment analysis to understand customers better. This enables the company’s product development team to explore opportunities for reducing returns and warranty requests for new products before they’re even released and get reactions from customers about current products. Skullcandy uses these insights to hone its new products based on what customers say they like and dislike, so that it can offer more attractive products to its target market.
Getting the most from qualitative data
Qualitative data eludes the rigid categorization and the storage limitations of traditional databases. It provides the raw material for information that is more varied and harder to organize than structured, qualitative data. Making sense of and deriving patterns from it calls for newer, more advanced technology.
Natural language processing (NLP), involving machine learning, is how your BI and analytics platform can understand the meaning of unstructured data such as emails, comments, feedback, and instant messages. It enables search-driven analytics that allow you to process complex NLP, because you can ask the system questions using natural, everyday language. Plus, you can receive visualizations and embed insights into external apps, even if what you’re asking for is relatively complex from an analytical point of view.
Furthermore, systems powered by AI and augmented analytics continuously learn what people choose to do with data. Algorithms identify patterns in the data, and these make search results faster, more accurate, and more complete. You can integrate AI analytics tools with other interfaces like Amazon Alexa and chatbots, drawing on these technologies’ impressive developments in NLP, too.
With all this potential to find new insights, it’s no surprise that 97% of business leaders say their businesses are investing in big data and AI initiatives.
Better together: Working with qualitative data and quantitative data
Quantitative data is the bedrock of your BI and analytics. It provides a solid foundation on which you can build data visualizations and insights that are fundamental to your organization.
With that foundation in place, qualitative data enables you to take your analytics further, get more understanding from a fast-growing array of sources, and power your decision-making with data from even more perspectives.
You have to be able to work with both kinds of data in order to unlock the most comprehensive insights. Together, they can help set the stage for game-changing pivots and innovations that can keep your organization at the head of the pack.
Adam Murray began his career in corporate communications and public relations in London and New York before moving to Tel Aviv. He’s spent the last ten years working with tech companies like Amdocs, Gilat Satellite Systems, and Allot Communications. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature. When he’s not spending time with his wife and son, he’s preoccupied with his beloved football team, Tottenham Hotspur.
Collagen-Based Products and Smart Business Management Catapult Vital Proteins to Massive Growth
Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast
Founded in 2014 by Kurt Seidensticker, Vital Proteins is a health and beauty brand focused on sustainably-sourced collagen products as well as products that help promote the production of collagen.
Why does this matter? Collagen is an essential nutrient for health, fitness and natural beauty. It’s beneficial for skin, hair, nails and joints. However, it’s often stripped from our diets by modern food processing. And that’s exactly the hole Seidensticker looked to fill. As an avid runner, he experienced joint pains and aches—that is, until his nephew suggested he look into collagen peptides.
Seidensticker realized there was a need for a fitness product like this, so when he eventually went to market in 2014 with collagen peptide powder, it’s no surprise that health nuts, athletes, celebrities and influencers shouted from the rooftops about the brand.
The numbers speak for themselves: In just five years, Vital Proteins reached $ 100 million in revenue and continues to grow rapidly.
Of course, this type of massive growth comes with some big growing pains that collagen just can’t fix.
Vital Proteins’ Chief Technology Officer, Laura Seidensticker, joins this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast” to explain some of the business management challenges the company faced early on. Vital Proteins worked off spreadsheets for the first few years—”hundreds of spreadsheets,” Laura said—which made it difficult to forecast, manage the supply chain, track financial information and keep up with the headcount it took to maintain the growing business.
Thus, Laura, Kurt and the rest of the leadership team began looking into business management solutions that could meet the company’s needs and continue to scale with it. They ultimately decided to implement NetSuite, utilizing SuiteSuccess to get up and running quickly, more easily and more confidently. Since then, Vital Proteins has implemented customizable modules for advanced manufacturing and warehousing, enabling transparency, empowering employees and creating more efficiencies across the business.
Learn how Vital Proteins continues to grow since implementing NetSuite, and how one, unified system allows the company to focus on exciting projects in the future. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud and YouTube.
by NetSuite filed under
Transparency is Vital Step for Restaurants in Addressing Food Allergens
Posted by Kevin Lentz, NetSuite Product Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality
Eating out should be a relaxing experience where guests sit back, order freely and enjoy their meal. For those with food allergies, though, it is rarely quite that carefree. For the estimated 15 million U.S. consumers with a food allergy, a restaurant can prove to be a very challenging environment. A survey conducted at the 2007 Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network conference found that 34% of the 294 respondents had experienced at least one food allergic reaction in a restaurant. A different study revealed that nearly half of fatal food allergic reactions over a 13-year period were caused by food from a restaurant or other food service establishment.
And the stakes are high for the restaurant. If you mishandle the situation, your best case is a ruined evening out and a lost customer, but your worst case could be dire. With food allergic reactions accounting for as many as 30,000 ER visits each year and as many as 200 deaths, it’s important to get your allergy preparations right.
So far, only four states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Virginia) and a handful of cities have enacted legislation concerning allergen safety in restaurants. So how can a restaurant proactively serve this segment? In a word: transparency.
Anything you can do to shed light on your prep process and ingredient lists will be helpful. This consumer segment is intensely scrutinous and inquisitive, and they have to be. So have the information as readily available as possible. That may be as simple as ensuring waitstaff are familiar with company-approved answers to questions, or you may choose to go further.
For instance, are you able to provide a list of each ingredient for each of your dishes, and are you able to confirm the source and preparation methods for each of your ingredients? Some restaurants are able to provide the actual labels with clear allergen statements to their patrons upon request. Consider whether you are able to do this at the time of ordering or ahead of time when the guest is researching dining options.
Consider also how food is prepared in your kitchen. Do you maintain a separate location to prepare allergy-free dishes? Be sure you can answer questions around cleaning and cross-contamination, as well. What other dishes are prepared there? How often is it cleaned? Ready access to this information will help put allergen-aware guests at ease.
Perhaps most important is staff training. Staff should be regularly trained for food allergen safety and allergen awareness, and consistently reminded of safe food handling procedures. No amount of process will keep guests safe if it does not become a way of doing business. This is also a good time mention that you should research your state’s regulations in terms of staff training, supplemental allergen awareness training, and any signage required to maintain compliance.
With an estimated 10% of the population directly affected by a food allergy, it’s important that the restaurateur does everything possible to properly and safely serve this segment. Often, that means empowering your staff and your customer. Empower your staff with adequate training and awareness so they can assist the guest appropriately and empower your allergy-aware guests with whatever information that they may need to sit back order freely and enjoy their meal.
Everyone will be better for it.
by NetSuite filed under
The Vital Role of Customer Service in the Sharing Economy
By 2022, the sharing economy is expected to double, reaching US$ 40 Billion, according to Juniper Research. Pioneers such as Airbnb and Uber are now global titans, taking in billions of dollars per year. From sharing furniture to sharing clothing, every industry seems to be trying to make its way into the lucrative sharing business.
With the market becoming more saturated with products, how do companies differentiate themselves from their competitors?
The answer: customer service. By 2020, customers
will give more weight to customer service than to the price or product itself, a recent survey suggests. Even today, 86 percent of customers say they would pay more for higher customer service, and 67 percent claim poor customer service is the reason they left a certain company.
In the current climate, where every retailer seems to be trending toward a more collaborative environment, customer service should be treated as a valuable tool to make the customer feel comfortable, catered to, and coming back for more.
The ‘Assuring Touch’
With the sharing economy expanding into nearly every industry, providing the best customer service becomes essential. This is especially important for niche industries — where customers may want to try something that they might never have done before. In situations like this, the customer needs expert advice in order to provide assurance that they’re getting the exact product they need in order to have the best possible experience.
Curation of the product to fit the specific customer is a great way
to manufacture a positive customer experience. It doesn’t make sense to use an outdated one-size-fits-all approach. Customer service needs to be flexible and to take into account what the customers ask for, in order to recommend the correct products.
Take the ski industry, for instance: Those who rent equipment likely will not have very much experience about the specific items they need, making customer service their only recourse. For example, a quality customer service representative would recommend what to wear in various weather conditions, or what kind of gear would work best for an individual. In this case, to give vital recommendations is essential to make sure customers have the best possible experience.
Furthermore — and especially when goods are shipped to the customer —
quality assurance that the product will be in good shape when it arrives is equally important.
When someone plans to access the sharing economy, many times it is for a major event, and they have skepticism that everything will go right. Making sure they know that their needs will be met will cultivate a positive relationship with the client.
Customer Feedback to Uphold Company Values
When the actual product choice depends on the particular client’s interests, it becomes more essential to know how the customer felt about the service.
For a business in the sharing economy, it’s important to understand both what the company does right and wrong in order to adapt for the future. Getting feedback in the form of
reviews or personal calls could prove vital in figuring out how to improve your service and provide the best experience for your customers in the future.
Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of the sharing economy is the sheer diversity in potential services. Contractors and gig workers provide diverse benefits, allowing customers to customize their experience by choosing the specific product they want. Think Airbnb hosts, who customize their rooms in order to fit a specific customer niche.
Of course, there is a downside to this: In the sharing economy, customers interact mostly with contractors, as opposed to actual employees of the company. While they may not be employees of the company, constractors still need to uphold the company’s values. For this reason, it is essential that they understand and support the company’s culture, as they act as the face of the company in the customer’s eyes.
Customer reviews let the company know if a contractor is the right fit to represent the company. Of course, if a customer has a bad experience with a contractor, positive customer service can go a long way toward achieving damage control.
For example, Uber has suffered reputational damage from controversies over
drivers harassing customers. The best scenario would be to have screening processes in place to make sure the right people are working with the company from the start. That said, being able to hear feedback complaints from customers in order to keep the contractors in check is an important part of cultivating a positive image.
For large companies, it’s hard to ensure that every contractor adheres to company values, but reacting to negative workers — and banning them from service as you would fire any employee — will go a long way toward improving customer trust.
Turning Customers Into PR Advocates
The best part about having satisfied customers in the sharing economy is the fact that they endlessly want to share their positive experiences with their family and friends. They essentially become free PR wherever they go.
Traditional marketing works by segmenting potential clients into sales funnels, but in the sharing economy,
people are much more influenced by reviews, other online feedback, and positive comments from people they know.
Word-of-mouth plays a significant role in the development of a business in the sharing economy — especially for young companies. This
is reflected in the numbers: 63 percent of sharers said they found the site through a personal recommendation, and 91 percent would recommend their last sharing service to a friend. This is why it is essential to provide the best possible customer service, as negative word-of-mouth could prove disastrous.
Customer service plays a vital role in virtually every company, but in no industry is customer service as important as in the sharing economy. While there is nothing wrong with dreaming of starting the next Airbnb, it’s important to remember that customer service is the foundation of successful businesses in the sharing economy.
Churn Prevention: New UK Rules Make Analytics Vital
Whilst UK consumers are likely to be enthused by the reforms around switching mobile provider and switch requests announced by Ofcom recently, this will give mobile operators an additional regulatory headache when it comes to churn prevention. The reforms are centred on making the switching process easier and enabling consumers to invoke the process by sending a free text message to their current provider.
Ofcom research has suggested that one of the biggest hurdles that consumers face is “having to speak to your current provider, and facing unwanted attempts to persuade you to stay.” So, whilst it’s clearly in the operators interests to have a conversation with the customer to incentivise them to stay, customers “will control how much contact they have with their current mobile provider, preventing companies from delaying and frustrating the switch process.”
This raises questions that operators will need to consider. Most providers cite their customer satisfaction measures, like Net Promoter Scores, as absolutely key, and consider exceptional service to be a competitive differentiator. In fact, recent research presented by Analysis Mason at the European Telecoms Summit 2017 suggests that for every 1% improvement in customer satisfaction there is a correlating 4% in churn reduction.
Yet with around 5 million customers per year choosing to switch provider, it is clear that operators still have work to do in order to maintain loyal relationships with their customers. Removing the “traditional” retention conversation could re-focus providers into ensuring they are managing their customers appropriately before the customer begins to consider their options.
Churn Analytics
This is where advanced analytics comes into its own. Analytics can proactively segment customers according to their likelihood of leaving, with churn scores based on their profile and network activity data, such as the age of their mobile device, number of negative customer support interactions and dropped call or service incidents.
These customers can also be segmented by value and other items, including cost to serve, in order to inform the decision as to what tailored, automated actions will mitigate each individual’s risk of churn. This includes incentives that exceed expectations and delight customers, or indeed whether the investment to retain a customer could be better used elsewhere and allow some low-value customers to churn.
Having the ability to interpret the churn signals coming from different customer segments, added to the tools to execute decisions that mitigate the risk and cost-effectively retain customers, is becoming ever more important in managing churn prevention. This is supported through research by Three quoted in the Ofcom report:
“61% of switchers who were offered a reactive save deal said they had made their final decision before starting the switching process, and their previous provider could not reasonably have done anything to change their mind about switching.”
There must be scope for operators to understand these switchers at a more sophisticated level and take action that dissuades them from making switch requests.
How Fast Can You Respond to a Switch Request?
Some savvy customers will of course use the process to their advantage as they do today; many customers will say they want to leave in order to get a better deal and the churn prevention activity is relatively straightforward. However, one of the policy aims of the Ofcom decision is to reduce unwanted attempts to persuade customers to remain. They lay out that expectations of providers are, in short, not to proactively contact the customer about the Port / Switching code in a way that may induce the customer to not proceed with the switch or to call the current provider. However, they do recognise that once a switch request has been made, operators are still free to contact the customer to attempt a save.
With a one working day, or less, time frame (in most cases) between the request and receiving a switch code, there is a short window of opportunity for the operators to get clever about how they identify the optimal save incentives and communicate this to the customer through the most effective digital channel that is likely to result in a save. The more agile operators are likely to use prescriptive analytics and decisioning to identify the incentive that makes most sense financially, the personalised offer that is likely to convince the customer to stay and the channel(s) that the customer is most likely to respond to.
As with so many other changes in the modern era, the operators that are best equipped to adapt to these changing regulatory requirements and manage churn prevention will be those that have embraced deep analytics and have the tools to put the analytical outputs into operation.
How Medical Mutual of Ohio Gains Vital Insights from Mainframe Security Data in Real Time
Medical Mutual of Ohio has been successfully using Splunk Enterprise® to monitor unauthorized access on their distributed systems. Splunk Enterprise enables a consolidated enterprise-wide view of machine data collected across the business, which makes it possible to correlate events that might not raise suspicion when each is seen by itself but could be indicative of a threat when seen together.
To take full advantage of the Splunk platform’s correlation capabilities, Medical Mutual wanted to make mainframe security data available in real time to the Splunk Enterprise platform to help protect customer information stored in DB2 from unauthorized access.
In order to achieve this goal, they deployed Syncsort’s Ironstream® software. Now, Medical Mutual is able to see previously hard-to-access mainframe data alongside other security information it was already analyzing in Splunk Enterprise.
“Medical Mutual of Ohio has been using Splunk Enterprise to monitor unauthorized access on distributed systems,” said Craig Fox, Security Specialist at Medical Mutual of Ohio. “Now by adding mainframe data provided by Ironstream into Splunk Enterprise, we finally have a real-time, 360-degree view that enables us to correlate all of our security data from across the enterprise and gain visibility into user-authentication data and access attempts tracked on the mainframe.”
Fox says that his organization was impressed with the Splunk platform’s ability to handle massive amounts of data from different formats and indexes and to decipher and correlate security events through analytics. He also is impressed with how Ironstream can stream mainframe security data for even greater insights. “Our mainframe team is also satisfied with Ironstream’s low overhead, which keeps mainframe processing costs low.”
Syncsort issued a press release with more details on the Medical Mutual Use Case. They also recently issued a press release on new capabilities in Ironstream that provide new ways to push additional mainframe data sources to Splunk solutions for more comprehensive application analysis.
Syncsort’s roadmap for Ironstream includes a consistent delivery of enhancements to handle emerging use cases like Ironstream does for Medical Mutual today. We want to make the right data from evolving data sources readily available in real-time to Splunk Enterprise for valuable business insights. This is consistent with Syncsort’s Big Iron to Big Data strategy — bridging the Big Iron to Big Data gap by creating a fast, simple and innovative data pipeline to deliver diverse enterprise data, including mainframe and other legacy operational data to next-gen analytical platforms such like Splunk.
Syncsort allows organizations to use its free Starter Edition for moving z/OS Syslog data into Splunk Enterprise. Unlike a typical technology trial, Syncsort allows organizations to use the Starter Edition to move the data without a time limit and run the applications in production at no charge.
Cultural readiness vital for HR data analytics
Human resources analytics is the shiny new toy for many companies looking to procure and secure talented workers. But before jumping on the trend, companies need to understand and plan for what analytics can do. Paul Seo, global head of HR business intelligence and analytics for Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., recently discussed HR data analytics with SearchFinancialApplications.
What are the best practices for planning and evaluating an HR data analytics project?
Paul Seo: To enable analytics, the first thing you need to have in place is infrastructure. It gives you scale and speed. The amount of data you are handling is exponentially growing — the speed to provide an answer is [faster and faster]. Infrastructure gives you a highway system to move a lot of data, synthesize it and push it through much quicker to meet the demand.
Second is data governance. There is data coming from everywhere, and it is also going out everywhere. You need a traffic cop in the middle, a governance process in place to make sure people using analytics are using it as intended. Otherwise, it is a highway system without police or traffic lights.
The third is your analytic capability. You need the right talent in your HR organization. This is what creates the business value. Turnover went from 10% to 15% last year; now what? You need to be able to provide insight that will allow people to make the best decision possible. Without a proper skill set in-house to turn data into intuitive and compelling stories, it would be difficult to make HR analytics stick.
The fourth is cultural readiness. With enough money, you can build the infrastructure [and] hire enough smart scientists to build the analytic capability, but if you don’t use it, it doesn’t really matter. To truly gain knowledge and the value of analytics, you must integrate it into the decision-making process.
It is a very different mind-set to make decisions using analytics versus simply enabling analytics. It is not something you can switch on and off instantaneously. It is something that is embedded.
Unless there is a cultural readiness and cultural capability to translate and leverage the analytics, then the first three don’t really matter. I would argue that this is the biggest impediment to making HR analytics work. Applying analytics to our workforce is a new concept in HR, and — naturally — this brings wariness, and hence we are our biggest obstacle to embracing and utilizing analytics. Until we get over this fear, it will be extremely challenging to truly apply and utilize analytics in HR.
Do you have any advice on identifying metrics that offer the quickest payoff for HR data analytics?
Seo: It is the integration with finance that holds the key to the biggest payoff: monetization of HR functions. Organizations should know exactly how much they spend to hire. They should know exactly how much they lose as a result of termination. As they invest in talent development, organizations should also know the expected return. [There is a] cost to hire, cost of replacement and cost of turnover. If you are going to provide training, for example, what is the average return you are going to get on that training? We need to put dollar signs next to everything we do.
The HR culture is grounded in relationships. How do you change that DNA? How can companies get over their reluctance to apply HR data analytics and live with the results?
Seo: It has to be mandated by the CEO. Human capital management is a business. We deal with the business of people. To put it very simply, running a business is about maximizing your profit. So we should approach human capital management in the same fashion. All HR functions, including talent acquisition, talent management — I like to call this workforce optimization—and talent retention should be driven with optimization in mind, and optimization, to put it very simply, is about maximizing your profit.
For every single person who walks out the door, for example, we should be able to tell the business what the bottom line impact would be and what we are willing to spend to either retain or recruit. Yet most HR organizations don’t follow this recipe.
Why are HR leaders hesitant to apply analytics?
Seo: I am not sure hesitance is the right word. I think the fundamental ways by which HR functions are evaluated are changing, and that naturally brings uncertainty.
Paul SeoWhen you quantify everything, you will be evaluated based on not only the improvement itself, but also the degree of improvement. This makes everything very factual; so, less about the relationship and more about the results. That is daunting for many in HR leadership. It presents a lot of political pressure they never felt before, and I think many HR leaders are simply trying to figure out how to navigate this new expectation.
In Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends survey for 2015, only 8% of the respondents surveyed believe their organizations have a strong HR data analytics team in place, a slightly higher percentage than in 2014. Why is that?
Seo: Most HR leadership is trying to figure out what to do and how to navigate this new paradigm shift. The problem isn’t technology or the analytics. I think it is purely cultural.
Top-down is the only way to make it stick. A chief HR officer needs vision and needs to see analytics as an addition, not a subtraction.
What software does Marsh & McLennan use for analytics?
Seo: We use Oracle OBIEE. We went live about a year ago. It is a visualization tool. It takes the data in the data warehouse, spins it and puts it out in a presentation in a dashboard to allow end users to consume.
Everything is on premise. Our data warehouse is on prem and OBIEE is on prem. We don’t use cloud — not yet.
We use PeopleSoft for core HR functions.
What are the pluses and minuses of OBIEE?
Seo: The pluses are that it is backed by a very powerful engine. It also uses the same language as the transactional system, like PeopleSoft, which is a very widely used application, and Taleo, a talent acquisition application.
A minus right now is visualization, in terms of aesthetics. It is not quite there yet with some other competitors, but I think Oracle is making good traction.
Do you have any lessons learned regarding your analytics software implementation?
Seo: Change management is a lot more complicated than building a dashboard or an analytical capability. Many organizations underestimate the difficulty of changing habits. It takes time to marinate.
What are some examples of the possibilities of HR analytics?
Seo: Predictive analytics is important for controlling turnover. It provides the trends of certain individuals who leave, their attributes, where they come from, their length of service, their location and job code. You can factor all that into the existing population and try to understand who is most likely to leave in a certain period of time. Based on that, you can reduce the likelihood of them leaving. There are some top actions HR can perform to reduce turnover.
Another would be optimizing talent acquisition. Analytics helps you understand historically where you have obtained the best talent. If you need engineers, you will know where you have had the best luck. Based on when the vacancy is likely to come, you can recruit and build a pipeline. It will reduce your cost of hire and your vacancy rate.
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Which Celeb Are You? And Other Vital Planning Questions
Now that it’s January, you might be expecting the standard New-Years-resolution/yearly planning post. Well I’m here to introduce to you a new and more glamorous form of planning for your year.
This won’t help you with your planning per se – it’s a journey into abstract thinking that involves celebrities, cars and shoes. Wait! Don’t bounce! It will be fun and I will entice you with the benefits. Just give me a paragraph.
A month or so back, my manager told me about a visualizing/planning exercise she did for the company: They asked her and other colleagues to determine which celebrity they thought embodied the company, and then to do the same with a car and a watch (but I don’t know anything about watches except that they keep time, so I changed it to shoes because I can).
OK I lied, I need two paragraphs: the purpose of the exercise was to get everyone thinking about how we not only perceive Infusionsoft and what we think it embodies, but about how we can actively continue fostering that perception to people who don’t work here. Reputations and perceptions do not make themselves, and since they are such abstract things, putting a concrete symbol with them can help you in your marketing and growth strategies.
Here’s why you should do that too: even if this exercise doesn’t spur you to go on a crazy planning spree, it will at least give you a solid idea of who you think your company is and how you can help other people see that. You can also draw on your celebrity, car or shoe mascot’s marketing or PR strategies.
Here are the mascots I picked for our blog (not the company as a whole) and why, as well as some tips on what to consider when you’re choosing mascots.
Our Celebrity: Matt Damon
Just the fact that he’s Jason Bourne should be enough, but there’s a lot beyond Matt Damon’s close combat martial arts skills that the blog wants to emulate.
First, Matt Damon is talented. He’s got serious box office draw, but he backs it up with a consistent display of acting chops, and his oeuvre ranges from serious drama to action to comedy pretty seamlessly. That range is something we’re working to hone for our new blog strategy. Yes, we want to be the resource to lead entrepreneurs down the path to success, but we want to be interesting and funny while we do it.
Damon is an active philanthropist and appears to be a good person. It’s important to us that we’re not just great at what we do (which is making you’re great at what you do), but that we also create a positive, nurturing environment and maintain credible character. That’s an abstract trait to nurture in a blog, but we’ve got high hopes and big plans.
Think about:
Reputation
This applies to both a celeb’s tendency to be in the tabloids and their professional status in the industry, since choosing someone untalented or scandal-ridden might be a bit counterproductive. But remember, everything is fungible, so if Val Kilmer just totally embodies your business, own it and note that a key difference is that you’re not a has-been. On the flip side, if your business has made a recent comeback, keep Michael Keaton in mind; Birdman made him cool again (for the moment, at least).
Don’t worry about:
Looks
We all know the bit about books and covers, but don’t count out excellent actors like Stanley Tucci, who may not have the Damon looks, but man, is he everywhere and good at it. It’s very acceptable to go off the A list, because sometimes the best talent is left off it.
Our car: Tesla
OK, probably everyone in the country would choose Tesla right now, but we’re going to stick with our choice because it’s apropos and Teslas are really cool. But up front I’ll say that what does not apply to our blog about Teslas is accessibility. They’re still prohibitively expensive for most people, but we’re not and we never will be. This blog is meant to be accessible to anyone, whether they’re our customer or not.
Something our whole company values is innovation and constant improvement, and if any company on the planet is doing that right now, it’s Tesla. They have the potential to completely change and redefine the auto – and transportation – industry as we know it.
I’m not saying we’re going redefine the blog, but I’m also sort of saying we want to redefine the blog. Our former blog just wasn’t cutting it, and we’re in the midst redefining not only how our blog will function by itself, but how it can be come the resource small businesses turn to for help, questions, encouragement, congratulations – and basically everything.
We’d also like retractable door handles. Those are cool.
Think about:
Safety record
Before you go choosing your car mascot, do a little search to see what the model’s recall history is. GM might not be the best pick for your car mascot at present.
Don’t worry about:
Luxury quotient
It might seem a little hypocritical since we chose Tesla, but don’t worry about whether your car mascot is a luxury vehicle or not. If they’d let me, I might have decided the blog was a Subaru. (OK, they probably would have let me do that.)
Just remember: it’s about overall perception, not about the price point.
Our shoe: Spy gadget shoes
From the Get Smart shoe phone to the Inspector Gadget roller skate shoes to From Russia: With Love shoes with a retractable blade, we’re going a little outside the box in proclaiming our shoe mascot.
And why is this blog gadget shoes? We strive to make the content on our blog useful and not just limited to its basic function of reading material. We also want the blog to be actionable so that if you need hypothetical roller skates in your content shoes, you’ll know to come here first.
We also want to be funny. And what’s funnier than a shoe you can talk into?
Think about:
Fictional shoes
If your company caters to high-end, luxury clients, head the Paul Simon way and go for a shoe mascot with diamonds on its soles. Perhaps you want clients to feel at home, so you choose ruby slippers, or you look for just the right customer fit and you’re a glass slipper. If you’re Nike, you’re Nike and you should own it, but don’t feel limited to real brands – it’s OK to trek into fictional footwear territory.
Don’t worry about:
Much else. If you’ve made it this far through this process, you should have a pretty good idea about who you are as a company and what you want to help people understand about who you are.
In the thinking mood now? Check out some more metaphorical thinking exercises here.
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Technology As An Enabler: Why It’s Vital In Your Search For Top Talent
As the new breed of ‘internet natives’ starts to hit the labor market, it’s a good time to reflect on the 
dizzying changes that have taken place in the way people search and apply for work.
More to the point, how can you make sure that your organization is harnessing technology so as to maximize its effectiveness in the recruitment process?
Technology can now be the best enabling tool in the recruitment process. But using technology in recruitment is much more sophisticated than asking candidates to email in their applications, and indeed there are still more developments to come in this area.
Ensuring that job applicants can readily access critical information, and apply for positions using electronic devices is essential to effective recruiting efforts. But it’s also important to remember that tried-and-true recruitment methods, such as word-of-mouth and personal recommendations, still have their place.
The way that candidates are scouring jobs markets and applying for positions reflects shifts in the use of technology and social media, but there are also particular traits unique to different regional markets.
How did people find work in 2014?
It’s no surprise that most people no longer scour the ‘situations vacant’ columns in newspapers, thanks to the arrival of the digital age.
The most frequent way of landing new jobs in 2014 was overwhelmingly through online job boards, with approximately a quarter of respondents of respondents in EMEA (26%) and APAC (27%) using this method.
Word-of-mouth remains an important conduit for jobs, particularly in EMEA where 16% used it successfully, compared with 8% in APAC.
Significantly more APAC respondents (23%) secured their most recent job through recruitment/ staffing companies or headhunters than in EMEA (16%).
Print advertising was responsible for just 3% of work secured, but what is also interesting is that social media sites accounted for just 2% of new jobs.
How did people apply for work in 2014?
Again, it should be no surprise that sending in a hard copy of a resume by mail is a thing of the past.
In regard to the actual method used to apply for a new position, the survey shows that electronic methods are now almost universal and have long replaced hard copy resumes.
More than 90% in both EMEA and APAC regions applied for their most recent job using an electronic application.
Just one-in-five used traditional hard copy applications.
It’s worth noting that other methods such as social media and video interview remain in their infancy as recruitment tools.
What employers can do to make the recruiting process easier
Not all firms are getting off to a good start when it comes to the recruiting process.
The initial phase of the recruitment process is crucial when it comes to getting off the right foot with potential candidates, and showing your business in its best light.
There is a frequent complaint from many candidates of a shortage of communication regarding where they stand in the application process. It’s often described as a ‘communications blackout’ which leaves applicants confused and bewildered.
One of the keys to improving the job application process likes in communicating with candidates to let them know where they stand, after submitting an application, or after an interview.
It’s vital that employers make it as easy as possible to submit applications. Job requirements, qualifications, experience and salary should all be easy for potential candidates to understand.
Too many firms treat the recruiting process with a degree of indifference, and actually make it difficult for top-talent to apply for work.
An onerous or outdated application process can deter in-demand job candidates, and mean that you lose potential new hires to rival companies.
To find out how you can make the job application process at your business better, download the ebook Candidate Experience: From Hiring to Onboarding.
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5 Vital Sales Metrics B2B Marketers Should Be Tracking in Salesforce
A marketer’s job should not end where a salesperson’s job begins. One of the biggest mistakes that B2B marketers make is assuming that their job should end with lead generation. But All B2B marketers should be full-cycle marketers, which is to say they should stay engaged with sales and help move leads through each stage of the sales cycle. Generating leads isn’t enough! You should know which efforts are generating calls, leading to conversations, creating opportunities and—most importantly—driving ROI.
Driving Revenue Should Be in Every Marketer’s Job Description
This is just one of seven essential sales dashboards revealed in our latest eBook.
Our latest eBook 7 Essential Salesforce Dashboards for Predicting and Influencing Inside Sales Success reveal some of the most important metrics that sales managers should be tracking. But it’s equally important for your marketing team isn’t also tracking how campaigns are actually driving results. When sales performance suffers, it is common at many organizations to play the blame game. Salespeople blame marketers for bad leads and marketers blame salespeople for not closing deals. Having been on both sides of the fence, I understand the desire to want to pass the buck. But instead, marketers and salespeople should be working in tandem to move leads through the sales cycle. Think of dashboards like a treasure map that can lead you to more revenue. By knowing where leads are getting stuck in the sales cycle, marketers can take actions to help more of those deals close.
Here are five vital sales metrics that should appear in virtually any B2B marketing dashboard.
Qualified Lead Velocity
This is a great sales and marketing alignment metric, as knowing the number of leads that marketing is handing to sales each month can help identify whether there are enough qualified leads for inbound salespeople to be working. This number should always be increasing! If marketers are unable to deliver increases in qualified leads month over month, than they need to adjust their efforts or invest in new channels in order to drive more leads.
Inbound Calls by Campaign
Marketers need to ensure that the phones are lighting up with the right leads and not the wrong ones. Phone leads can be some of the highest quality leads, but only if those leads are qualified. It’s the job of marketers to ensure that campaigns aren’t only causing phones to ring, but that they drive conversations with high quality inbound leads. Knowing how calls correlate with revenue can help marketers assess the ROI of campaigns.
As an example, suppose you have two campaigns:
Campaign A
Number of inbound calls generated: 1000
Overall Revenue Generated from inbound calls: $ 100K
Campaign B
Number of inbound calls generated: 500
Overall Revenue Generated from inbound calls: $ 100K
Even though the campaigns generated the same amount of revenue, Campaign B actually provides better ROI because it took up less of your sales team’s time. Knowing this can help marketers invest more in the most efficient efforts.
Opportunities by Campaign
If a campaign is driving a lot of calls but not a lot of opportunities, it’s quite possible that Marketing can do a better job of targeting qualified leads. For example, say you’re selling a marketing automation platform for Salesforce users. Your lead profile should be marketers using Salesforce. Therefore, you likely want to avoid campaigns that flood inbound phone lines with leads that don’t have or plan to invest in Salesforce.
Closed/Won Deals by Campaign
If a campaign is generating a lot of deals that go to the opportunity stage but aren’t closing, then it means that salespeople could probably use some additional resources to close deals. Marketers can work with salespeople to provide prospects with contextually relevant collateral (slide decks, one-sheets, eBooks, etc.) that can move deals forward.
Competitors We Lose To
Examining which competitors you are losing deals to on a regular basis can also help markers pivot their strategy. Salespeople and marketers can work together to craft a narrative of ways that your company exceeds specific competitors. By crafting collateral that shows ways that you can beat various competitors, you can win more of those highly competitive deals.
For help discovering which metrics are most vital to your business drivers, check out our latest eBook 7 Essential Salesforce Dashboards for Predicting and Influencing Inside Sales Success.
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