Compared to companies with a lower level of insights maturity, advanced insights-driven businesses are more likely to report enviable revenue growth, improve their ability to innovate, and create market differentiation, according to Forrester Research.
Forrester defines being an insights-driven business as: Using data → to deliver actionable insights → about customer experiences that matter most to the business → everywhere in and across the organization.
Most insights teams will tell you they’re already on top of the first three parts of this definition. After all, it’s the insights team’s responsibility to gather and analyze data, synthesize actionable insights, and connect them to the customer experience goals their company cares about.
The area where the majority of insights teams still struggle is in delivering insights not just to a few department heads or line managers, but to everyone in and across the organization who could benefit from them.
In a 2021 study that my company, Bloomfire, conducted with 451 Research (part of S&P Global Marketing Intelligence), we found that only 26% of businesses have a single source of truth for customer insights and knowledge available company-wide. Additionally, 45% of CX leaders said that fewer than half their decisions are made using data.
Businesses striving to increase their insights maturity need to start by improving the cross-functional flow of knowledge and insights. Paul Ponsford, Senior Market Research Manager at Delta Faucet Company, recently spoke about this topic with me in a GreenBook webinar and highlighted several key takeaways from his own experience.
Allow Stakeholders to Self-Serve Insights
Paul shared that a couple of years ago, his insights team at Delta Faucet Company set out to answer the question, “How do we move what we know beyond our team and immediate stakeholders?” They recognized the value of sharing insights widely to promote data-driven decision-making, but they were running into issues scaling access to insights. Their reports were saved to a network drive that was difficult to search and that not everyone in the organization had access to, and team members found themselves fielding a lot of one-off questions from people who were unsure what information was available.
They ultimately decided to overhaul their approach to insights sharing by centralizing their research in Bloomfire (a cloud-based insights and knowledge management platform) and giving stakeholders across the organization access so they could self-serve answers to their research questions. Now, stakeholders can perform a keyword search or browse research content collections to see what the organization already knows, saving them time and reducing one-off questions to the insights team. And as one insights team member put it, “Sometimes they are able to find more than they thought was available, which makes for very happy stakeholders.”
Meet People Where They Are
Improving knowledge flow across your company requires you to reduce points of friction and make it as easy as possible for people to consume knowledge assets. Paul and his team recognize that people rely on multiple communication channels throughout the workday, and they have been using Bloomfire’s integration with Microsoft Teams to deliver notifications about new research to their stakeholders in real-time. They also use email digests (and allow their stakeholders to choose the frequency at which they receive these digests) to deliver previews of the latest research to their stakeholders’ inboxes, encouraging them to click through to the full report to learn more.
Delta Faucet Company’s insights team also knows that since they have increased the reach of their work, they need to meet people where they are at in terms of their familiarity with market research. They have created a series of content on market research basics–including what their department does and what resources they have–to serve as an approachable entry point for stakeholders who are new to the company or market research in general.
Make Knowledge Sharing Part of Your Culture
Paul emphasized that it’s essential to have a strong culture of knowledge and information sharing embedded in your organization. Insights team members need to understand the value of sharing their research widely, and stakeholders need to recognize the business benefits of leveraging insights in their decision-making. In organizations that don’t already have this culture, insights teams can start building it by communicating the ROI of research to business leaders, sharing win stories (i.e. examples of stakeholders making insights-driven decisions), and encouraging stakeholders to engage with research by commenting or asking questions.
While building a sustainable culture of insights sharing takes time, it will ultimately improve knowledge flow by ensuring that stakeholders are not just willing but eager to engage with and act on insights.
