Big data, text mining and dozens of other technologies are here to stay. Yes, they are helpful, but in most cases, the best computing machine you have is the one between your ears. Its especially useful if you learn how to hack it and leverage your whole body experience when you are doing analysis. Your brain is incredibly flexible and can rewire itself to meet the demands you place upon it.
I've been challenged to do analysis on some "unsolvable" problems using customer feedback and customer behavioral data over the last 15 years. I've been asked:
How should the world's largest hotels design their meeting space to optimize their guest room occupancy and increase meeting planner satisfaction?
How can a company that was open for just 90 days double customer satisfaction and loyalty scores?
How can a personal development company use surveys taken weeks before an offer is made to predict which product a prospect should be offered?
And, frankly, none of these required the use of anything more than some spreadsheets, whiteboards and lots of creative thinking. By the way, I am not a math whiz. I nearly failed trigonometry in high school and I took Euclidian geometry as my token college math course while earning my bachelor degree in history. There were no protractors or compasses needed.
I share this not to impress you but rather to impress upon you that you don't have to be a genius to figure out what customers really want when you have the right data. And, I am not discounting the value of the right software. I use software to speed up the processes. However, the insight does not happen in a computer. It happens in your head (and your body).
Here are eleven of my favorite mind-body hacks I use when I am facing new, unknown data and a tough question. I typically follow this order, but sometimes I mix it up when I am stuck. They may seem weird but I swear by them:
When facing an "impossible" problem, the only thing you need to change is your consciousness.
For more hacks and customer experience analysis training, click here.
I've been challenged to do analysis on some "unsolvable" problems using customer feedback and customer behavioral data over the last 15 years. I've been asked:
How should the world's largest hotels design their meeting space to optimize their guest room occupancy and increase meeting planner satisfaction?
How can a company that was open for just 90 days double customer satisfaction and loyalty scores?
How can a personal development company use surveys taken weeks before an offer is made to predict which product a prospect should be offered?
And, frankly, none of these required the use of anything more than some spreadsheets, whiteboards and lots of creative thinking. By the way, I am not a math whiz. I nearly failed trigonometry in high school and I took Euclidian geometry as my token college math course while earning my bachelor degree in history. There were no protractors or compasses needed.
I share this not to impress you but rather to impress upon you that you don't have to be a genius to figure out what customers really want when you have the right data. And, I am not discounting the value of the right software. I use software to speed up the processes. However, the insight does not happen in a computer. It happens in your head (and your body).
Here are eleven of my favorite mind-body hacks I use when I am facing new, unknown data and a tough question. I typically follow this order, but sometimes I mix it up when I am stuck. They may seem weird but I swear by them:
- Write an absolutely clear intention. You have to be crystal clear on what you are doing. You'll want to write it out and read it to yourself every time you start working on the project. This focuses your mind and clears out the clutter. Nothing less than this intention will be accepted and no distraction is entertained.
- Decide it is solvable. This will be a breakthrough for you. It will take you from dabbling with "impossible" questions to solving them while stretching beyond what you've ever done before. One of my mentors continually reminds me when I am stuck, "You don't need to know how to do something in order to decide to do the thing." She then reminds me that the Wright brothers did not know how to fly before they flew. Similarly, you won't know how to solve the problem until it is solved. So just decide it is solvable and get to work.
- Move into a state of gratitude. Before you start working, fill your whole being with gratitude. Why? Because gratitude affects your whole mind and body. In the positive state of gratitude your body releases a cocktail of neuropeptides that allow you to see more, be more creative and connect ideas that you could not do in a lower emotional state. Read some of the research on the power of gratitude if you don't believe me. Besides, why wouldn't you be grateful. You just decided that this impossible problem is solvable and you are the one who is solving it.
- Segment your data. Don't start by reading everything. Decide what metric you want to move. Then, segment out those customers who affected that metric into those who behaved in the way you want them to from those who behaved in the way you don't want them to. You might take those who canceled a product vs. those who didn't. Or, those who were made an offer to choose one of three products and segment by product purchased their feedback prior to making the purchase. Segment to your heart's content. But, remember to focus on segmenting by the behaviors that really matter to that metric.
- Consume each segment's data separately. Just read. You can take notes if you want, but don't bother coding your comments. Just get into them by reading. Submerse yourself in them. Cover you walls with the feedback or the behavioral data so every time you look up you can see it. A pattern will emerge. This was one of the techniques I used to figure out how to design hotel meeting space. I had 9 years of convention data printed out and taped up all over my office walls. I know there were rumors whispered around the office and the occasional disbelieving glance into my office by passing executives. Who cares what they think. You're solving their problems.
- Pay attention to your intuition. Don't underestimate your body's ability to help you reach an insight. Research shows that our unconscious biofeedback systems can detect patterns in data well before our conscious minds are able to declare that there is a pattern. I have learned to feel whether I am on the right path or not. Is it always right? No, but more often than not it seems to be. In fact, I have learned that I have a "buzzing" sensation in my head within hours of coming up with a breakthrough insight. Is that real or just an imagined state? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter because it fuels me on through the next several hours as if they were mere minutes. And, I get to the breakthrough.
- Test your hunches. Once you feel the breakthrough and have the "Aha!" moment, be sure to test your hypothesis. This is where the software can be handy. It can speed up the process of validating your insights. NEVER, EVER, EVER publish your hunches as fact. Always test them first. While I trust my intuition, I know that the fifth venti Starbucks dark roast in as many hours may have a slight effect on my highly tuned senses. In other words, I might be wrong. Intuition is seductive and addictive because when our brains have the "Aha!" moment, a new neural pathway is created. You actually rewire your brain. In the process, your body releases dopamine which can be addictive. The good feeling that dopamine triggers causes the best of analysts to over estimate the factual nature of their intuitive hypothesis.
- Walk away. This one cannot be overstated. You have got to push yourself over the edge of stress into the state of diminishing returns where you feel stuck and probably a bit frustrated. When you feel that frustration, STOP. Take a few deep breaths because it changes your body chemistry. Then, get up and walk away. You have been in your head for hours. Get back into your body. Feel your body move. Go walk in nature and observe the beauty of nature. Don't think about the problem. Fill your mind with what you feel as you walk and let all of your senses kick in to high gear as you take in the surroundings. Often, this is where the insight or the new perspective that leads to the insight shows up. Stop thinking about the problem consciously by flooding your conscious mind with sense data and you allow your subconscious mind to take over the problem solving.
- Learn about your customers. Your customers use your products and services for mere moments of their lives. Go read about what's happening to them in the other 99% of their lives. Get outside of the walls of your cube or office. Get into their hearts and minds. What do they worry about? What do they really want in life? What have they tried already? I asked these types of questions while working with one client studying millennials and we came up with 27 different product and service ideas that they could innovate.
- Walk in your customer's shoes. I am always amused when I tell one of the many stories to analysts I am training about how I often pretend I am the customer and I walk from one employee to another to understand what the customer is going through. When I am really adventurous, I pretend I am a packet of information or data being transmitted around the company, manipulated by people and processes to reach some ultimate outcome. This latter exercise is particularly helpful when I study the parts of a customer's journey that are not working well. Suddenly, the data flow comes to life and I can see exactly where the problems are at. I once reverse engineered a programming error that was deep in a software product the company I worked for was using. I shared my discovery with the vendor and told them which step in the process was broken and how I thought it should be actually written. They were amazed to find that I was right and then suspicious that I had hacked their system to see the code. We all got a good laugh when I described my process of "being the data."
- Read the data or feedback with a new mind. Finally, after all those other mind-body hacks, come back to the data and read it again. Let it be your second first impression. If you did at least some of the hacks above, you are a new person with new perspectives and you will see something new in the data.
When facing an "impossible" problem, the only thing you need to change is your consciousness.
For more hacks and customer experience analysis training, click here.