All posts by cathy

A Marketer’s Guide To Agile – Top 7 Reasons Why Your Data Is So Crappy

How and when data is captured is a vital part of decision-making in call center scripting, digital architecture, sales presentations, just about everything that touches a customer. There are things you can do to help make it better, but some issues will be always with us. So, here’s why your data is crapola, in no particular order…

1. TEXTING (yes, TEXTING)

In the data world, spelling counts. Whether data is being entered by professionals or by the customers themselves, text fields will be rife with errors. That is true no matter how clever you get with the drop-down boxes or type-ahead functionality. The proliferation of text-speak has made this worse, and spelling is rapidly becoming a matter of personal choice. That doesn’t bode well for text-mining. And no, spell-correct is not the antidote. Entire websites are devoted to how that can go horribly and hilariously wrong.

2. IT WORKLOAD

“Why can’t the digital dev folks just put another box in the online form so the prospect can enter their promo code?”

They can! They will! Just as soon as that work order rises up to the top of the priority list. Right now the project manager has it in the backlog. Where work orders go to ripen, get covered with brown spots, and die.

3.BAD DROPDOWNS

The data was shocking. Month after month, nearly a third of all disenrolling customers were dropping service due to bankruptcy. Nationwide. All segments. So I planted myself in the call center for a few days. In the CRM system, the drop-down box marked “Reason for Leaving” had 35 choices. “Bankruptcy” starts with a B, so it came up at the top of the drop-down. Too bad “Alien Invasion” wasn’t one of the choices, it would have been caught more quickly. So, yeah, that happens. In my experience, 12 choices is the limit for an effective drop-down in a call center. Any more than 12, and boom – 30% of the country mysteriously goes bankrupt.

4. POOR REQUIREMENTS

The marketer: “This email address is blank – it should be a required field.”
The analyst: “Someone input their mailing address in the email field.”
The email vendor: “Lots of these email addresses are undeliverable.”

Coding an email field with an input mask requiring a “@” character and a period will solve the analyst’s problem. Making it a required field will mean 100% of records are populated, which will satisfy the marketer (at least temporarily). Coding an email field with that input mask plus making it a required field will get you a lot of bad email addresses like “noneofyourbiz@buzzoff.com”. That can get you blacklisted with ISP’s. It can also spike your abandonment rate on the digital form page.

But marketers – it’s not the developer’s job to know that – it’s yours. He or she will code to your requirement specs. Think through the ramifications of stakeholder requirements – and make sure the requirements reflect a considered decision.

5. USER EXPERIENCE

First, let’s get one thing straight. UX and good data capture are NOT mutually exclusive. But what’s great for data capture isn’t always great for the user experience, and the two must be balanced. I once had an HR stakeholder tell me that data was vitally important to her, so it was a requirement that users submit 10 fields of personal data into a web form before they could browse jobs on the company’s career site. I told her that strategy would get her the best data and the three most committed job seekers she ever saw. The rest would bail.

6. COMMUNICATION

The promo postcards start hitting consumer mailboxes at 8am, and the TV ad blitz started airing at 9am. The campaign is a hit! Responses galore! Great! Except Marketing forgot to notify the Customer Service Manager that the promo schedule had changed, so she isn’t staffed up for the traffic onslaught. The unfortunate reps that are schededuled today can’t keep up with the volume. Calls are going unanswered. Their priority today is not great data capture. Their priority today is to take as many calls as possible and make it through their shift alive.

7. INCENTIVES

Sales reps’ income largely depends on how many sales units and revenue dollars they bring in. For customer service reps, bonus criteria often include average handle time, time-to-answer, off-hook time, etc. Sometimes data accuracy is part of the incentive formula, but it’s almost never the lion’s share. Generally, when short-term incentives are introduced for better data capture, data capture gets better. And when the incentive period is through, the gains recede, although hopefully to a little higher than baseline.

Agile Humor – Definitions

Kanbanter – Small talk exchanged while you and a fellow developer view progress on the board.

Custermation – When a project’s resources estimate is about as accurate as Custer’s prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Reverse Time Lapse – When seven hours elapse while finishing a piece of code with a one-hour estimate.

Pessimestimation – When you start padding six extra hours onto every hour of estimated work.

Doubtsourcing – When stakeholders start contracting out work because all of the internal team’s time estimates appear six or seven times too high.

Data Analytics – Define Channel

“A third of our sales are coming in through the web channel – let’s move budget from direct mail into display ads!”

Whoa – display ads are in the digital channel – but is display actually driving those purchases? Would more display ads drive in more purchases?

What do you mean by channel exactly? What if I respond to a direct mail piece by calling your Inbound Sales Center, then go onto your website to make a purchase? Which channel do you attribute me to – Direct Mail, Inbound Call or Web?

The answer is that every response has two at least two types of channel attribution.

One is the marketing stimulus channel – in this example, Direct Mail. The other is the response channel – in this example, Inbound Call. In many cases, a third channel is the purchase channel – in this example, it’s Web.

Moving money from Direct Mail to Display might be the right move – or it might cut off the main pipeline into your purchase funnel. I don’t want to make your head explode – but there may be a combination of market stimuli that constitute the actual Market Channel. It’s another facet of multi-channel attribution.

So you’re not measuring all this precisely? You’re not alone – many firms, even some really big ones you’ve heard of, aren’t doing it all that well either. Getting attribution right is a commitment – time and money – and is an iterative process. It should ultimately answer the question of where to spend your marketing money, gaining more precision with time.

Agile Humor – More Agile Drinks

The Scope Creep

Gin and tonic. Wait, can you add some bitters to that? Oh, and can the tonic be in a separate glass? I’ll have it over at that table instead. And can you bring some peanuts with that? Then some buffalo wings?

Debug Sour

Whiskey and sour mix, sent back three times until the bartender gets it right.

Minimum Viable Martini

A martini glass with just enough chilled vodka for the first sip.

Cowboy Code Margarita

The best margarita you ever tasted, but the bartender can’t replicate it. Plus, the bar’s a mess.

Click here for more Agile drinks from a previous posts…

Click here for even more Agile drinks

Click here for still more Agile drinks

Agile Humor – You Might Be a Project Manager If…

If setting your alarm for 6:30 am means you’re “sleeping in”…you might be a project manager.

If the time it takes to microwave your Lean Pocket in the breakroom and the time it takes to eat it are coded to two separate job numbers…you might be a project manager.

If you’ve fallen asleep on a status call with the offshore team…you might be a project manager.

If your client team hates you for taking too long to bring the project in, and your dev team hates you for not giving them enough time to bring the same project in…you may be a project manager.

If you’ve called someone a “scope creep” or “legacy hugger” under your breath…you may be a project manager.

If you are too tired to celebrate at Dave and Buster’s after the app finally goes live…you may be a project manager.

Data Analytics – Why The C-Suite Ignores Data

The data is too math-intensive to hold their interest.

Eyes glaze over. Gazes wander. Executives shift in seats. Expensive pens tap on conference tables. Math does that to people. You remember high school math class when you had to turn word problems into equations? Well, now you have to do that in reverse.

They really believe in their hunches.

C-Level executives are paid a lot of money on the assumption that they know stuff mere mortals don’t. And they got swagger. Who the hell are you to tell them their intuition doesn’t reflect reality? Well, it’s actually your job to tell them, isn’t it? Break the ice by asking if they saw Moneyball. Then slip the name Nate Silver into the conversation at some time in the presentation. You’re doing them a huge favor correcting assumptions that are untrue. But telling the truth isn’t enough – you have to sell the truth. Get your own swagger on.

They get a conflicting story from their own tribe.

Department heads like to say “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. So, unfavorable data within a department will often be put through the “spin cycle” before they are presented to the C-level person. Or, the data may be buried altogether so as not to make the middle managers look bad. For instance, maybe the IT team only presents the CTO cumulative data on users of the new app – the arrow on the graph is a never-ending march upward. It’s no wonder, then, that the CTO may not embrace Marketing telling her that customers don’t like the new app, and never come back after their first visit. It may be the first time she’s heard it.

Agile Humor – The Cocktail Hour

Signature drinks:

The Sprint

Grey Goose and dissolved Skittles, the only mixer available from the vending machine at 2 am.

Velocity Sour

Jack Daniels, club soda and lemon juice, already 3/4 finished.

Harvey Kanbanger

Smirnoff, Galliano, and orange juice with an orange Post-it garnish.

Scrum Punch

Bacardi Silver, Hawaiian Punch and frozen lemonade concentrate, drunk standing up at 8:30 am.

Lean Martini

It’s not necessary to know the full recipe up front.

Backlog Captain and Coke

Captain Morgan. That’s all. The Coke will be added in the next sprint.