Making an Insights Impact
An effective insights leader (or team) should feel empowered to uncover actionable insights. These should be relevant and valuable to the business context, goals, and objectives. Yet, it’s easier said than done, as it can feel frustrating at this point in the process of the function. How do you shift the way that your team is perceived and interacted with? How can you deliver more value?
According to Kapiche, an AI-powered feedback analytics platform for understanding customer feedback, there are several steps to enable you to make the most impactful decisions for the business.
- Excel at your core responsibilities: Ensure that your insights are answering questions that your stakeholders have presented in a way that they can make sense of and relate directly to their work. This works to establish engagement with your insights and establish a healthy feedback loop on the type of insights that are impactful and how individuals like to consume information.
- Continue to build trust and relationships with your insight consumers: Once you’ve established a strong and reliable insights product, it’s time to further develop trust with your stakeholders, which will inevitably lead to greater engagement. This part of the journey to building trust is all about building relationships through lines of communication. As you develop these relationships, it’s important to gain an understanding of the practical actions that can come about as a result of your insights, what your insights are being used for, and the conversations that are occurring at the leadership level or among other business units.
- Take the insights function to the next level by leveraging technology: Technology can help you communicate the value that your team provides by establishing a new capability. Technology is key to building team assets such as reporting templates and workflows, which allow you to do your job quicker and more effectively.
- Expand the impact that your team is having: Look for opportunities to apply your team’s expertise and capabilities to other areas of the business. This could mean disseminating your insights to more teams or individuals in the business via email or an alerts system, establishing new touchpoints for you to provide your expertise via new relationships, or applying your insight tools and assets to other business functions such as operational areas.
Getting Your Slice of Influence & Impact
All Things Insights’ “Elevating Insights Impact,” recently examined this topic. Market research efforts are evolving as corporations strive to determine actionable insights, implement new operations and infrastructures, and establish new priorities while making an impact. With these new challenges, there is more emphasis on how insights can make an impact, wield more influence at the executive level, and just how to measure the ROI of these multi-faceted initiatives. With the consumer landscape always changing, and more ways than ever to gather data and intelligence, there are many opportunities in terms of making an insights impact.
Looking forward to TMRE 2024? The conference, which will be held October 8 to 10, will feature the keynote session, “Insights & Influence Ignited: Leadership, Impact and the Art of Storytelling,” presented by Stefania Gvillo, SVP, Chief Analytics & Insights Officer at Domino’s Pizza. This keynote will spotlight how true leadership is not always about wielding the best tools, but rather hinges on the ability to drive a pathway to influence with purpose and authenticity. Through creative storytelling methods and showcasing how the insights function truly is a strategic organizational partner, Gvillo will take you on her real-world journey and share lessons learned from leading insights and analytics at Domino’s Pizza. Register for TMRE 2024 here.
Maximizing Your Corporate Influence
Insights leaders play a pivotal role in shaping an organization’s strategic direction. We asked Gemini to break down the myriad skills needed so that insights professionals can maximize their impact while forming strong partnerships:
Become a Trusted Advisor
- Demonstrate value: Quantify the impact of insights on business outcomes to establish credibility.
- Build relationships: Cultivate strong relationships with key stakeholders across the organization.
- Communicate effectively: Translate complex data into actionable insights that resonate with different audiences.
Data-Driven Decision Making
- Champion a data-driven culture: Promote the use of data and insights throughout the organization.
- Identify opportunities: Leverage insights to uncover new business opportunities and optimize existing offerings.
- Measure and evaluate impact: Continuously assess the effectiveness of insights-driven initiatives and demonstrate ROI.
Foster Innovation
- Challenge the status quo: Encourage experimentation and risk-taking to drive innovation.
- Identify emerging trends: Stay ahead of industry trends and anticipate customer needs.
- Collaborate with other departments: Work closely with product development, marketing, and sales teams to bring insights to life.
Develop a High-Performing Insights Team
- Hire and retain top talent: Build a team with diverse skills and perspectives.
- Invest in training and development: Empower team members to stay up to date with industry trends and technologies.
- Foster a culture of curiosity and learning: Encourage experimentation and continuous improvement.
The Power of Insights
By following these strategies, insights leaders can position themselves as strategic partners and drive significant impact on their organization’s success. Bridging the gap from impact to insight of course has its challenges in many organizations and it takes time to hone these skills, build an insights engine and wield influence.
Human8 asks the question, in its blog on “Turning insights into impact,” how does the life of an insight look in your company? Are they at the heart of the organization or are they filed away? Are they actionable with a clear return on investment? Collaboration and communication are key, suggests Human8. “Do not limit the interaction with the insights. Involve the organization before, during and after research. Harvest their current knowledge to map out gaps, share live updates from the field, link them back to everyday life… Let them experience the insights from the start and make them their own.”
Video courtesy of Harvard Business Review
